Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign plan to end New York City’s gifted and talented admissions for kindergartners is only the most prominent effort in recent years to hold back students in the name of “equity.” Similar initiatives include the “detracking” of math courses in San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Under Governor Ralph Northam, Virginia’s Department of Education considered ending advanced high school math courses across the entire state. Such efforts are unpopular—Americans oppose ending tracking in public schools more than almost any other proposed Democratic policy, and the Virginia Department of Education had to retreat from its own proposal after facing a public backlash—but they’re far from uncommon. They represent a long, bipartisan tradition of neglecting America’s most talented students. But as science and technology become more important than ever to the national interest, it’s past time for that tradition to end.
For decades, federal education policy has prioritized basic proficiency over other concerns. From George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act to Barack Obama’s Every Student Succeeds Act, presidents and lawmakers have sought to help the lowest-performing students and reduce class and racial achievement gaps. These are admirable goals, but they have diverted attention away from especially bright children.
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The result has been a persistent failure to identify and nurture exceptional talent—the “lost Einsteins,” as economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have described such children. Chetty et al. have found that low-income students with great math skills are far less likely to hold patents than wealthier students with much lower aptitude. This suggests that becoming an inventor depends not only on “excelling in mathematics and science,” as it should, but also on “having a rich family.”
Failure to recognize and support ability wastes enormous potential, leading to missed discoveries and breakthroughs. Scientific progress is heavily skewed toward the very best: the top 1 percent of inventors are five to ten times more productive than the average inventor, and the top 1 percent of scientists are responsible for more than one-fifth of academic citations.
Equity-based education policies are undermining future 1 percent geniuses and their potential achievements. Amid the ongoing AI race and mounting geopolitical tensions, identifying and supporting America’s next top scientist is essential.
During the Cold War, America met the moment and its obligations to talented youth. The National Defense Education Act of 1958, motivated by the Sputnik launch the prior year, required states to establish a plan to test students, identify those of “outstanding aptitudes and ability,” and develop guidance to get them through high school and into college. The law reflected a recognition among policymakers that nurturing the most promising talent at a young age could have an outsize impact on the nation’s security and prosperity.
We need a similar recognition today. Republican lawmakers are looking for further reforms to champion on the heels of recent years’ expansion of education savings accounts. One option? Building a thriving meritocracy and discarding the levelling mediocrity advanced by progressives.
Programs to identify or foster exceptional students currently represent a rounding error in the roughly $126 billion the federal government spends on K–12 education. The single program dedicated entirely to supporting these students, the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, receives less than $17 million.
Even the Javits program isn’t exclusively devoted to identifying and supporting top talent regardless of background. It emphasizes “serving students traditionally underrepresented in gifted and talented programs,” such as low-income, limited English proficient (LEP), and disabled students.
Considering the upside to encouraging the brightest minds at a young age, however, redirecting and boosting funding for Javits would be a worthy and efficient use of education funds. Other federal initiatives, such as the Institute of Education Sciences and the Education Innovation and Research program, could also allocate more of their grants and research to the study of effective talent identification and support strategies.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), which spends more than $1 billion annually on education research and STEM-related initiatives, similarly does little to develop future leading scientists and innovators. NSF should consider reestablishing its Young Scholars Program, which offered enrichment opportunities for top STEM high school students from 1989 to 1996. In addition, NSF’s INCLUDES program, which strives to make STEM education and career pathways “more fully and widely inclusive,” could shift its focus from equity toward gifted and talented programs.
If Congress won’t step up, President Trump could issue an executive order directing departments and agencies across the executive branch to prioritize advanced talent development as part of a national strategy. As the Eisenhower administration and Congress recognized with the National Defense Education Act, supporting the nation’s most promising young minds is a national mission that warrants federal involvement.
Meanwhile, states could update their testing programs to ensure that public schools screen for high-aptitude children in elementary and middle schools and give them advanced learning opportunities. States could also require public school districts to implement automatic enrollment in advanced math courses for children who are prepared to succeed based on their performance the prior year. And greater parental choice, facilitated by the spread of education savings accounts, will enable experimentation to support bright students who previously lacked options.
Any plan for accelerated education should keep exactly these kids in mind. Behind the grand strategic priorities and dreams of scientific progress is a simpler and more mundane principle advanced by the University of Connecticut’s National Center for Research on Gifted Education: “Every child has a right to learn something new every day.”
An education worthy of the name does not choose to waste human potential and subject curious children to useless boredom. Empowering gifted students to go as far as their talents can take them should be a national priority.