Reconstructing Gifted Education: Moving beyond Patching Leaks to Replacing the Broken Talent Pipeline

Overview & Synopsis

Gifted education is a broken talent pipeline. Gifted programs in primary schools provide access to honors and advanced curriculum in middle schools, which lead to advanced courses in secondary schools, which are pipelines to higher education institutions (Milner & Ford, 2007; Patrick et al., 2020). Though gifted students exist in all backgrounds, the typical gifted-identified students are White or Asian, monolingual, are not economically disadvantaged, and are not students with a disability (U. S. Department of Education, 2020). Black students and students from other minoritized groups are severely missing from gifted education (U.S. Department of Education, 2018). This missingness is a significant loss to the talent pipeline. Despite decades of school reform meant to increase the representation of students from minoritized groups, gifted education programs in America continue to lack diversity. Equity must be built into the infrastructure from the onset and cannot be retrofitted to a system whose design was meant to segregate and exclude. Gifted education must be replaced in its current form as a talent pipeline. Creating a robust talent pipeline requires equitable education, especially for students with the highest potential to demonstrate talent. This paper discusses past challenges in creating a more equitable gifted education and a vision for future success.