Less scarcity, greater efficacy, and more pluralism in advanced education

A viral article in New York Magazine by Katie Arnold-Ratliff kicked off a big, public debate over the problems that have long plagued advanced education.

Editor’s note: This was first published as part of a newsletter for Mike’s Substack, SCHOOLED.

Advanced education is a big priority for me, so I can’t let a big public debate on the issue pass by without commentary. Katie Arnold-Ratliff kicked off the latest round with her viral New York Magazine article on the “mirage” of the gifted child. It’s actually a balanced and nuanced take on a complicated subject, but I wonder if many folks got past the title and the sub-hed:

Critics say the process we use to identify bright kids is flawed and insular. But what if giftedness itself is a lie?

Katie offers a smart tour through the history of the gifted-education movement, highlighting the sharp disagreement among experts about whether giftedness is even a thing, how to measure and cultivate it (if indeed it does exist), and why participation in gifted programs is so often inequitable, including in her hometown of New York City.

All of this is why so many of us prefer to focus on “advanced” students rather than “gifted” ones, and why Fordham launched the National Working Group on Advanced Education, rather than yet another panel about giftedness. We can definitely measure high achievement, starting in the early grades, and we can work to make sure that students who are showing a lot of academic talent get the challenges and supports they need to fulfill their potential. We can also create policies—like universal screening with local norms—that ensure that we catch high-achieving, low-income (HALO) students, too, so we can better serve them and not just their upper-middle-class peers. A new Education Next article by David Card, Eric Chyn, and Laura Giuliano demonstrates, yet again, how transformative such initiatives can be, especially for disadvantaged boys.

Unfortunately, as Katie writes, such well-designed programs are the exception rather than the rule. She writes:

The potential benefits of separate learning are also highly variable: Is the teacher engaged and committed? Is the district adequately resourced? Is enough time devoted to enrichment activities versus the standard curriculum? The answer is often “no.” A 2024 report by the Fordham Institute put it plainly: “America’s school district policies for advanced learners are mediocre at best.” I ask Lana, who sent her daughter to a G&T program at their neighborhood elementary school on the Upper West Side and her son to the general-ed program at the same school, what differences she noticed in their educational experiences. “Not much difference at all,” she answered. “Not in the curriculum, the homework. I don’t really feel like in the end she learned any more than he did.”

Ding ding ding!

Matt Yglesias picks up on this theme in his post, “The real problem with ‘gifted’ education.” So what is it?

The level of fighting over who gets into this program and whether it’s unfair is wildly out of proportion to the scrutiny of its actual educational efficacy.

Matt wants us to pay more attention to how to make programs and practices work better, including for advanced kids. He certainly doesn’t want us to give up on it:

Outside of formal K–12 schools, nobody thinks the right way to teach is to lump a bunch of people together based on their age and then have one teacher try to deliver a lesson to everyone regardless of what they already know. That’s dumb.

Indeed it is.

The other problem is induced scarcity—in New York and elsewhere. Alina Adams argues the answer is to raise the bar in all schools and for all kids:

As long as parents focus only on getting the best education available for their child, and ignore the fact that the majority of children could benefit from an “accelerated” curriculum, they will be hurting all students.

John Ketcham, on the other hand, thinks school choice is a better answer:

If the alternative to G&T is school choice, public schools would have stronger incentives to use new programming to improve educational quality and compete for students. Consider Idaho, which in 2024 comprehensively rewrote its charter school law to give operators greater autonomy, reduce barriers to charter expansion, and make it easier for traditional public schools to convert to charters. In 2025, the state passed a $50 million tax credit to defray private school education.

Some public schools have thrived in this environment, including through G&T-like programs. Fierce competition for students has pushed district leaders across Idaho to expand magnet schools—district-run schools organized around themes such as STEM and open to students from a wider geographic area. In West Ada and Coeur d’Alene, officials have embraced magnets and bolstered their programming to keep families from drifting to charters or private schools.

Jonathan Plucker and Leah Raymond believe this market could potentially be huge:

We need better data on the number of advanced students exercising choice options, but we suspect it is already significant. For example, estimates of gifted students being homeschooled range from 50,000 to 140,000, and we suspect the total number of advanced students pursuing educational choice in some form exceeds 1 million students. Yet advocates of educational pluralism and choice rarely talk about advanced learning.

Less scarcity, greater efficacy, and more pluralism: These are good rules to follow!