Ending Gifted Programs in the Name of Equity Hurts the Kids It Claims to Help

Here is a policy that sounds wonderful in a committee room. There is a gap between the highest and lowest achievers in your schools. You cannot easily raise the bottom. So you lower the top, and the gap closes, and the press release says "equity." Nobody has been helped, but the chart looks better.

I wish that were a joke. It is a fair summary of a strain of school policy that has spread across the country over the past decade: eliminate the gifted program, delay the algebra course, merge the classes, and call the result justice. This post argues that the policy is wrong on its own terms. It does not lift struggling students. It removes the ladder from able children whose parents cannot pay for private tutors, and it leaves the children of families who can pay exactly where they were.

The claim and the terms

The thesis: when a district ends advanced tracks in order to narrow gaps, the children it hurts most are the high-ability students from families without money to replace what the school removed.

Some definitions, because this debate is usually fought with undefined words.

• Tracking means sorting students into different classes by prior achievement or measured ability, so that a class moves at a pace that suits the students in it.
• Detracking is the movement to end that sorting and to teach students of all levels in the same classroom.
• A gifted and talented program identifies students who need more challenge than the standard class provides and gives it to them.
• Acceleration is letting students take a subject earlier than the age norm, for example algebra in eighth grade rather than ninth.
• Equity, in this literature, usually means equal outcomes among groups. Conservatives generally mean something different when they use the word: equal treatment and equal opportunity for individuals.

That last distinction is the argument in miniature. Policy aimed at equal outcomes among groups has a bias toward lowering ceilings. Policy aimed at opportunity for each child has a bias toward raising floors and keeping ladders in place.

The steelman

The other side has a real argument, and I will state it as its defenders would.

Tracking, they say, has a poor record in practice. Children placed in lower tracks often get less experienced teachers, less rigorous material and lower expectations, and they seldom move up. Black and Hispanic students and low-income students are underrepresented in gifted programs, often because identification depends on a parent's referral or a teacher's nomination, and both filters favor families with more information. The sociologist Jeannie Oakes made this case at length in her 1985 book Keeping Track, and generations of education schools have repeated it. If separate classes freeze a child's trajectory by age eight, then a school is doing the sorting that society should be undoing.

That is a serious argument, and part of it is correct. Identification that depends on referrals is biased toward the already-advantaged. Low expectations are a genuine harm. A child placed too low should be able to climb, and many schools have not made that possible.

The answer, in numbered points

1. The flaw in tracking is a flaw of identification, and the fix is better identification, not abolition. The best evidence here is about universal screening. In a well-known study of Broward County, Florida, the economists David Card and Laura Giuliano found that when the district began testing every second grader rather than relying on referrals, the share of economically disadvantaged and minority children placed in gifted programs rose by large amounts with no change in the eligibility standard, and that the referral system had systematically under-referred Black and Hispanic children, English learners, children on free or reduced-price lunch, and girls. The finding is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2016). That is the remedy a friend of the disadvantaged child would choose: find every able child, not hide the program.
2. Ending the program does not lift anyone else. This is the central point, and the one least often confronted. If a district shuts its advanced classes, nothing in that decision improves the instruction received by a struggling reader. The savings, if any, are small; the extra attention does not materialize; the classroom becomes harder to teach. The gap narrows only because the top comes down.
3. The families who can pay simply buy the missing program. A parent with money hires a tutor, enrolls the child in a private after-school course or a summer program, moves to a district that kept its advanced track, or enrolls the child in a private school. The parent without money cannot. So the policy does not remove advanced instruction from the community. It privatizes it, and the cost goes to the child least able to pay.
4. Algebra is the gate, and it is a gate with consequences. In most American schools, a child who takes algebra in eighth grade can reach calculus by senior year, and one who takes it in ninth cannot unless the school provides compression. That is why the question of "when algebra" is a question of "who can reach calculus." San Francisco's school district delayed algebra I until ninth grade for everyone beginning in the 2014 school year, in the name of equity, and the debate over whether it worked has gone on since. California's mathematics framework, adopted in 2023, also leaned against early acceleration. A policy that closes the gate for everyone does not open it for anyone; it ensures that only the children whose families supply a side door get through.
5. Ability is not an adult's privilege. A gifted child who is bored for six hours a day is not "privileged." That child is idle, and idle children, as any teacher will tell you, become troubles to themselves. Where school will not stretch them, some quietly stop trying. Nobody counts that loss in the equity spreadsheet because it is not a number anyone collects.

The test case: Thomas Jefferson High School

The most visible battle in this fight is in Fairfax County, Virginia, at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as TJ, a public magnet school consistently ranked among the best high schools in the country.

For years TJ admitted students through a competitive process that included a standardized admissions test and an application fee. In 2020 the Fairfax County school board decided to drop the test and the fee, and to adopt a system that guaranteed seats to the top students at each middle school and used a holistic review of "experience factors" for the rest. The stated aim was to broaden the student body. The share of Asian American students admitted fell sharply in the first classes under the new system, and a group of parents formed the Coalition for TJ and sued.

The case is Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. The district court ruled in 2022 that the admissions change violated the Equal Protection Clause. A federal court of appeals reversed in 2023 and upheld the policy. In February 2024 the Supreme Court declined to take the case, denying certiorari. Justice Alito dissented from the denial, joined by Justice Thomas. Alito's dissent argued that the Fourth Circuit's reasoning was wrong and should not be left standing.

Now I want to be fair about what that proves and what it does not. A denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits; it means four justices did not vote to hear the case, and nothing more. The Court did not bless the policy, and the lower court's reasoning stands only as the law of that circuit. But for our purposes the legal question is secondary. The educational question is the one at hand: what happens to a school's mission, a school built to concentrate the most mathematically and scientifically able children of a county, when it decides that ability is not the criterion?

You may take either side of that question. What you cannot do is pretend the stakes fall equally on all students. They fall hardest on a family with a talented child, no tutor and one shot at a magnet school.

"But the real problem is that the bottom is neglected"

It is, and this is where a conservative has the better argument, not the weaker one.

The proper response to a child who is behind is to teach that child more effectively: systematic early reading, high-dose tutoring, a curriculum with a coherent sequence of content, and a classroom in which discipline allows learning to occur. These are the interventions with the best evidence, and none of them requires that anyone else's child be held back. We address some of them in The Reading Wars, How Whole Language Lost a Generation and Phonics Won Back and What the Nation's Report Card Measures and What Proficient Really Means.

When a school board reaches for detracking instead, it is reaching for the one policy that costs nothing in effort and makes no demands on adults. It is easier to close a classroom than to teach a child to read. It is also easier to describe, and easier to describe as virtue. That is the real attraction: the policy lets the people in charge claim moral credit without doing the harder work.

A hypothetical, labelled

Picture two sixth-graders in a district that has abolished its gifted program. Both are strong at math. One lives in a home where a parent can pay for a weekend math class and a summer program. The other lives in a home where both parents work and there is no extra money. A few years later the first reaches advanced courses by his own initiative and by purchase; the second has been in a mixed classroom where the teacher, doing her best with thirty children at every level, cannot give him anything he has not seen. Nothing in this story required any villain. The district's decision did it all.

Now ask what the district gained. It has a narrower reported gap in honors enrollment, because the honors classes were never created. It has no more children reading at grade level than before. And it has a quietly wider gap in the thing that matters, which is what children actually know and can do at eighteen.

What a school that took both goals seriously would do

Nothing here is an argument for leaving things as they are. The better answer to the detracking movement is a policy that takes its legitimate complaint seriously and keeps the ladder. Such a district would do five things, none of them exotic.

• Screen every child. Test all second graders, as the Broward County experience suggests, rather than waiting for a nomination. A referral system is a lottery in which the tickets go to the best-informed parents.
• Make the door swing both ways. A child placed in an advanced class should be able to step back without stigma, and a child in the standard class should be able to test into the advanced one at any grade. Tracks that are walls are a defect; tracks that are doors are a service.
• Offer acceleration by subject, not by label. A child may be ready for sixth-grade math and fourth-grade writing. A subject-by-subject approach avoids the crude sorting of "the gifted kids" and "the rest," and is easier to defend to any parent.
• Publish the numbers. Show the public, school by school, who enrolls in algebra in eighth grade and who reaches calculus. Sunlight is the cheapest reform in education. A district that is proud of its program will publish it, and a district that hides its numbers has told you what it thinks of them.
• Pair acceleration with real help at the bottom. Systematic reading instruction, tutoring and a calm classroom raise the floor without lowering the ceiling.

Every item on that list serves the poor child with talent. Not one requires telling a ten-year-old that her ability is a problem to be managed. Notice, too, who objects to such a list. It is not the family that cannot afford a tutor. It is the committee that cannot bear to publish a table.

The Founding angle

Americans have a name for the idea that every person should have the chance to rise as far as talent and effort will take them. Jefferson called it a natural aristocracy, whose grounds, he wrote to John Adams in 1813, are "virtue and talents," as opposed to an artificial one based on wealth and birth, and he wanted public education to find it. His 1779 plan to educate Virginia, described in Jefferson's Plan to Educate Virginia, and Why the Legislature Said No, proposed that the brightest poor boys be identified and sent forward at the public expense. He would not have recognized a system whose first instinct was to hide its brightest students.

That, not the leveling of outcomes, is the American promise: the equal chance to be unequal in achievement.

The verdict

Is there a form of tracking that is cruel and rigid? Yes, and it should be fixed with open doors, universal screening and the freedom to move up. Is the right response to throw out the ladder? No. A system that cares about the child who has no tutor keeps the program, widens the door to it and makes sure every able child, in every neighborhood, is found.

If you want a short test of whether a policy is about children or about statistics, ask this: after the change, is there a single student who is better taught than before? If the answer is "no, but the chart looks better," you are reading a press release, not a plan.

The case in brief

1. Detracking and the end of gifted programs reduce gaps by lowering the top, not by raising the bottom.
2. Universal screening, as Card and Giuliano found in Broward County, finds the able children that referrals miss and is the fix for the real flaw in tracking.
3. Families with money replace what a district removes, so the cost lands on the families without it.
4. Algebra timing determines who can reach calculus, and a single delayed gate leaves only side doors for the well-off.
5. The Thomas Jefferson High School case shows the stakes, and the Supreme Court's 2024 denial of certiorari, with Justice Alito dissenting, decided nothing about the merits.

What you can do: ask your school board for the district's gifted-identification method and its eighth-grade algebra enrollment, and ask whether every second grader is screened or only those who are referred.