Nurturing the Gifted All the Way from K-12

In 2018, Todd Stanley asked why gifted services so often stop before high school and argued for a continuum from kindergarten through twelfth grade. The section below the original looks at how gifted programs are organized and funded in 2026, what the research says about acceleration, and what a high school can offer beyond Advanced Placement.

Why don’t gifted services continue at the high school level? The way many gifted services work across the nation is that if a school or district has gifted programming, it is focused in the younger grades. Very rarely is there gifted-specific programming at the high school level. Instead, we rely on nationally recognized programs such as Advanced Placement (AP) and College Credit Plus (CCP) to fill the need for rigor and challenge. While these courses are certainly more rigorous than your typical high school class, they are not specific to the needs of gifted students. Even if they were, they would only be meeting the academic needs of the students. What of their social/emotional needs?

Traditional Teaching in High School Classrooms

The other impediment for gifted learners in high schools is that many high school teachers have a traditional style in the classroom, standing in front of the students and talking at them. They are the disseminators of information, the sage from the stage, the content expert. If you don’t believe me, go into most any high school and see how the desks are situated in the classroom. I would bet a majority are lined up in symmetrical rows, all pointed toward the front of the classroom where the teacher’s desk sits. This drill and kill style of teaching has been proven to not be the most effective method of reaching students, especially gifted ones, and yet it continues.

The problem with solely using AP and CCP as band-aids for the needs of gifted students is that they typically are using this traditional method of teaching where a lot of material needs to be covered in what seems like a short period of time. As a result, there is a lot of focus on surface level learning such as rote memorization and traditional methods of assessment. Unfortunately, these methods do prepare students for many of the AP exams and college entrance exams students must take in order to advance in their education. They do not prepare students, however, to figure out things for themselves in the real world nor do they necessarily stretch one’s thinking.

Authentic Strategies for Gifted Learners

These traditional strategies are not the best methods to challenge gifted students or any student for that matter. Instead, authentic strategies such as Inquiry learning, Project-based learning, Problem-based learning and Case-based learning are far better suited for high-ability students. Let the students be the content experts, let them figure out how to learn something on their own. This is how young people learn best. Just turn to YouTube for proof. There are millions of do-it-yourself videos by kids showing other kids how to make jewelry, learn to play an instrument or cook a meal. Kids can get on and learn for themselves.

These methods of teaching allow students to learn for themselves rather than having it spoon-fed to them by the teacher. They also are engaging and challenging at the same time. They teach students not just the content, but how to find that content and use it best. This way, whether that student retains that content or forgets about it, they still possess the skill of knowing how to learn.

A lot of these strategies as well as station rotation, blended-learning and hands-on activities are abundant in the lower grades. You walk into an elementary or middle school and kids are actively engaged. Could you imagine a 2nd grade teacher trying to give kids a one hour lecture? Those kids would be rioting after fifteen minutes. Probably ten. Not only that, because elementary and middle school teachers are often teaching more than a single subject, there is a lot of cross-curricular learning taking place. Teachers at this level are not content experts, they are engagement experts.

Responding to High School Teachers’ Concerns

I am aware of the counter argument many high school teachers would propose. I was a high school teacher at one time. When you have 150 students throughout the course of a single day, management and survival are your main goals. These traditional methods allow a teacher to better maintain order and discipline. But order and discipline shouldn’t be the main goal of a school. It should be student learning.

Other high school teachers might argue they are getting students ready for college where they will be lectured to and given exams worth half their grade. If a teacher takes this approach he is indeed getting students ready for college. The bad news is the college he is getting them ready for is the same one the teacher attended when he was an undergraduate ten or twenty years ago. Colleges have adapted to the new research of learning and recognize the importance of independent work, group collaboration and student engagement. Many colleges have forgone exams for research paper, presentations, projects or other performance assessments.

Because high school teachers are such content experts, it is difficult for them to be open to learning new things. After all, they are the one who knows the most about their content, and no one is disputing that. However, teaching strategies are not content specific. Blended learning could work in a theatre class, Trigonometry, or World History.

The main advice for high school teachers is to remain open minded. To recognize that even though you might be the content expert of your subject, you are not necessarily the strategy expert. There is always room to learn. If we expect this of our students, we should expect it of ourselves. If there is anything I have learned after twenty years in education, it is that I still have a lot of learning to do.

A Continuum of Gifted Services

School systems also need to do a better job of creating a continuum of services for their gifted population. You cannot have programming in the middle school and junior high only to yank it back once students reach high school. As my superintendent so wisely said to me, “if their services go away, their needs do not.” There needs to be programming at the high school level, even if it is just a bridge to AP and CCP which students usually do not take until their junior year. The transition to high school is difficult as it is. Imagine students trying to deal with these growing pains. There needs to be programming in place to help them adjust and make sure both their academic and social/emotional needs are met. Further Reading

1. VeryWell – Top Ways to Nurture Gifted Children
2. Huffington Post – From Perfection to Personal Bests: 7 Ways to Nurture Your Gifted Child
3. edCircuit – “Rigor” and “Hard” Are Not The Same Thing

Gifted programs from K-12 in 2026: funding, acceleration and high school options

Todd Stanley wrote that gifted programs tend to exist in the younger grades and thin out at the high school level, where schools lean on Advanced Placement and dual-credit courses. That description still matches how gifted programs are set up across the country, and this section explains why, what the research says about the options available to a gifted high school student, and what a district can decide.

Why gifted programs differ so much from place to place

Each state decides what gifted services it requires, and many districts decide the rest. The National Association for Gifted Children and the Council of State Directors of Programs for the Gifted publish a State of the States in Gifted Education report, and the most recent edition covers 2022-2023. A summary of that edition notes that states often require gifted services without providing money for them, which pushes the cost to local districts, and that definitions of giftedness and identification criteria vary by state and sometimes by district. The summary also reports that disparities in identification and access persist for underrepresented groups. The effect for families is that a child who qualifies as gifted in one district may not qualify in a neighboring one, a problem edCircuit has covered in National Education Standards: A Definition for Gifted, and in The Challenge of Identifying Gifted Children from Poverty. Readers unsure how gifted differs from simply bright can start with What Is the Difference Between Bright and Gifted?

What the research says about acceleration

Stanley named Advanced Placement and College Credit Plus as the main high school options and observed that they do not address every need of a gifted learner. One of the ways schools can add to them is acceleration, which means moving students through material at a pace that matches their readiness instead of their age. In its May 2025 position statement, the National Association for Gifted Children says more research supports academic acceleration than any other intervention for academically advanced students. The statement reports that accelerated students, compared with same-age peers of equal ability and with older students in the new grade, performed significantly better academically, often chose college majors related to the subjects in which they were accelerated, and earned advanced degrees at a higher rate. On the common worry about social effects, it reports that accelerated students as a group did as well as or slightly better than non-accelerated students in the short term and several decades later.

The same statement is an advocacy document from a professional association, and it describes the research in summary form, so a district should read the studies it cites before basing a policy on it. It also says that research on acceleration for diverse learners needs to grow. Its list of accelerative options goes beyond grade skipping and includes curriculum compacting, Advanced Placement, dual or concurrent enrollment, cluster grouping, mentoring, summer programs and online learning, which is useful for a high school that cannot offer a separate gifted class.

Equity in who gets in

The position statement recommends universal screening, so that every student is considered and not only those recommended by a teacher or family member, and it names auto-enrollment in advanced coursework as a promising practice that replaces prerequisites based on test scores or recommendations. It also cites a 2023 report from the National Working Group on Advanced Education, published by the Fordham Institute, which advises schools to start looking in early elementary school, cast a wide net, use local norms and use flexible screening methods. These recommendations matter for the continuum Stanley describes, because a program that begins with a single test in one grade will miss students who would have qualified later.

What leaders and teachers can decide

Stanley quoted a superintendent who told Stanley, “if their services go away, their needs do not.” In practice, a district can act on that in several ways:

• Write down the gifted services offered in each grade band, and look for the grade where they end.
• Build a bridge course or advisory in ninth grade that covers both academic challenge and the social and emotional needs Stanley raises, ahead of the Advanced Placement or dual-credit courses that students usually reach in eleventh grade.
• Adopt an acceleration policy with a clear team process, above-level testing and transition planning, which are among the practices the position statement lists.
• Review who is identified. Compare the make-up of the gifted program with the make-up of the school, and consider universal screening and local norms if there is a gap.
• Offer teachers in advanced courses training in inquiry, project based and problem based approaches, the strategies Stanley recommends over lecturing.

Teachers who want to understand how gifted children can still struggle may find Why Gifted Children Can Be At-Risk Too helpful, and the debate over whether such programs are fair to other students is covered in Are Gifted Programs Elitist?

More on Gifted and Advanced Learning