Do public school Gifted and Talented (G&T) programs improve outcomes, or unfairly favor affluent families? Last week, a viral New York article took up that question. Its author seemed to believe that G&T is mostly a way to entrench disadvantage.
That framing, though, misses the bigger picture. The shortcomings of G&T are not unique in public education. They reflect a system designed to serve teachers, organized labor, and education bureaucracies rather than students and families. The fix for G&T programs, moreover, is the fix for the rest of the system: more competition and more choice.
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The U.S. spends roughly $1 trillion on K-12 public education each year—about $20,000 per student. Yet outcomes have stagnated. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that as of last year, fourth-grade math and reading scores were near or below where they stood in 2004.
New York City starkly illustrates the problem. All-in per-student spending now exceeds $42,000 a year, according to the Citizens Budget Commission. Yet student performance remains at or below the national average.
That failure belongs primarily to traditional public schools. More than four in five students nationwide attend a district-run public school, which is typically geographically zoned and heavily shaped by the local teachers’ union. Charter and parochial schools, by contrast, produce better results while spending far less per student.
Big-city parents who wish to secure the best education for their children have only a few realistic options. They can apply to charter schools, but available seats are in short supply because of caps and other restrictions limiting the number of charters that may be issued. Alternatively, they can move to neighborhoods zoned for higher-performing district schools. But moving is expensive and disruptive, especially when the strongest school zones are in neighborhoods many families cannot afford, making this option accessible mostly to affluent families.
Failing that, parents can turn to private school—another costly option—or leave a city altogether for a suburban district with stronger schools or a state that has enabled greater school choice. Increasingly, families in New York City have made one of these choices, as evidenced by enrollment dropping by about 150,000 students since 2020. In April, the city’s Department of Education released a first-of-its-kind survey of parents who have left the public school system. The most common reason for leaving, at 41 percent, was to pursue more rigorous education elsewhere.
Parents who remain but cannot find a decent education for their children are likely to be the voters most interested in a structural overhaul of the public school system. For teachers’ unions, a highly motivated and sympathetic voting bloc of parents calling for school choice threatens to upset a favorable status quo.
G&T programs reassure status-conscious parents that their children are on a more promising path, one that appears to lead from accelerated classes to selective high schools and prestigious colleges. This distinctive track makes G&T a political pressure-release valve, easing calls on elected officials and their allies in organized labor for more fundamental change.
G&T programs thus survive not because they consistently deliver a superior education but because they help a failing system retain the families most likely to flee or oppose it. Their high popularity among New York City families makes them especially valuable to the public school establishment, giving dissatisfied parents a reason to stay invested in the system rather than demand alternatives outside it. Better yet for the union, G&T creates demand for more teachers—and thus more members—while thinning general-education classes and easing those same teachers’ workloads.
Unsurprisingly, New York’s union leaders have long pushed back against efforts to eliminate G&T. Instead, they have called for expanding it while weakening the features that make it genuinely selective. That means, for example, placing less weight on admissions tests, using broader criteria to identify students, and pursuing greater racial diversity. Their approach would give more parents the impression of access to higher-quality schooling while sparing the union from real accountability for better educational outcomes.
No matter how G&T selects students or curricula, keeping it within the public school structure exposes it to the same pathologies that afflict general education. The New York article suggests that many parents are underwhelmed by the quality of G&T instruction. Indeed, no matter the type of program, teacher quality remains decisive.
And quality is uncertain even in G&T programs. As one parent interviewed in the article put it, “my kid in G&T has a mediocre teacher and is having a mediocre year. My kid in general ed has a fabulous teacher, and she’s having a fabulous year.”
For all these flaws, abolishing G&T would be a mistake, especially if the only alternative is the existing public school system. Eliminating G&T would further expose high-performing students to the failing general public education system. This would likely accelerate public school disenrollment.
But if the alternative to G&T is school choice, public schools would have stronger incentives to use new programming to improve educational quality and compete for students. Consider Idaho, which in 2024 comprehensively rewrote its charter school law to give operators greater autonomy, reduce barriers to charter expansion, and make it easier for traditional public schools to convert to charters. In 2025, the state passed a $50 million tax credit to defray private school education.
Some public schools have thrived in this environment, including through G&T-like programs. Fierce competition for students has pushed district leaders across Idaho to expand magnet schools—district-run schools organized around themes such as STEM and open to students from a wider geographic area. In West Ada and Coeur d’Alene, officials have embraced magnets and bolstered their programming to keep families from drifting to charters or private schools.
In other words, where families have real alternatives, traditional public systems are more likely to create differentiated, high-quality curricula and realize parents’ expectations. As ever, it’s the competition that makes the difference.
Ironically, school choice would let G&T fulfill its promise. In a competitive system, G&T would matter less as a status signal and more as one program among many striving for educational excellence.
G&T should not be abolished. It should instead be liberated from the system that made it necessary. If families have genuine alternatives, public schools will have to earn families’ trust—not take it for granted.