Gifted and Talented: Who Does the Label Serve?

For many New Yorkers, the city’s Gifted and Talented program represents a guaranteed pathway to success for their children. Photo by Matt Green.

New York City’s public school system is unique in that it is really two public school systems. There is one system for the “gifted and talented”: those precocious chosen children who solve puzzles and use big words, need the best instruction, and deserve the most attention. From an early age, this system is designed to direct its students toward elite high schools and colleges and, from there, to high-powered jobs in government, law, and medicine.

Then there is the other system, whose students are largely shut out from the educational opportunities that the city prides itself on. This is the system for normal children, whose budding intellects, according to the city, simply don’t warrant special attention. 

These two classes of children—the gifted and the ungifted—are, for the most part, separated by the time they turn five. Until 2020, a single exam taken at age four determined this division. This exam, which tested pattern recognition, arithmetic, and word recognition, could apparently quantify a child’s intellectual potential and encapsulate exactly where and how they needed to learn. By the start of the 2021 kindergarten admissions cycle, the test was completely eliminated and replaced by an apparently more holistic screening process. Now, pre-kindergarten teachers nominate students who they’ve personally identified as gifted, and those students are then entered into a lottery for the 2,500 slots in the city’s gifted and talented programs and schools. 

One fact worth noting is that there is no dedicated gifted and talented curriculum. Teachers of gifted students receive no special training. The point of a gifted and talented classroom is only to physically and socially separate the gifted from the ungifted, which is not all that beneficial to anybody involved. A 1989 study found that separating students only served to exaggerate inequalities in mathematical achievement and high school graduation rates, and numerous other studies have found that students on the gifted track do not make any noticeable academic strides beyond their peers. 

Put plainly: ungifted children suffer at the hands of this division, while gifted children don’t gain anything at all. 

An attractive fantasy lies at the heart of this divide, based around an outdated image of giftedness. This image, which generally involves a bookish toddler who exhibits dazzling ability in all areas, is frankly unrealistic.

Giftedness, in the developmental sense, encapsulates a series of behaviors more than it does a particular type of child. It is not a cut-and-dry quality that a child either has or doesn’t have, and its boundaries are often porous. “The usual focus is on labeling kids as ‘gifted’ or—as is implied, even if it’s not said—‘not gifted,’” Halley Potter, a senior fellow who studies education policy at the Century Foundation, explained in an interview. “But we shouldn’t be labeling students; we should actually be thinking about labeling behaviors. Typically it’s not that you have an individual student that is gifted all the time in every subject now and forevermore…When you think of gifted and talented as behaviors—and not just as students who either have it or they don’t—every child has the opportunity to weave in and out of those circles.”

Designated gifted classrooms can be helpful, said Monica Taylor, Academic Co-Editor of The Educational Forum,“in the sense of making sure [gifted children] have some peers who are also gifted—but I think there is great benefit in having classes that are heterogeneous. Children can scaffold for one another and also learn from one another.”

Separating the gifted from the ungifted is more than just intellect-based segregation. It has also historically resulted in noticeable racial segregation. In 2022, Black and Latinx students represented nearly 70% of the city’s public school population but less than a quarter of its gifted and talented classes. White and Asian students are grossly overrepresented in gifted and talented programs, which translates to overrepresentation in the city’s elite public high schools, universities, and high-paying professions down the line

Even the teacher-referral process introduced in 2021 is tinged with racial bias; prekindergarten teachers are just as capable of discrimination as any exam. A 2021 federal report showed that in the 2017-2018 school year “Black preschool students accounted for 18.2% of total preschool enrollment but received 43.3% of one or more out-of-school suspensions [and] were expelled at rates that were more than twice their share (38.2%) of total preschool enrollment (18.2%),” which indicates that preschool teachers on the whole are more likely to perceive their Black students as having behavioral shortcomings, which makes them less likely to recommend them for the gifted and talented program. 

Personal bias, in addition to racial and socioeconomic bias, can similarly leak into the nomination of students. A teacher’s attitude towards a student can shift from day to day, moment to moment; children, however mature or intelligent they may be, can be moody and frustrating. Sometimes, a teacher may simply dislike a student for no particular reason. 

Biases in this process are further exaggerated by the fact that there is no concrete set of qualities that teachers are instructed to look out for, aside from an eight-and-a-half-minute-long video advising them to keep an eye on indicators like curiosity, self-awareness, and sophistication in verbal communication. Ultimately, these qualities are impossible to define and isolate in a hectic preschool environment.

And still, New York City clings to its gifted and talented programs in part due to a sort of scarcity model of success. There are only so many opportunities available to the city’s roughly one million public school students, and the label of giftedness promises that the best and brightest children will at least get their basic academic needs met within a largely dysfunctional school system. 

In this way, giftedness becomes a zero-sum-game of academic achievement: gifted students must succeed at the expense of their peers without ever gaining anything personally or academically.  Being labeled as “gifted” amounts, essentially, to winning the public school system—and somebody has to lose.

Rebecca Kopelman (BC ‘25) is a Staff Writer with CPR studying English and Philosophy.