Todd Stanley 
Todd Stanley wrote this column in 2019, when New York City was debating whether to end its gifted programs. The section below, added in 2026, explains what has happened in the city since, what research says about gifted identification and equity, and what school leaders can decide in their own districts.
When word broke that NYC schools were considering 86ing all of their gifted programming, I was livid. After all, I have spent my entire career fighting for the rights of gifted students and making sure they have specialized services for their unique abilities. Then I began to read some of the articles debating the topic and, like most things in life, found that things were not so cut and dry.
The Dilemma
The major problem is that there is no good guy or bad guy in this situation. Both sides have very legitimate arguments. On one side of the argument are those who would seek to discontinue gifted programming. The rationale is that the programs are predominately white and Asian, even though most of the NYC school system is black and Hispanic. These programs have created a very “have and have not” atmosphere, with those who can afford it getting help in being accepted (a la college admissions scandal), or who are just more knowledgeable about the system and know how to play it to give their child advantages over others.
Understanding the Debate
Overcoming Obstacles
A student cannot help it if his parent will not get him to school. Grades, on the other hand, can be very subjective. Kids who are compliant by following directions and behaving tend to get better grades than discipline problems or those who go against the grain. This does not indicate which student has the higher ability, however. This might come as a shock to most, but not all gifted students are well-behaved, model pupils. In fact, their predisposition is to challenge and question, which can cause a lot of problems with teachers who expect students to raise their hand or quietly work.
The Gifted Program
On the other side of the argument are the gifted pundits who want to protect their programs because they believe they are what is best for kids, and in my experiences in gifted education, this is absolutely correct. Gifted programs offer a specialized service to a unique ability that is going to do a better job of helping these students reach their potential than if these services had not been available. That does not take away from the fact that the tests we give students to qualify them for such programming have a certain amount of bias to them. A student coming from an educated, middle-class family is given a huge advantage over a child who comes from an impoverished home where there are bigger fish to fry than schooling. This does not take away from the fact that there are students out there who need a different education. We just need to do a better job of identifying them. Having policies such as universal screening, using multiple nationally normed tests to provide a clearer picture, and eliminating subjective measures such as teacher recommendation or elements outside of the control of the student would be a start, but much more needs to be done.
Identifying Before Eliminating
What this ultimately comes down to is the difference between equity and fair. Is it equal to get rid of gifted programming in NYC and offer opportunities to everyone in the district to participate in specialized programs? Yes, that would certainly make things more equal, but it is not fair to students who have a specialized need that is not going to be addressed by trying to teach everyone equally. There is an issue here but not the one they are currently addressing. We need to properly identify what the issues are before we can make blanket statements such as eliminating all gifted programming.
Specialized Education
Here is a suggestion you would never hear. NYC schools determine that its’ special education programs are predominantly one race and so in order to make things more equal, they decide to get rid of those services and offer the same education to everyone. That would be nuts not to mention illegal since special education is federally protected under IDEA. But because there is no federal law protecting gifted education and those who qualify for it, it is up to the discretion of the school district. This, of course, is beside the fact that you would not consider doing this to special education students because we recognize they have specialized needs that must be addressed. Gifted students have specialized needs as well; they are just at the other end of the spectrum. So why is it alright to discontinue their services?
Like most things, the adults need to get their s**t together and figure things out because the only people who are going to be affected by this are the children. No matter what decision is made, all that I ask is that they not take the easy way out. It is easy to completely cut something rather than trying to make it more equitable. It is easier to deny students a specialized education rather than trying to fix the system that created this mess. If we truly believe in the benefits a gifted education provides, we need to be willing to do as we often ask of our gifted students; we need to think outside the box.
Read more from Todd at Stanley at edCircuit and The Gifted Guy.
Gifted identification and equity in gifted education: what the evidence says in 2026
Todd Stanley argues above that the real problem in New York City was how students were identified, and not the existence of gifted programs. That is a question about gifted identification, meaning the process a district uses to decide which students receive gifted services, and it matters as much in a small rural district as in the largest school system in the country. This section follows what has happened in New York City since 2019, reviews a well-known study of universal screening, and sets out questions a district can ask about its own process in pursuit of equity in gifted education.
What changed in New York City
The city stopped giving the standardized test to four-year-olds that Stanley describes. In January 2021 its Panel for Educational Policy voted 8 to 7 against extending the contract with the company that supplied the entrance exam, and teacher recommendations later replaced the test. In October 2021 Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Brilliant NYC, a plan to end the gifted test and separate gifted classrooms, but in April 2022 Mayor Eric Adams kept the program and expanded it to all 32 districts, adding about 100 kindergarten seats and 1,000 third-grade seats. Chalkbeat reported in October 2025 that about 2,500 children are admitted to gifted kindergarten classes each year, that the gifted application is now part of the regular kindergarten application, and that 85 percent of applicants were found eligible last year. Because eligible applicants outnumber seats, siblings of current students get first priority, some schools reserve seats for underrepresented groups, and a lottery fills the rest.
The share of kindergartners in the program who are Black or Latino rose from 12 percent in 2020, the last year of the test, to 30 percent in 2023-24, and the share who are low-income rose from 34 percent in 2019 to 47 percent. Chalkbeat also reports that applications are uneven across neighborhoods: one Bronx district had 76 applicants last year while a Manhattan district had 718. In that October 2025 report, the schools chancellor, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, told the paper that the current process is a concern, and Zohran Mamdani, then running for mayor, proposed ending kindergarten admission while keeping classes that begin in third grade. By December 2025, Chalkbeat’s kindergarten application guide described Mamdani as mayor-elect, reported that Mamdani would like to phase out gifted programs that start in kindergarten, and said that nothing was likely to change for the application cycle then under way. Readers who want the current position should check the city’s Department of Education gifted and talented page.
These figures show that replacing a test that favored prepared families changed who entered. They do not show how the students are doing once they are in the program, and Chalkbeat does not report outcomes. Stanley’s warning that subjective measures carry their own bias is relevant here, since teacher recommendation is the main route in now.
What a study of universal screening found
The clearest evidence on identification comes from a study by David Card and Laura Giuliano, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. A large urban district in Florida began testing every second grader with a nonverbal ability test in 2005. Students who scored high enough, with lower cutoffs for English learners and students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, were evaluated for gifted placement, and the gifted eligibility standards themselves did not change. Comparing third graders before and after the program, the authors found that the odds of being identified as gifted rose 74 percent for Black students and 118 percent for Hispanic students, and the gifted share among students who were low-income or English learners rose from 1.4 to 4.3 percent. Their conclusion is that Black and Hispanic students, English learners, students receiving subsidized lunch and girls were systematically under-referred when identification depended on parents and teachers.
The study has limits that a reader should keep in mind. It follows one district, it compares cohorts over time instead of assigning students at random, and the district later scaled the program back for budget reasons. It still supports the part of Stanley’s argument that universal screening and multiple measures give a clearer picture than a system that depends on who asks.
Questions for a district to ask about its own process
A district does not need to resolve the national debate to look at its own numbers. Five questions are a practical start:
- Who can refer a student, and how many students are referred by each route?
- Does every student at a grade level take a screening measure, or only students whose families or teachers ask?
- Does the district use more than one measure, as Stanley suggests, so that grades, attendance or classroom behavior do not decide who is identified?
- How does the share of identified students in each group compare with that group’s share of enrollment, and has the gap changed over three years?
- What services follow identification, and do students who enter in later grades have a route in?
Two earlier edCircuit articles take up related parts of the topic: The Challenge of Identifying Gifted Children from Poverty and There Needs to Be a National Definition for Gifted. Parents who think a child may be gifted and has not been identified can ask the school how referral and screening work and request an evaluation, and a school psychologist or gifted coordinator is the right person to ask.
Subscribe to edCircuit to stay up to date on all of our shows, podcasts, news, and thought leadership articles.
Related reading
More on Gifted and Advanced Learning
