Gifted education advances school integration and equity

Changes in the way schools offer gifted services could provide equitable access to all students who need additional challenge, including students of color and students from low-income families.

All students should have equitable access to educational experiences that appropriately challenge them, including gifted services. This means all schools must offer gifted services, all students must be considered for gifted services, and eligibility for those services should be based on building norms. These actions, if implemented, will improve the equity of gifted and talented services themselves, advance overall school integration, and help narrow achievement gaps.

Gifted education in the U.S. has a long and troubled history (Peters, 2022; Pirtle, 2019). Research has documented disproportionate representation in gifted programs (e.g., Shores, Kim, & Still, 2020) with Black, Latinx, and white students being 57%, 70%, and 118% as represented in gifted programs as they are in the overall K-12 student population (Peters et al., 2019). Students from low-income families are similarly underrepresented. Those in the top quintile of socioeconomic status (SES) are more than seven times as likely to be identified as gifted as their peers in the lowest SES quintile (Grissom, Redding, & Bleiberg, 2019).