I didn’t think much about gifted and talented programs until I saw my husband’s shirt. It sits folded at the bottom of his T-shirt pile because — not surprisingly — he would never leave the house wearing a shirt that reads “Gifted and Talented Education — Allegheny Intermediate Unit.”
Zhe started in such programs the year his family immigrated to America from China, when he started second grade in Fairbanks, Alaska. His father would soon find work in Pennsylvania’s collapsing steel industry, and his mother waitressed and took community college classes to train for a technical role at an engineering firm. Meanwhile, Zhe enrolled in gifted programs at public schools in rural Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh suburbs, and at Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Sciences, a free summer residency camp for high-achieving students. Eventually, he attended Harvard on scholarship.
Having grown up in Massachusetts, I marveled at this story. I knew of no schools with gifted and talented programs. Several high-achieving students at my public middle school went on to private high schools, but that was an expensive option for students who might’ve otherwise stayed in the public system, if advanced or enrichment courses had been offered free of charge.
But Massachusetts is an outlier. While close to 60 percent of public schools across the country offer gifted and talented programs, fewer than 4 percent of Massachusetts schools do, according to a 2019 report presented to the state Legislature.
“We have not really challenged our most gifted children, and we need to do better,” Jeff Riley, the state’s former commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said last fall. Massachusetts is so proud of its high test scores, Riley warned at the Massachusetts Association for Gifted Education symposium, that it risks ceding ground to states with a more creative, individualized approach to education. “I worry that Massachusetts is so busy patting itself on the back that it’s almost broken its arm.”
Ironically, as the state with the highest percentage of college graduates, Massachusetts boasts lots of folks whose lives have been peppered with elite programs and institutions: all-state band camps, robotics competitions, math Olympiads, AP classes, elite colleges, top-tier med schools, hard-driving law schools, ultra-competitive financial firms. But when, as parents, they show up at public schools with their super-bright kids, the options are few. “You’re on your own,” says Michelle Barmazel, co-president of the Massachusetts Association for Gifted Education.
So why are we so unusual? Why do so many other states offer robust programs for gifted children, while Massachusetts has next to nothing?
FOR THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD IT, there’s quite a lot you can do to enrich the education of a talented child. As researchers at Harvard and Boston University have shown, tutoring centers have exploded across the United States since the late 1990s. In 1997, there were just over 3,000; by 2015, there were more than 10,000. In the Boston suburbs, you’ll find plenty of kids enrolled at Kumon and the Russian School of Math. (Not surprisingly, the researchers say “the number and growth of private tutoring centers is heavily concentrated in geographic areas with high income and parental education.”)
Back in the 1970s, recalls Janis Baron, gifted and talented programs were far more common in Massachusetts public schools. Programs existed all over the state, in towns such as Arlington, Shelburne, Hanover, Framingham, Randolph, and Millbury. Baron ran one in Andover. And there was state support for them: the Office for Gifted and Talented.
Having that office was critical, Baron believes, because it gave educators the sense that the state approved of what they were doing. And, she says, “There were a lot of really talented people at the helm of these programs,” such as leaders in Barnstable, Methuen, and Brockton.
“I remember going into towns like Haverhill and Lowell, where the parents sometimes didn’t speak English,” Baron tells me. “They didn’t realize how incredibly talented [their] child was.” Teachers often didn’t know what to do with such kids, she says, so she helped them with strategies and sometimes offered students full scholarships to a summer program she ran in Andover.
But the Office for Gifted and Talented disbanded in the early 1990s, budgets were cut, and most programs withered away. In Baron’s eyes, it was a huge loss.
Over the course of her career, she has seen “a lot of depression and anxiety that comes from being in a situation where you feel helpless and you’re not growing.” And Baron thinks a lot about the mental health consequences of boredom and ostracization. “We have such a concern about leaving any child behind, but we’re not concerned about holding kids back. Why is that?” she says.
Karen Blumstein used to teach at the Carroll School, a private school in the Boston suburbs geared toward students with learning disabilities. She knew a good deal about special needs, but considerably less about kids performing above grade level. Her son, though, turned out to be a fast learner. When he showed up for kindergarten at a public school in Acton, he was reading and ready to tackle division. But he had no access to more advanced material during the day — the school said it made sense for him to remain in his class because his handwriting needed work.
The experience turned out to be so difficult and isolating that he stopped eating. Blumstein eventually enrolled him in a private school for gifted children, where he’s thriving. Her younger son now attends the same school, while her daughter is happy at the local public school.
I asked Blumstein, now co-president of the Massachusetts Association for Gifted Education with Barmazel, why the state has so few gifted and talented programs. She said that Northeastern states, in particular, worry that having these sorts of programs would be elitist.
She has seen people move to other states — or simply not come to Massachusetts in the first place — because they couldn’t find good options for advanced students. She fields calls from families relocating to Massachusetts who have kids enrolled in gifted and talented programs elsewhere. When the families inquire about how to transfer their child into a similar program here, Blumstein tells them it’s almost certainly not going to work out; there’s little point in forwarding their paperwork to the new school district.
FOR A CHILD IN MASSACHUSETTS without resources, being gifted can prove challenging. Boredom led one second-grader to begin roving the classroom, helping other students. His teacher thought maybe he had attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Their son is ready for advanced work, the boy’s father says, but is rarely offered any in class. “We are extremely worried. We have sleepless nights,” he tells me. He and his wife, who live in a town about 40 minutes west of Boston, asked to remain anonymous because they don’t feel socially secure enough to talk publicly about their school.
Their son is allowed to bring in a book of his choice to read, and puzzles, but any enrichment he gets — either at school or at home — is largely dependent on his parents. And they worry that the school entertains high-achieving kids with computer tablets while other students finish their work. “They’re on screens all day,” the dad says.
Both parents immigrated to the United States and feel strongly that if their son were white, his intelligence would be more highly praised. Instead, he has experienced bullying from classmates. After his teacher expressed concerns, they had their son evaluated for ADHD — the results showed he didn’t have it. The parents say if they could afford it, they would send their son to a private school.
Many children who display exceptional talent early on struggle to remain at the top. The 2019 report on gifted education looked at third-grade students who scored in the top 12 percent of the state on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System Exams. Of those students, only about half remained top-scorers by the time they reached sixth grade — and divisions along racial and ethnic lines were stark. Nearly three quarters of Asian students and nearly half of white students remained top scorers by sixth grade. But fewer than a quarter of high-scoring Black and Hispanic third-graders were still high-scorers three years later.
ELSEWHERE IN THE COUNTRY, innovative approaches to gifted education have emerged. One standout is in Texas, at San Antonio’s Advanced Learning Academy, established in 2016. A public school for students in pre-K to 12th grade, it offers learning practices typically used by gifted and talented programs because they’re “great practices for all kids,” says Kathy Bieser, the principal.
Selection for the school is by lottery, and it’s tough to get in. For the 2024-2025 academic year, 132 new students were selected; more than 700 remain on a wait list. About 75 percent of the students are Hispanic, Bieser says, and about 50 percent of children receive free or reduced-price lunch.
The school curriculum is project-based, allowing students to engage with a group question on different levels — some will go “deeper” and “more complex,” Bieser says. Learning is tailored to what students are interested in, an approach that “has historically — sometimes only — been implemented into more traditional gifted programs,” Bieser says.
Students work on in-depth projects, guided by their interests, which culminate in presentations. If a student is working beyond grade level, teachers can offer the child more challenging material, or, if needed, the school can elevate the child to the next grade level for a course such as math.
Growing up in Arizona, Christopher Cleveland was part of the gifted program at his local elementary school. He spent much of the day in a regular classroom except for pull-out sessions in reading and math. Cleveland says this advanced education helped prepare him for middle and high schools, and he eventually enrolled in an International Baccalaureate program, a challenging curriculum used by schools around the world.
Now a research assistant professor at the Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, Cleveland believes in “providing services to students who are either behind or above grade level.”
In his working paper “Gifted or Gone: The Effects of Gifted Education on Public School Enrollment and Achievement,” he studied data gathered from 2010 to 2019 from New York City’s gifted program. The program (which has since changed) was particularly interesting, he notes, because it allowed students to take an admissions test before kindergarten. That meant that children coming from inside or outside the public school system could try to get into the city’s gifted and talented program. And when they were admitted, they wanted in.
Cleveland found that if Asian, Black, or white families were offered a spot, they were more likely to enroll in public school than families whose children didn’t get into the program. (The effect on Latino families wasn’t statistically significant.) He advocates for systemic screenings of students, to better understand the range of kids in a class, the learning experiences and styles they arrive with, and the possibility of poor teaching the previous year. In practice, though, he knows that accounting for differences is tough.
WHILE THERE IS A NATIONAL definition and set of requirements surrounding special education, there’s no such definition or requirements for gifted education. Every state — and, in some cases, every locality — is on its own. Some states have universal screenings for giftedness, some don’t.
Several people I spoke with pointed out that if a child is a year or two behind in math, their school is obligated to help them. But if they’re a year or two ahead in math, they’re entitled to nothing. Which is often — at least in Massachusetts — what they get.
In 2023, a bill seeking to secure “educational equity for gifted and beyond-grade children” began winding its way through the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Sponsored by Worcester Democrat Meghan Kilcoyne, it would require that gifted children be provided with appropriate services, much as special education students are served according to their needs. The bill was not taken up this session, but could be refiled next session.
Up until a few years ago, Boston Public Schools gave students a standardized test at the end of third grade, admitting high scorers to a program called Advanced Work Class, which offered enriched math and English classes in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. In 2019, education researcher Sarah Cohodes, now at the University of Michigan, found that “students who participate in AWC tend to be more [financially] advantaged than BPS students as a whole” and that the “program increases college enrollment by 15 percentage points overall.”
The gains for students of color were especially significant, Cohodes noted. Black and Latino students, who made up about half the children in the program, benefited far more, with a 65 percent increase in college enrollment. And yet, Boston halted the citywide test for the program in 2021, and phased out AWC.
Former Boston superintendent Brenda Cassellius, then at the helm, has noted that offering enrichment for a few can reduce overall equity. In 2020, when explaining why the city’s exam schools had a smaller percentage of Black and Latino students than the district as a whole, she argued that, “Oftentimes, when children come to us with less, they get less.” Which was why she supported an admissions approach that would privilege those in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
But equity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Cambridge and Brookline, for example, recently captured headlines for contentious debates around eliminating advanced math and English classes. While some educators have expressed concern that white and Asian students tend to dominate higher-level courses, many parents have pushed back against the idea of “de-leveling.” In Cambridge, where math is no longer tracked in middle school, the “aim was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers,” the Globe reported.
“There’s a larger issue around equity in gifted education that creates a lot of tension, with people thinking that if they don’t offer gifted education, it’s actually more equitable,” says Shelagh Gallagher, president of the National Association for Gifted Children. “They’re providing a more level playing field by removing that top tier.” But just the opposite happens, she argues, calling that thinking “misguided.”
“What we see is, in regions where people take away the gifted program, is that parents of means — and parents who feel comfortable within the education system and know how to work the system — go find resources,” she says. “They either buy them or they access them through their connections” — meaning they try to get their child matched with teachers who can juggle various ability levels in a class. “The people who lose out are exactly the people that others who are concerned about equity are concerned about.”
Paul Reville, who served as secretary of education under Governor Deval Patrick, says it’s crucial to challenge kids and meet them where they are. “We should have opportunities to nurture special talent,” he says. But creating a bunch of gifted and talented programs simply isn’t the best way to get us there, he argues. Reville opposes “singling out people on the basis of some fairly dubious criteria,” and says that such programs inevitably tend to reward the well heeled and well educated.
Now, as schools across Massachusetts slash programs and staff to balance budgets — in the wake of dried-up pandemic funds and years of high inflation — it may seem increasingly hard to justify enrichment for gifted students.
But Reville also rejects the notion that students’ differences should go unrecognized. “Every child is entitled to be challenged,” he says. “That has got to be part of our definition of equity in education.”
How might that play out in a classroom? It could involve creating subgroups in a class, offering advanced classes, or developing other sorts of personalization techniques. Right now, Reville says, “We’re still using the factory model,” in which kids are treated interchangeably. He says that Massachusetts has “plateaued, and we have a tendency to be complacent.” We have high average scores, but “those scores conceal vast differences.”
Reville points out that some schools have stopped publicizing National Merit Scholars, because it might make other students feel bad. But, he says, “We’ve had no problem historically singling out outstanding athletes for special attention and special investment.”
Indeed, how many schools keep quiet about varsity athletes, assuming it might make those on JV feel inferior? Which schools tell fast runners, “Despite your natural ability, the only fair thing is to have you run with the group”?
AT THE STATE LEVEL, spurred by former commissioner Jeff Riley, a search for a manager of advanced and accelerated learning is underway. The job description emphasizes equity, noting that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education wants to “advance educational equity for Massachusetts students — particularly those traditionally or currently underserved.” The department is working with Northwestern University — whose Center for Talent Development has focused on advanced students for 42 years — to offer increased guidance to school districts on how to serve “students with advanced learning needs,” according to a press release.
A dad from a middle-class, immigrant-rich Boston suburb told me that our focus on equity “can be conflated with what is just, in a way. You could say it would be just to educate people according to their ability.” His two kids, one in third grade and one in fifth, are both working about two grade levels beyond the material they’re getting in school, he says, and they’re bored much of the day. He did not want to be identified because he’s been working methodically with school leaders to try to improve opportunities for his children.
“I wonder what my Latina daughter could do,” he says, “if she were not just doing sixth-grade math problems with me at home, but she were also doing them in her third-grade class. What heights could she go to?” The family has considered private school but are quite committed to public education, and he likes the kids going to a diverse, neighborhood school. Plus, he attended public school himself in California (where he was part of a gifted and talented program).
In Magalie Pinney’s view, not offering gifted programming is a form of discrimination. Pinney brought up her three children in Brockton, where they were all part of the city’s Talented and Gifted Program — one of the few in the state. She says that families who “can afford to leave public school will. But we were one of the ones who were stuck.” Still, she valued her children’s time in the Talented and Gifted program, which ran from fourth through eighth grade (it has since been shortened). Pinney is now a member of both the Department of Education’s Gifted and Talented Education Advisory Council and the board of directors of the Massachusetts Association for Gifted Education.
She doubts the state will expand offerings for gifted children any time soon. She says students of color are overdiagnosed for special education but underdiagnosed as being gifted. And she worries that, in poorer schools, decision makers believe there couldn’t possibly be gifted children.
Pinney points to her cousin, who, like her, is the child of Haitian immigrants. He grew up in New York City, and when he was young, his teachers complained that he had behavioral issues. It turns out, she says, he was bored. “Then they came to realize that once he was in gifted and talented, that disappeared. He wound up going to Harvard.”
Kara Miller is the host of the podcast It Turns Out. Send comments to kara.miller@globe.com.