Renaissance for Gifted Education?
After an era in which attaining grade-level proficiency was paramount, emphasis is broadening.
By Ed Finkel
State and local policies on gifted education are like the proverbial thousand flowers, except that they have bloomed to wildly different degrees. But the Every Student Succeeds Act has prompted a reexamination of how to ensure gifted students have the opportunity to grow, all student’s strengths are identified, and tools including acceleration become ubiquitous.
Policies vary significantly from state to state and community to community because the federal government has never played a particularly strong leadership role, leaving almost every state with its own definition and legal framework, according to Eric Calvert, Associate Director at CTD.
“For example, Illinois hasn’t had line-item funding for gifted education since the beginning of this century, essentially—so that leaves a lot of control and a lot of responsibility to the individual districts,” he says. “Where there’s not a lot of outside resources, not a lot of outside guidance, then that tends to lead to highly varied approaches or programming—and, in a lot of schools, a lack of access altogether. Or districts and schools have such limited capacity to provide services that assessment processes framed as ‘gifted identification’ become less about determining who needs services and more about creating rationing systems, where scores are more about justifying limits to local stakeholders than finding the right educational fit for students.”
Every Student Succeeds Prompts Shifts
One growing positive within that topsy-turvy picture has been the movement away from purely grade-level, proficiency-based accountability systems, like state report cards, that were a hallmark of the “No Child Left Behind” era, Calvert says. “There were no carrots and no sticks related to allowing students that were already proficient on the first day of school to continue to grow,” he recalls.
The transition to the federal Every Student Succeeds Act has prompted many states, including Illinois, to take a fresh look at their accountability frameworks, Calvert says. “It’s no longer enough to say, ‘It’s OK that [a student] didn’t learn anything new this year because he was already proficient on the first day of school,’ ” he says. “Now the expectation is that even if he is ahead of most of his peers, he will still continue to make progress year after year.”
Many schools in the Chicago area and beyond are undertaking program reviews as a result, leveraging data to note which high-achieving students are not making progress, Calvert says, adding that he sees at least preliminary evidence of a pivot from “one-size-fits-all, two-hour a week gifted pullout programs … into something that is more systemic and curriculum-embedded.”
Because the emphasis on racial and economic equity infused into No Child Left Behind has carried over to Every Student Succeeds, it has leant greater attention to disparities not only in who reaches grade-level proficiency, but also in who has access to advanced learning opportunities. In the NCLB era measurement and reporting focused on “proficiency gaps,” while the underrepresentation of African-American, Latino, low-income, and rural students at the highest levels of achievement, termed the “excellence gap”, received far less attention. Increasingly, with ESSA’s shift to absolute growth, districts are naming the role that unequal access to advanced coursework and enrichment plays in these outcomes—what some refer to as the “opportunity gap,” Calvert says. The opportunity piece matters—recognition that systems need to change.
“That increasing focus on equity, not just growth to proficiency but at those higher levels, seems to be helping to bring a lot of attention to groups of students that have long been underserved,” he says. “There’s still a lot of work to do, but this is something that we weren’t seeing a lot of 25 years ago, that we do see now.” - Eric Calvert
“That increasing focus on equity, not just growth to proficiency but at those higher levels, seems to be helping to bring a lot of attention to groups of students that have long been underserved,” he says. “There’s still a lot of work to do, but this is something that we weren’t seeing a lot of 25 years ago, that we do see now.”
This shift in focus is crucial given that the majority of current K-12 students are people of color, Calvert says. “If we don’t do a better job developing talent across all groups, it’s going to have negative consequences for us as a country in the long run,” he says, noting Illinois amended its Report Card Act to require data on who participates in advanced learning opportunities disaggregated by race, income, and disability status. “So, there’s growing accountability, not just for average achievement in a district, but ensuring that everybody has opportunities to make progress.” There is also a growing emphasis on cultivating talent, providing high-quality enrichment to all students and accelerated learning services to more students.
Advocacy for Early Entrance
Students exhibit significant cognitive differences as early as kindergarten, Calvert says, with some students reading chapter books while others won’t acquire that level of skill until second or third grade. For this reason, CTD advocates for access to early entrance for those students developmentally and cognitively ready to go to school.
That’s sometimes stymied by well-intentioned laws originally supported by advocates for students with disabilities that require schools to admit students at age 5, no matter what, so they couldn’t defer entrance due to fears of difficulties serving such students. “We know a lot of students with disabilities really need early access to interventions,” he says. “The origin of that legislation was to make sure kids that were 5 couldn’t be held out of school.”
However, the back-story of that legislation has been forgotten, and many districts and even some states have adopted age 5 as the minimum age for school entrance, even though the original legislation was not intended for that purpose, Calvert says. “Even though many educators will acknowledge, ‘This 4-year-old is more advanced than some of the 6-year-olds that I have in my class,’ they’re not even considering letting that student start school.”
And by the time they start kindergarten, they’re so far advanced beyond their peers that to gain any benefit and experience cognitive growth, they need to have services for advanced learners, Calvert says. “That student’s teachers need to figure out how to differentiate virtually every lesson, every day, if that student is going to get any benefit,” he says. “Whereas, if we were more permissive in terms of allowing students to start school on the basis of readiness, versus on an arbitrary birth-date cutoff, it would actually relieve some of the need.”
Using Acceleration as a Tool
Many districts and schools are similarly resistant to acceleration throughout school, letting a student learn with children older than they are, creating the need either to provide pullout programming or differentiation. “But when the choice is to say ‘no’ to that acceleration, then the result is increasing the workload of every teacher that will ever work with that student if they’re going to be effective,” he says. Also, when schools deny an acceleration, a common alternative they use is to provide separate pull-out instruction instead—creating the need for another classroom, another teacher and additional supplemental materials, which adds to costs.
"When the choice is to say ‘no’ to acceleration, then the result is increasing the workload of every teacher that will ever work with that student if they’re going to be effective.” - Eric Calvert
To become more flexible in terms of how they group students of different ages but similar levels of readiness for curriculum and instruction, schools need to examine the overlaps in what education professionals term a student’s “zone of proximal development.”
“That’s kind of the Goldilocks level of challenge that they should be in,” he explains. “If they already know all of the curriculum, they can’t learn [anything new]; but if they don’t have the foundation for the next thing, then they’re going to be overwhelmed and frustrated.”
And once a student is ready for curriculum two or more grade levels above others in their class, very few teachers—even with good support and professional development—can do an effective job of meeting that student’s needs, Calvert says. “That’s a very clear point where we need to have another structure,” he says. “Whether that’s a path for that student to be accelerated to the next grade level or a higher-level class, or for that student to get some replacement curriculum and instruction.”
Studies and Implementation
To bring such concepts to fruition on the ground, CTD has done work with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and with schools and districts around the country, focused on helping schools target talent development within a Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) framework, Calvert says. “We’re looking at relative strengths and potentials in all students,” he says. “And making sure that everybody has access to opportunities to explore their interests, and to get instruction in their strength area, and not just to get remediation.”
The tiered model creates a dynamic where students who traditionally find themselves “slipping through the cracks of the traditional system actually be able to cross over, to become high-achievers—to help close some of those excellence gaps,” Calvert says, citing a research paper that he and others at CTD, along with colleagues at University of California-Berkeley, published in Education Sciences.
As more states and districts seek to expand opportunities for advanced learning, this work demonstrates how thoughtful policy, paired with proven practices, can reshape school systems to recognize and cultivate potential in every student. By embracing talent development and adopting evidence-based practices like acceleration, schools can create pathways that are more accessible, more flexible, and more responsive to its students. Ultimately, broadening the scope of gifted education isn’t just about serving a select few—it’s about building learning environments where all students can discover what they’re capable of and achieve at the highest levels.
To learn more about CTD's work with schools, educational organizations, and policymakers, visit our Educators and Schools webpage.