I Was Enrolled In A “Gifted” Program As A Kid. Years Later, I Discovered A Dark Side I Never Knew About.

I don’t remember precisely when I first heard the word “gifted,” but it must have been in early elementary school. I do remember being pulled out of my first-grade class and led to the fifth-grade classroom, where a teacher told me to choose a chapter book that was “more at my level.” 

I appreciated the chance to choose from all sorts of new books, but it marked an early example of what would eventually be both a privilege and a curse: my foray into being “set apart” academically from my fellow classmates. 

By the time I reached middle school, the gifted and talented program in my district had taken wing. The timing makes sense: In 1998, many American schools were provided with official K-12 standards for so-called “gifted education” by the National Association of Gifted Children. While the NAGC first promoted advanced academic programming in the 1950s, its work in the late ’80s and ’90s represented a more structured approach to educating students who were found to be gifted.

K-12 gifted education standards were preceded by the passage of the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Act in 1988, which secured funding to “orchestrate a coordinated program of scientifically based research, demonstration projects, innovative strategies, and similar activities that build and enhance the ability of elementary and secondary schools to meet the special educational needs of gifted and talented students.” 

In those early days, my experience with Gifted & Talented (or G/T, as we fondly called it) was almost entirely positive. Our G/T class was tucked away in a windowless classroom whose walls we decorated with silly drawings and posters. Several of my close friends were also in the program, and there was nothing better than getting to hang out with them for an hour or two per day while working on our largely self-assigned curriculum. Our teacher was warm and encouraging, always pushing each of us to incorporate our individual interests and skills into projects. 

In fact, nearly all the teachers I worked with in G/T were engaged educators who genuinely wanted their students to thrive. I’m forever grateful for their personal guidance, regardless of my later reflections on the program. In so many ways, G/T was a safe place at school — a place where I could be my true (weird) self and engage in more self-directed learning.

But there was a troubling flip side to the G/T experience that took me years to unpack. From what I could gather, most students qualified for the program based on standardized test scores. While the NAGC defines gifted pupils as “those who demonstrate outstanding levels of aptitude (defined as an exceptional ability to reason and learn) or competence (documented performance or achievement in top 10% or rarer) in one or more domains,” it seems inevitable that many kids would be excluded from gifted education for factors beyond their control.

In her 2016 book Engaging and Challenging Gifted Students: Tips for Supporting Extraordinary Minds in Your Classroom, Jenny Grant Rankin, Ph.D., outlines gaps in gifted education. Nonwhite students, socioeconomically disadvantaged kids, girls, and those classified as English language learners are disproportionately excluded from gifted and talented programming, Rankin reports. 

She also cites a 2016 study by Jason A. Grissom and Christopher Redding that found that Black students were 50% less likely to be considered for gifted and talented programs than their white counterparts, even when both groups recorded similar standardized test scores. What’s more, students of color were less likely to be labeled gifted when their teachers were white. 

In G/T, I learned quickly that much of my self-esteem came from academic praise and approval from adults. The “gifted” label seeped into everything I did and was a stumbling block at times — if I struggled to master a concept in math class or didn’t understand a question on a social studies test, I’d avoid asking for help. After all, I was gifted. I shouldn’t need help with anything, right? 

It felt like my so-called “natural” giftedness should pre-qualify me to succeed in any endeavor, which led me to prematurely give up on new hobbies later in life when I didn’t immediately feel like a master.

And when a project in a non-G/T class earned anything less than an A, I often found myself in tears and seeking reassurance from my family and friends that I was “still smart.”