A growing number of school districts are eliminating gifted and talented programs, ending the practice of separating students by academic ability, and the move is drawing sharp criticism from at least one prominent education researcher.
Michael Petrilli, an education researcher, said the push to scrap ability grouping is driven by equity advocates who oppose singling out high-achieving students even as they lament the lack of diversity at top universities.
“This is so misguided,” Petrilli said. “These equity people say, ‘Oh, we’re against gifted education.’ At the same time, they’re upset that universities aren’t very diverse.”
Petrilli argued those same advocates are contributing to the problem. “They stand in the way of kids of color and low-income kids getting what they need in elementary and middle and high school so they could compete,” he said.
How tracking fell out of favor
Testing students and placing them into different instructional tracks was once standard practice in American schools. Petrilli said the approach made practical sense: “It’s super hard to teach reading to everybody if some don’t know their letters and others are reading ‘Harry Potter,'” he said.
The shift away from tracking traces back to 1985, when education theorist Jeannie Oakes published “Keeping Track,” a book arguing that tracking students produced racially segregated classrooms. In its place, schools have increasingly turned to “differentiated instruction,” a method in which teachers adjust their approach for students at different skill levels within the same classroom.
Petrilli was skeptical of that model. “Magically, you look out at 30 kids and figure out how to teach them all at the same time,” he said, describing it as part of “a big anti-tracking movement, a big effort to get rid of ability grouping, to just say kids should be mixed together, all the time.”
Race, class and culture
Asked about the fact that wealthier parents often hire tutors, giving disproportionate numbers of white and Asian students access to advanced coursework, Petrilli said the disparity is not primarily about race. “It really is mostly about class, family structure, culture,” he said, adding that many Asian students come from severe poverty yet perform well academically “regardless of how poor they tend to be.” He said “culture matters, family matters — a lot.”
Petrilli said the elimination of ability grouping has hit hardest in the poorest neighborhoods, where academically gifted but low-income students “suffer the worst of both worlds.”
New York City’s changes
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio eliminated New York City’s gifted test, shifting to a system in which teachers and administrators recommend which students should be fast-tracked. Advocates for the change argued that standardized tests “exclude kids because they’re poor.”
Petrilli disputed that reasoning, saying “there’s a lot of evidence that recommendations are biased, while tests are much less biased.” A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that universal test-based screening for giftedness leads to “large increases in … economically disadvantaged students and minorities placed in gifted programs.”
Current Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed eliminating gifted classes until third grade. Petrilli called the idea “reasonable” but cautioned that schools still need to accommodate students, including kindergartners, who arrive already academically advanced. “It doesn’t help any of us if kids are coming to school and sitting bored in class because we’re not teaching them anything new,” he said.
Attempts to interview activists who oppose ability grouping and gifted testing were unsuccessful; none contacted agreed to be interviewed for this story.
