The Hidden Dark Side Of Gifted Programs Revealed
I appreciated the chance to choose from all sorts of new books, but it marked an early example of what would eventually be both a privilege and a curse: my foray into being 'set apart' academically from my fellow classmates.
By the time I reached middle school, the gifted and talented program in my district had taken wing. The timing makes sense: In 1998, many American schools were provided with official K-12 standards for so-called 'gifted education' by the National Association of Gifted Children. While the NAGC first promoted advanced academic programming in the 1950s, its work in the late '80s and '90s represented a more structured approach to educating students who were found to be gifted.
K-12 gifted education standards were preceded by the passage of the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Act in 1988, which secured funding to 'orchestrate a coordinated program of scientifically based research, demonstration projects, innovative strategies, and similar activities that build and enhance the ability of elementary and secondary schools to meet the special educational needs of gifted and talented students.'
In those early days, my experience with Gifted & Talented (or G/T, as we fondly called it) was almost entirely positive. Our G/T class was tucked away in a windowless classroom whose walls we decorated with silly drawings and posters. Several of my close friends were also in the program, and there was nothing better than getting to hang out with them for an hour or two per day while working on our largely self-assigned curriculum. Our teacher was warm and encouraging, always pushing each of us to incorporate our individual interests and skills into projects.
In fact, nearly all the teachers I worked with in G/T were engaged educators who genuinely wanted their students to thrive. I'm forever grateful for their personal guidance, regardless of my later reflections on the program. In so many ways, G/T was a safe place at school — a place where I could be my true (weird) self and engage in more self-directed learning.
But there was a troubling flip side to the G/T experience that took me years to unpack. From what I could gather, most students qualified for the program based on standardized test scores. While the NAGC defines gifted pupils as 'those who demonstrate outstanding levels of aptitude (defined as an exceptional ability to reason and learn) or competence (documented performance or achievement in top 10% or rarer) in one or more domains,' it seems inevitable that many kids would be excluded from gifted education for factors beyond their control.
In her 2016 book Engaging and Challenging Gifted Students: Tips for Supporting Extraordinary Minds in Your Classroom, Jenny Grant Rankin, Ph.D., outlines gaps in gifted education. Nonwhite students, socioeconomically disadvantaged kids, girls, and those classified as English language learners are disproportionately excluded from gifted and talented programming, Rankin reports.
She also cites a 2016 study by Jason A. Grissom and Christopher Redding that found that Black students were 50% less likely to be considered for gifted and talented programs than their white counterparts, even when both groups recorded similar standardized test scores. What's more, students of color were less likely to be labeled gifted when their teachers were white.
In G/T, I learned quickly that much of my self-esteem came from academic praise and approval from adults. The 'gifted' label seeped into everything I did and was a stumbling block at times — if I struggled to master a concept in math class or didn't understand a question on a social studies test, I'd avoid asking for help. After all, I was gifted. I shouldn't need help with anything, right?
It felt like my so-called 'natural' giftedness should pre-qualify me to succeed in any endeavor, which led me to prematurely give up on new hobbies later in life when I didn't immediately feel like a master.
And when a project in a non-G/T class earned anything less than an A, I often found myself in tears and seeking reassurance from my family and friends that I was 'still smart.'
The question of 'potential' was another overwhelming aspect of G/T. Gifted kids at my school were encouraged to pursue all sorts of fields — with the unspoken message that no matter what we pursued, we were expected to be excellent. Most of us went on to take as many Advanced Placement classes in high school as our schedules would allow, driven by the sense that we simply had to be high achievers. Academic excellence would translate directly to excellence in career and life in general, many of us thought.
It wasn't until college that I first experienced the lingering impacts of the gifted education experience. Suddenly, I was a very small fish in the massive pond that is the University of Michigan. I wasn't the 'smart kid' anymore— I was one of thousands of 'smart kids,' all of whom had ambitions on par with or beyond my own. College instructors rarely offered direct praise, and the occasional B in a class became commonplace. When I couldn't maintain perfection, I felt like I was failing the version of myself I was supposed to become.
Unsurprisingly, college was also when my mental health took its first major nosedive. Alongside a handful of personal issues, my sudden sense of academic invisibility had triggered a crisis. My path felt unclear. Wasn't I supposed to get to college, breeze through with perfect grades, and immediately jump into an impressive career?
When graduation rolled around, I got a dose of validation by heading off on a Fulbright teaching grant to Malaysia, but my life beyond that looked so blurry. It took a long time to admit that I didn't want to go to grad school, which felt shameful. Without academic validation or 'high achievement' on the table, would I be untethered forever?
In the decade since, I've drawn connections between my most plaguing anxieties and my early education. It's taken practice to feel more comfortable with accepting professional criticism or admitting when I'm not sure how to do something at work.
I see how my G/T years merged self-worth with accolades and grades, and I feel sad for the younger version of myself — along with other 'formerly gifted' peers — who internalized so many false measures of success.
At times, adulthood feels like an ongoing battle to remind myself that I'm a valuable, worthy person, regardless of outward achievements.
I'm not alone: In recent years, the 'formerly gifted kid' trope has become something of a meme, with TikTokers cracking dark jokes about their lingering sense of anxiety, perfectionism and perceived failure to live up to parents' and teachers' expectations. It's funny because it's true.
Data shows that while gifted programs can result in better long-term academic outcomes and college success for some students, these benefits still reflect inequities. A 2021 study by Grissom and Redding found that small associations existed between participation in gifted programming and long-term achievement in math and reading, but there was no evidence to support a correlation between gifted kids and their general engagement with school.
Most glaringly, even these small positive associations were skewed toward higher-income white pupils, with low-income or Black gifted students excluded from long-term academic gains. What's more, this research doesn't begin to explore gifted education's extended impact on social and emotional development for all participants.
I don't regret my time as a gifted kid, but I do wish G/T had offered more care for students' mental health and more inclusivity for children who didn't fit the program's relatively narrow mold of exceptionalism. I wish I could unlearn the idea that outward praise equals true success, and measure excellence in the form of learning for learning's sake.
Above all, I wish we'd had an environment where every single student was reminded how smart and talented they were, and given the tools to explore their gifts — no matter what form they took.
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Vox
an hour ago
- Vox
The truth behind the endless 'kids can't read' discourse
is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Every month or so, for the past few years, a new dire story has warned of how American children, from elementary school to college age, can no longer read. And every time I read one of these stories, I find myself conflicted. On the one hand, I am aware that every generation complains that the kids who come next are doing everything wrong and have gotten stupider and less respectful. I fear falling into this trap myself, becoming an old man yelling at cloud. On the other hand, with every new story, I find myself asking: … Can the kids read, though? I don't think I'm alone in this confusion. Similar responses emerge almost every time a new piece arrives with tales of elite college students who can't get through Pride and Prejudice or another report reveals just how far reading scores have plunged among America's schoolchildren. 'Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively,' Slate reported bleakly in 2024. Within days, a teacher's blog offered a rebuttal, arguing that there has never been an era where adults were impressed by kids' reading habits: 'Find a news article published since the 1940s that shows that students not only read proficiently but eagerly and a lot. I'll wait.' On the other hand, with every new story, I find myself asking: … Can the kids read, though? 'We've long seen both of those extremes,' says Elena Forzani, director of the literacy education and reading education programs at Boston University. 'In a sense, you could argue both are true or neither are true.' Much of the current anxiety is being driven by the fear that new technologies are scrambling kids' brains in a way no other generation has faced: smartphones, social media, and now the threat of generative AI, which millions of students are currently using to do their schoolwork. How could such powerful tools not change our children's ability to process information? Yet on the other hand, there are all those think pieces about how adults had similar worries with every new piece of era-shifting technology that came before, including television. Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Broadly speaking, there are two different issues that get intertwined together in the 'kids can't read' narrative. The first is the sense from professors that their students are unprepared to read at the level college requires — that while they're technically literate, they are not sophisticated readers. The second is that at the elementary level, kids' reading test scores are going down. So is it true? How much panic over kids' literacy is warranted? Scholars who study the subject, concerned English professors, and experts in the 'kids these days' phenomenon told me that the literacy landscape is a lot more nuanced than either of my gut impulses would have led me to believe. A brief history of adults saying, 'Kids these days!' When I say that every generation complains about the kids these days, I do mean all of them. We have documentation of this phenomenon going back to Socrates. 'It's one of these things you keep seeing generation after generation,' says John Protzko, a psychology researcher at Central Connecticut State University and the co-author of the 2019 study 'Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking.' Protzko's study found that adults tend to judge kids by their own adult standards. If you're an adult who likes to read, he says, you tend to assume that you read just as diligently as a child. 'And then I impose that on society at large: 'Everyone liked to read as a kid,'' Protzo explains. Rapidly, that false belief can turn into 'None of the kids today read like they did in my day.' When I say that every generation complains about the kids these days, I do mean all of them. We have documentation of this phenomenon going back to Socrates. We're particularly prone to this kind of false memory when it comes to the attributes on which we pride ourselves. If, for instance, we are proud of being polite, conscientious adults, we feel that children are growing ever more disrespectful. For highly educated people who like to read — like me, and a lot of other journalists who cover literacy, for instance — reading can be a big one. Millennials, who had the misfortune of growing up in the boom of the internet think piece economy, are particularly aware of how common the 'kids these days' trope is. As the generation perhaps most loudly accused of historic levels of laziness, neuroticism, whininess, and extended adolescence, we are acutely aware of how easy it is to reflexively dismiss Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Related Why old people will always complain about young people I asked Protzko if it was possible to fall into a trap of overcorrecting for the kids-these-days tendency, and to end up overlooking a real problem because you're afraid of sounding old. 'The central problem is that we rely on our intuitions, and we rely on our memories, and we think that they're accurate,' says Protzko. 'But when it comes to something like reading ability, in many cases we do actually have decades of research.' Can kids read in college? Let's start with the college problem. A spree of recent articles written by or quoting college professors make the case that their students are getting worse at reading, and that in some cases they can no longer even read full books. 'Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article,' wrote Adam Kotsko for Slate last year. Kotsko adds that the problem is not with the kids themselves, but with the education system in which they've been reared. 'We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.' Complaints of the kind Kotsko is making go back at least 10 years. 'Is it just me, or are student competencies like basic writing skills in serious peril today?' wrote Azadeh Aalai in Psychology Today in 2014. 'Teachers have been reporting anecdotally that even compared to five years ago, many are seeing declines in vocabulary, grammar, writing, and analysis.' Yet there is little hard data that shows such a decline. One recent splashy study led by English professor Susan Carlson evaluated 85 undergraduate English and English education majors on their ability to understand the first seven paragraphs of the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House. 'Fifty-eight percent of them could not get through a few paragraphs without being completely lost,' Carlson told me. 'Yet 100 percent of them said they could read it with no problem. What that tells me is there's a disconnect between what people think reading is or what they think they're doing and what they're actually doing.' Carlson, a professor of Victorian literature at Pittsburg State University, didn't set out to make a grand sweeping claim about the literacy of all college students, but to look closely at the inner workings of the minds of a specific cohort to figure out how they thought about reading. She compared them with students from a similar regional Kansas university, but she kept the rest of the study small by design. What she found is that these specific students — despite years of training in literary analysis — lacked the vocabulary, background knowledge, and reading strategies it takes to understand Dickens at a college level. It's hard to use this data set to extrapolate past that. As Carlson told me over the phone, '85 people is not enough to know anything. I can't make any kind of assumptions based on that.' Carlson's study also doesn't provide a comparative data set from previous years that might show us whether or not there's been a change in the number of students who can evaluate a complicated text like Bleak House well. Notably, the data was all gathered in 2015, meaning that it was looking at the tail-end millennials who were in college in 2015, not the much-maligned Gen Z. (Why the delay between when the data was gathered and the study was published? 'I teach a four-four courseload,' Carlson says.) Carlson told me she has a feeling that her students have gotten noticeably worse at reading over the past five years. 'It's just a feeling, right? Who cares about a feeling?' she says. 'But when I talked to other professors, they felt the same way.' Currently, we don't have enough data to show that college students are graduating with lower reading comprehension abilities than they used to have. The fears around their capabilities are only accelerating as reports emerge of their reliance on ChatGPT to do coursework. Still, what's actually going on here is an open question. When it comes to childhood literacy rates, though, we've got a lot of data. The controversy comes when we try to interpret it. Can kids read in elementary school? When it comes to a childhood literacy crisis, the numbers that all the horror stories cite come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as NAEP or the Nation's Report Card. NAEP tests a sampling of representative students across the country every year to see how well American students are doing at various different subjects. For the last decade, NAEP reading scores have been in decline. 'I track closely the share of students who are not meeting what we define as a basic level of proficiency. These are students who are really struggling with the fundamentals of literacy,' says Martin West, an education professor at Harvard and vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board. 'That number is now 40 percent of students in grade four and 33 percent in grade eight.' NAEP's reading proficiency ratings nosedived during the pandemic years when schools went virtual. But they had already been trending downward before that, says West: 'As far back as, depending on the grade level, 2013 or 2015. That's when reading scores in the US peaked. They've been falling since then.' Notably, the scores have held pretty flat among high-achieving students. But among the bottom third of scorers, they've plunged. The plight of those kids began receiving increased attention after the massive success of the podcast Sold a Story. Published by APM Reports in 2022, the podcast drew on five years of education reporting by its creator Emily Hanford to make the case that schools have ignored the 'science of reading' by skipping over important phonics work to focus on context clues, like telling kids to look at a picture and guess a word. The podcast was so impactful that in its aftermath, at least 25 states passed new legislation on how reading should be taught. The idea that schools overlooked the importance of the science of reading has become a popular explanation behind the long-term drop in reading test scores. But that's not the case, says Hanford. The methods she critiques in Sold a Story have been popular for much longer than a decade. They've been used in different parts of the country on and off since at least the 1960s. The best reading scores the country ever got showed that a third of fourth-graders still hadn't achieved basic literacy. 'One of the things I object to is a narrative that I often hear which is that we need to go back to the basics and back to the good old days and back to the way things were,' she says. 'We don't have any good evidence that I'm aware of that there are good old days when we were doing such a good job with this before.' The best reading scores the country ever got showed that a third of fourth-graders still hadn't achieved basic literacy. Another popular explanation for the drop in reading test scores is the Covid lockdowns that shut down schools. Nearly everyone I talked to agreed that Covid exacerbated the problem. Yet as West points out, reading scores started dropping well before lockdowns, from 2013 to 2015. 'We have lots of ideas' about what's gone wrong, West says. 'What we don't have is definitive evidence.' Not everyone, however, is convinced that the NAEP data is even giving the whole picture. Some of the literacy experts I spoke to felt that NAEP's standardized tests don't capture the full possibilities of what literacy might look like for today's kids. 'In order for NAEP to succeed and to have these results year in and year out, it means that we need to hold a particular kind of definition of literacy,' says Antero Garcia, a Stanford professor of education and the vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English. 'That's just not how language functions historically and culturally in societies, right?' He argues that today's kids can be quite sophisticated with language and hybrid language, like Spanglish, and in complex virtual spaces like the live-streaming platform Twitch, that NAEP just isn't reflecting. 'The ways we evaluate if kids can read and write doesn't start with the investment in where kids are currently at, and where culture currently thrives.' Garcia suggested that the 'gap in understanding' between the literacy that lets a kid navigate the screen-in-screen chat scroll of Twitch and the literacy that guides a kid through Bleak House offers schools an opening for education. 'Those places of, 'How do I take this highly literate conversation that might be happening on Twitch and then translate it into an academic essay' — those feel like opportunities for scaffolding,' says Garcia. 'Which oftentimes is not happening in schools, because the ways we evaluate if kids can read and write doesn't start with the investment in where kids are currently at, and where culture currently thrives.' Forzani is concerned that the recent wave of reforms that have hit schools since Sold a Story have narrowed into a focus on phonics drills (although the podcast emphasizes multiple times that reading involves a lot more than that). 'A lot of people are thinking about reading in terms of pretty narrow definitions of comprehension,' says Forzani. 'But of course we want kids to be able to make inferences and interpretations beyond just literal interpretations, right? We want them to be able to make higher level inferences and to be able to evaluate and critique text.' Forzani points to research from the UK, where reading curriculums were widely reimagined a few years before the US did the same thing. 'They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important,' she says. 'But then they've also seen, 'Wait, we did too much of that focus and now we lost sight of really comprehending at a high level.'' West says that the current concern over kids' ability to read might actually be understated. 'I've been struck by the lack of a sense of urgency on the part of what seems to be the larger share of the public,' says West. 'Literacy is the foundation for everything that we want schooling to be able to do for our children.' Lots of kids can read just fine. That doesn't mean we shouldn't still be concerned. By the end of my reporting, my head was spinning from all the data and studies I had read through. Parsing the whole thing out, though, here's the conclusion I came to. US schools have never done a very good job at teaching kids to read, but it seems as though there's meaningful evidence that we're doing a worse job right now. While high-achieving kids are still reading the way they've read for decades, the ones to whom reading doesn't come easily are failing more now than they used to. We don't have clear data on what happens when kids get to college. Still, it's certainly plausible that the problems being documented in the primary education years persist into secondary education as well. It's not being old or out of touch to say so. Moreover, no one seems to know what the solution is: to endlessly drill kids in phonics, or to try to build a reading curriculum that accounts more effectively for how they communicate today, or both or neither or something else. What seems pretty clear to me is that this is not a problem we should be looking away from. In the meantime, schools are bracing for impact as generative AI continues to make its way onto students' devices, fundamentally changing the ways they interact with text. 'To study the strategies that [students are] going to use to survive is really important,' says Carlson, the English professor who wanted to know what her students were thinking when they read Bleak House, 'because they're not going to hit the wall until later.' Later: when they leave school and come to join us in a world that, for now, remains text-based.
Chicago Tribune
3 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Faces of freedom come alive through Black history storytelling effort
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Business Wire
3 hours ago
- Business Wire
Monuments Men and Women Foundation's Forever Promise Project Receives Critical Support from Bank of America
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Presently, the Dutch adopters only have the contact information for the relatives of about twenty-five percent of their American liberators. Rooted in the remarkable tradition that began in early 1945, families in Margraten and other towns in Limburg Province began caring for the graves of fallen U.S. soldiers, placing flowers and paying tribute to their sacrifice, before World War II had even ended. This gesture of gratitude towards the American liberators who restored freedom to this area of the Netherlands has existed as a formal adoption program for eight decades and has continued, uninterrupted, to this day. 'Thanks to Bank of America's support, we are able to scale our efforts and shine a light on this remarkable legacy of gratitude and remembrance,' said Anna Bottinelli, President of the Monuments Men and Women Foundation. 'The Forever Promise Project is about more than remembrance. It's about human connection across generations and raising awareness of the enduring cost of freedom.' 'Preserving the memory of those who gave their lives for our freedom is an important way to honor their sacrifice,' said Brian Siegel, Global Arts, Culture & Heritage Executive at Bank of America. 'We couldn't be prouder to support the Monuments Men and Women Foundation as they embark on this mission, and to help foster the bonds that unite our global communities.' The project aligns closely with the recent release of the New York Times bestseller Remember Us: American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom, and a Forever Promise Forged in World War II, the latest book by Robert M. Edsel, founder and chairman of the MMWF. Remember Us tells the powerful story of twelve Americans—paratroopers, combat soldiers, pilots, a chaplain, and a grave digger – whose lives converge in this area of the Netherlands, and how the grave adoption program and its enduring bonds came into being. 'This book is a tribute to the Americans who liberated a portion of the Netherlands in September 1944, and the Dutch citizens whose profound gratitude transformed into a promise kept for generations—a forever promise' said Robert M. Edsel. 'The Forever Promise Project is the continuation of that story—one that honors the American men and women who preserved our freedom with their lives. It is a timeless story as relevant today as it was 80 years ago.' Families of U.S. service members buried at the Netherlands American Cemetery or memorialized on its Walls of the Missing are encouraged to visit to complete a short form and begin the process—entirely free of charge—of being connected with the Dutch family caring for their loved one's grave. About the Forever Promise Project The Forever Promise Project, a partnership between the Monuments Men and Women Foundation and the Foundation for Adopting Graves American Cemetery Margraten, seeks to connect American families with the Dutch adopters of their fallen relatives. Learn more at About Monuments Men and Women Foundation The Monuments Men and Women Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to preserving and promoting our shared cultural heritage by honoring the legacy of the Monuments Men and Women of WWII. Through public awareness campaigns, restitution efforts, and partnerships, the Foundation continues their mission. Learn more at About Bank of America Bank of America is one of the world's leading financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle-market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk management products and services. The company provides unmatched convenience in the United States, serving approximately 69 million consumer and small business clients with approximately 3,700 retail financial centers, approximately 15,000 ATMs (automated teller machines) and award-winning digital banking with approximately 59 million verified digital users. Bank of America is a global leader in wealth management, corporate and investment banking and trading across a broad range of asset classes, serving corporations, governments, institutions and individuals around the world. Bank of America offers industry-leading support to approximately 4 million small business households through a suite of innovative, easy-to-use online products and services. The company serves clients through operations across the United States, its territories and more than 35 countries. Bank of America Corporation stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: BAC). 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