And it prompts questions about ability and opportunity. Is bias shutting bright children out of gifted education? Are schools measuring academic potential or family privilege? Is a separate gifted and talented program even the best answer?
“There is no issue in American education that is more fraught,” said Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd, an education think tank at Georgetown University, who called the enrollment disparities a troubling example of “the failure of public education to educate all students to their ability.”
Gifted and advanced education is sometimes regarded as a niche concern, especially when schools face daunting challenges, including widening achievement gaps and alarming declines in 12th-grade reading and math skills. The debate is often deeply emotional because some of these programs were formed with an explicit goal of keeping middle-class white families in public schools who might otherwise have fled amid integration.
Still, a growing number of education leaders have cast advanced education as an urgent problem with far-reaching consequences for millions of traditionally underserved children and for the strength of the nation’s economy as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown could depress the arrival of high-skilled immigrants.