Broken Systems Are Not Proof That Gifted Children Don't Exist

Thoughts on Katie Arnold-Ratliff's The Mirage of the Gifted Child article from a longtime gifted advocate and parent

Nobody wakes up one morning hoping their child will need college at 8.

Trust me.

Some people think that parents of gifted children are chasing prestige, Ivy League admissions, and bragging rights. Most of us are chasing something much less glamorous: an education that fits.

For over a decade, I’ve been involved in the gifted world as a parent, advocate, speaker, organization leader, and moderator of gifted communities. I’ve spent years digging into the research, helping families navigate educational/early college options, and advocating for children whose needs fall outside the systems that weren’t built to serve them.

My son earned his associate’s degree at 11, a bachelor's degree in Physics at 13, a master's degree at 15, and is on track to complete his PhD at 18. I'm incredibly proud of him. But if you think this story is about collecting degrees, you've missed the point. Those degrees are just evidence of what happened when a gifted child was finally given access to learning at an appropriate level. The goal was never to create a prodigy. The goal was to make sure that a child who was ready for more wasn’t asked to spend years waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Because gifted children exist.

By age 3, my son’s educational needs looked nothing like those of his age peers. Long before there were degrees, there was a child who had already mastered the material being presented to him and who needed something different than what was available.

That’s why I read Katie Arnold-Ratliff’s recent article, The Mirage of the Gifted Child, with real interest.

What the Article Gets Right… But…

The article gets some things right. Gifted identification is imperfect. Gifted programs vary wildly in quality. Labels can be unhealthy. Some parents pursue gifted placements for status. Some schools mistake compliance for intelligence. Some gifted students are overlooked, while others are misidentified. None of those observations are controversial to people who have spent any amount of time in the gifted world. Advocates have been making those same observations for years.

One of the things I appreciated most about the article was the depth of the research. The author clearly spent considerable time digging into the history of gifted education, cognitive testing, identification practices, and the political battles that have surrounded gifted programs for decades.

But I am frustrated because so much of that research was selectively framed. The author introduced studies, experts, and historical examples that were more nuanced than the conclusions drawn from them. She highlighted evidence that supported her thesis while leaving out the broader context, competing interpretations, or the portions of the same research that point in a different direction.

The article asks whether giftedness itself is a lie. Yet most of the article argues that gifted programs, gifted identification systems, and gifted labels are flawed. A bad gifted program doesn’t prove giftedness isn’t real. An imperfect identification system doesn’t prove giftedness isn’t real. An inequitable program doesn’t prove giftedness isn’t real. Those are arguments about services, implementation, and policy, not about the underlying phenomenon itself.

By the end, I found myself wondering whether the article had actually challenged the existence of giftedness or documented the many ways we have struggled to identify, understand, and educate gifted children. A flawed system doesn’t invalidate the population it was created to serve.

Words Matter, Even If You don’t Like Them

The author interviewed Amy Shelton, executive director of Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY), who said she prefers the term “advanced learner” over “gifted.” That’s interesting to me, though probably not for the reasons the article intended. CTY doesn’t identify students through IQ testing or other measures of cognitive ability. Admission is based on above-grade-level achievement measures such as the SCAT, PSAT, SAT, ACT, and other academic assessments. In other words, CTY identifies students based on demonstrated academic performance rather than intellectual giftedness as traditionally defined through cognitive assessment.

I can understand why someone working with high-achieving students might prefer the term advanced learner. But advanced learner and gifted are not interchangeable concepts. One describes what a child is doing. The other attempts to describe how a child learns. A child can be gifted and underachieving. A child can be an advanced learner without being intellectually gifted. Many children are both. Those distinctions matter because they lead to very different educational questions.

To be clear, this is not a criticism of CTY. They have served many students well, including my own son. E was admitted into the Study of Exceptional Talent (SET). My point is that achievement and giftedness are different constructs. I found it somewhat ironic that one of the article’s strongest challenges to the concept of giftedness came from a leader of a program that identifies students through achievement measures rather than cognitive ones. If we are going to question whether giftedness exists, shouldn’t we first be talking about children identified as gifted?

The author clearly invested a tremendous amount of time researching the subject and uncovered sources many readers have never encountered. I genuinely appreciated that. Again and again, studies, experts, and historical examples were introduced in ways that supported the article’s thesis, while competing interpretations, limitations, or the broader context surrounding those same sources were left unexplored.

Giftedness Is Not Achievement

One of the biggest problems in the gifted conversation is that giftedness and achievement are often treated as though they are interchangeable. They aren’t. A high IQ is not an achievement. It isn’t earned and it doesn’t make someone better than anyone else. At its most basic level, it’s a description of cognitive ability relative to one’s peers. Achievement is something very different. Achievement requires effort, persistence, opportunity, executive functioning, and support. My son’s educational trajectory didn’t happen simply because he had a high IQ. It happened because he was able to learn at his level and at the pace he needed.

A high IQ isn’t a guarantee of accomplishment any more than exceptional athletic ability guarantees an Olympic medal. No gifted child should have to shoulder that expectation. What it can represent is potential: the capacity to learn quickly, reason deeply, make connections others may miss, and master complex material at a faster pace. Whether that potential develops into achievement depends on so many other factors, including opportunity, motivation, perseverance, family support, educational fit, and any 2E considerations.

That’s why one of the article’s central arguments is so unconvincing. The author points to a long-term study showing that “only” 12.3% of gifted children went on to achieve what researchers classified as “eminence” by age fifty. The implication seems to be that because most gifted children did not become Fortune 500 executives, full professors, judges, leading scientists, or award-winning journalists, giftedness may not be particularly meaningful after all.

BSFFR.

People are thoughtful enough to define success for themselves rather than chasing whatever society happens to value. Not everyone wants to be a CEO, a celebrity, or a Nobel Prize winner. Some want meaningful work, intellectual challenges, strong relationships, and a life that aligns with their values. I find it so odd that we would measure the worth of an education by how many people reach eminence than by whether they were given the opportunity to develop their potential… to do and be anything they want.

The G&T Education Problem

One of the strongest critiques of gifted education receives surprisingly little attention in the article. Many gifted programs aren’t actually serving gifted children. They’re serving high achievers.

As New York City debates the future of gifted education under Mayor Mamdani, I would encourage the mayor and policymakers to consider a different question. Rather than asking whether gifted programs should exist, we should ask whether New York’s current model is truly identifying gifted kids in the first place.

When gifted programs rely on achievement measures, grades, teacher recommendations, portfolios, or other indicators of performance while moving away from measures of cognitive ability, the population being identified begins to shift. The program becomes less about identifying students with exceptional learning needs and more about identifying students who are already succeeding within the existing system. If a district fills its gifted programs primarily with high achievers, it should not be surprising when the results look more like honors education than specialized programming for students with exceptional cognitive needs.

The Research Is More Nuanced

Many of the sources cited are more nuanced than the conclusions that were drawn from them. It discusses the overlap between giftedness and neurodivergence but presents one clinician’s opinion as if it carries broader consensus than it does. It discusses instability in childhood cognitive scores while giving relatively little attention to the long-term stability often observed at the highest ranges. It discusses failures of gifted programming while spending less time on the substantial body of research supporting acceleration for appropriately selected students. It discusses inequities in identification without fully exploring whether many gifted students from underserved communities may be underidentified rather than overidentified.

To be clear, every article has limits. But readers should understand that many of these conversations remain active debates, not settled questions. And often, the same studies used to criticize gifted education have also been used to argue for improving it.

To Mayor Mamdani, and Educational Leaders Everywhere

So this is my plea, not only to Mayor Mamdani, but to educational leaders across America.

Please don’t look at a flawed identification system and conclude that the children are the problem. Don’t look at inequities in access and conclude that gifted children don’t exist. Don’t look at programs that have drifted away from their original purpose and conclude that no purpose ever existed.

Let’s fix them, improve them, rebuild them.

Let’s find gifted students in underrepresented communities who have historically been missed. Let’s create pathways that recognize both achievement and cognitive needs. Let’s make identification broader and more accessible.

But please don’t pull the rug out from under the very students these programs were originally created to serve. These kids existed before gifted programs and they will exist after gifted programs. We can’t ignore them. The consequences are real if we do.

Yes, Virginia, Giftedness Is Real

So is giftedness is a mirage?

No.

The mirage is the idea that because the systems struggle to identify gifted children fairly, giftedness itself must not be real.

The mirage is the belief that because some programs are ineffective, the needs they were created to address must not exist.

The mirage is thinking we can eliminate educational mismatch by eliminating the language we use to describe it.

Gifted children will always exist as the always have.