For parents applying to the dual-language program at Rochester, New York’s public school No. 12, where students learn in both English and Spanish, the process can be both bureaucratic and baffling. After listing the program as a top choice, parents must schedule a testing appointment at the central office, where an instructor gauges such skills as whether each incoming kindergartener can hold a book properly and turn its pages, identify that a sentence is made up of words and spaces, use words to describe the scene in a picture, identify sounds in a word, and other pre-reading skills.

Families never receive a “score” on the test, which is available in both English or Spanish, or any information about how it is used in the admissions process — just word on whether their child made it in. (The district communications office did not respond to multiple queries about the process.)

After her 5-year-old son took the test several years ago, Rochester parent Llerena Searle was convinced that the news wouldn’t be good. He had a meltdown when asked to go with an unfamiliar instructor, acquiescing only when allowed to “test” from his mother’s lap. The boy was admitted, though, and is now in seventh grade; Searle believes he received a wonderful education at school No. 12. “I just wish it were more accessible,” she said. 

In some communities across the country, dual-language programs — one of the best means of ensuring equity for underserved groups, especially English learners — have taken an elitist turn. And with the Biden administration eager to help districts expand such programs, questions about who they help — and who gets left out — are becoming more urgent. 

In too many places, admissions processes send a message that dual-language learning is not for everyone (when research shows that actually it is). In Mamaroneck, New York, for instance, the local dual-language school at one point published information asking families to consider whether their child’s native language is developing within “normal” limits when deciding whether to apply. (After this article published, school officials reached out to say that has not been their practice for some time, and the program is open to all interested families.) In Boston, the dual-language programs significantly under-enroll students with disabilities, partly out of a misconception that learning in two languages isn’t appropriate for many students with special education needs.*

Related: A Spanish-English high school proves learning in two languages can boost graduation rates

In other districts, the sin is one of omission rather than commission: failure to market the dual-language programs sufficiently to newcomer families; failure to locate the programs in communities where newcomers actually live; time-consuming admissions processes that can seem labyrinthine and opaque — even if they don’t involve testing recalcitrant preschoolers. 

Most experts recommend reserving at least half of seats in dual-language programs for English learners, who benefit most from programs partly in their native language, and dividing the remainder through random lottery after aggressive outreach to underrepresented communities, including Black families, low-income students and those with disabilities. Yet English learner enrollment shares are shrinking in most dual-language schools in large cities including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to a report released last spring by The Century Foundation and the Children’s Equity Project. 

Meanwhile, the share of white student enrollment was up in several other cities, most noticeably Washington D.C. “Many dual-language programs are at risk of tilting toward language enrichment for English-dominant children, instead of advancing linguistic equity and expanding educational opportunity for ELs,” the report’s authors wrote. Overall, the number of dual-language schools in the country has nearly quadrupled since 2010, and currently numbers more than 3,600. 

“[P]rograms that were ostensibly created to help English learners have turned into an extracurricular for native English speakers.”

Alina Adams, parent

There’s no one solution to this troubling shift — dual-language programs are gentrifying in many cities partly because the cities themselves are gentrifying. In some communities, English learner enrollments are depressed because of the lingering effects of hypocritical policies in the U.S. banning bilingual education for non-English speaking newcomers. Many immigrant families absorbed the “English only” message, and remained hesitant to try dual language even after the policies changed.

But school districts need to be far more vigilant in designing admissions processes and programs that favor the least privileged rather than the most. Otherwise, one of the most proven ways to combat the achievement gap, particularly for English learners, is at risk of playing a perversely opposite role: expanding educational opportunity for the elite.

Dual-language programs have never been monolithic in their demographics or their goals. When they began to appear in significant numbers in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s, some opened with the intent of serving English learners and working-class Latino families. Others hoped to enroll a significant number of white, English-speaking families, and even deter white flight from urban areas. Some wanted to meet both goals. One-way language schools enroll predominantly students from a single language group, while most two-way programs try to enroll a roughly equivalent number of students from English-speaking households and the target language.

Widespread gentrification in the 1990s and early 2000s also brought many white and well-off families back to some urban neighborhoods where dual-language schools were taking root. That coincided with a growing recognition by privileged families of the economic and career benefits of bilingualism, and a particular interest in affluent communities in studying Spanish and Mandarin. Research shows that learning multiple languages early in life has cognitive benefits extending beyond language acquisition and helps children develop stronger social skills, including empathizing better with others. In sum, bilingualism is good for both the brain and the heart.

In New York City, meanwhile, some middle-class and affluent families have come to see dual-language programs as an alternative to gifted and talented education, particularly as the latter has become harder to access, said Alina Adams, a parent and creator of the website NYCSchoolSecrets.com. Over the last decade, “gifted and talented became more competitive every year and suddenly there were many more dual-language programs,” she said. Ambitious parents perceived it as a more rigorous, challenging curriculum. And at some locations, “programs that were ostensibly created to help English learners have turned into an extracurricular for native English speakers,” Adams added.

Related: Students with disabilities often left out of popular ‘dual-language’ programs

Yet recent decades have also brought a growing research base showing that it’s precisely the students least likely to seek out gifted and talented programming who can benefit most from well-designed, supportive dual language programs. “Dual language is the one program we’ve found that truly closes the [achievement] gap” between English learners and the rest of the student population, said Virginia Collier, an emeritus professor of education at George Mason University.  Her research, done over the course of four decades in collaboration with her husband and GMU colleague Wayne Thomas, also shows that dual-language learning can be particularly effective for Black students, low-income students, and those with special needs — three groups that are often underrepresented in the programs. 

There’s a misconception among some educators and parents that bilingual education is inappropriate for students with developmental delays, or those predisposed to fall behind in an English-only curriculum. Yet a 2021 study found that dual-language “education can benefit … even students who often struggle in school because of special education needs.” And a 2018 paper found “no credible evidence that bilingual education adds or creates burden for children. Yet it is “incontrovertible,” according to the paper, that bilingual learning comes with decided advantages.

Spanish dual-language programs, the most common kind in the U.S., can be especially beneficial for students who struggle with reading. That’s because the Spanish language is more phonetic than the English one, with much less variation in the sounds that letters make. But some programs send the message — whether intentional or accidental — that dual language schools aren’t appropriate for children without strong early literacy skills.

“You might hear a parent say, ‘My kid didn’t start talking until age three and a half. They are already struggling — it would be too confusing to be in a dual language program,’” said Emily Bivins, former principal of a dual-language school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina whose company provides professional development for dual-language programs. “We all know the research is counter to that. These are the students who absolutely need to be in our bilingual programs.”

Bivins’ own three children attended dual-language programs, and she said it was most helpful for the child with an attention deficit diagnosis and early reading struggles. “Learning to read in Spanish was much better for her … the rules were clearer,” Bivins said. That’s part of the reason it’s so frustrating when she hears from colleagues at dual-language schools that use reading screeners where, if students “don’t score high enough [they] don’t get in.”  

Widespread interest in dual-language schools, including among the affluent, is a good thing, say proponents of bilingual education. But it becomes problematic if students from underserved groups are neglected or squeezed out of programs. Many communities lack sufficient bilingual educators to meet the desire for dual language. “It’s an iron law of education policymaking: nothing exacerbates educational unfairness like scarcity,” wrote the authors of the report released last spring.

The history of the Amigos School, a dual-language program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shows that even seemingly minor changes to admissions processes can significantly shape how a school is perceived — and who applies — tilting preference toward privilege.

Thirty-five years ago, scores of first- and second-generation immigrant families from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, along with others, came to see Amigos as the place to send their kids. The school was located near subsidized public housing, where many of the families lived. And the school’s founder, Mary Cazabon, engaged in constant grassroots outreach, attending community events and churches, like Cambridge’s bilingual Saint Mary’s church, where she spread word about the school and the benefits of learning in two languages. “We wanted to make sure that we were going to address the needs of the students who were most vulnerable,” Cazabon says. “The priority was on them.” To that end, Spanish-speaking students designated as English learners were given priority in admissions, Cazabon says.

Then the biotech boom hit Cambridge in the 1990s, and a growing number of white and wealthier families began to take an interest in Amigos, drawn by the allure of raising bilingual children. At some point in the 2000s, the school district also made a pivotal switch: Instead of giving priority to English learners, as Cazabon had done, they introduced a system that awarded “Spanish points” to children who could show some knowledge of Spanish when applying to the school’s pre-K or kindergarten. 

Related: Once criticized, ‘Spanglish’ finds a place in the classroom 

The change opened the door to a much broader group of families gaining admissions preference: Families with some Hispanic heritage whose toddlers were exposed to both English and Spanish in the home, but also families with no Hispanic heritage who sent their children to a Spanish-language child care or hired Spanish-speaking nannies with the goal of getting a spot at Amigos. By 2010, the demographics of Amigos had shifted dramatically, and it enrolled fewer low-income students than almost all the schools in the district. Penn Loh, a lecturer at Tufts University, said that in his son’s class at that time, only two of 44 children qualified for free and reduced lunch.

In 2011, one mother filed a complaint with the Cambridge Human Rights Commission, alleging that Amigos no longer served the Hispanic community. And Loh and other parents at Amigos petitioned the school board to change the admissions process, worried that Amigos increasingly catered too much to the children of Cambridge’s elite. “The pool of Spanish-proficient applicants became more unbalanced, with more wealthy, privileged families having children qualify in this pool,” Loh said in a recent email.. “We heard that working class Latinx families, often in Cambridge for generations, were not … getting into the school.”

The school district changed the policy to give “points” to children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

The number of dual-language public schools in the U.S. has quadrupled since 2010, to more than 3,600. 

“We are on our way to being much more balanced,” said Sarah Bartels-Marrero, the school’s current principal. “To me, it’s very important that we have a very diverse group of Spanish-speaking students. That’s a core pillar of our school.” The Spanish points system helps ensure that, she added, although she acknowledged that some English-only parents have also employed it as a workaround. “Certain individuals with privilege and knowledge may look for a loophole,” she said. “That is a thing, but we work really hard to combat and mitigate that.” 

Amigos continues to enroll slightly fewer English learners and about 10 percent fewer low-income students than the district average. Although the current formula would virtually guarantee a low-income Spanish speaking student admission, only one such incoming kindergartener listed Amigos as their first choice in January 2022, according to data published by the district.  However, Bartels-Marrero pointed out that about 60 percent of families identify as Hispanic or Latino, a group that is incredibly diverse. “To me it’s fundamentally important that [Amigos] is an option and opportunity for every kid in Cambridge regardless of race or background,” she said. 

Some states and communities also suffer from a location problem when it comes to dual language. The predominantly white town of Maynard, Massachusetts created a Spanish dual-language school with its English speakers in mind — not its growing population of Portuguese-speaking students, for instance. But the thousands of Spanish-speaking English learner students in the much larger and heavily Hispanic city of Lawrence, located just 35 miles to the north, have for two decades lacked access to even a single dual-language Spanish program (two are slated to open in the next year or so). States and the federal government could, and should, incentivize districts to open programs where there is the most need, and discourage programs targeted mostly at English speakers.

But starting new programs takes time, and there are steps that school districts can take right now to help ensure that English learners, low-income students, Black students, and other underrepresented groups have equal, if not greater access, to dual-language programs. They should engage more in grassroots outreach and marketing of dual learning, tailoring the message as needed to different communities. They should make the admissions process as transparent and accessible as possible, avoiding complicated or burdensome steps that advantage those with flexible schedules and knowledge of school system bureaucracy.

And they should eschew any kind of elitist framing, intentional or not. 

Llerena Searle, the Rochester mother, liked the dual-language program at School No. 12 well enough to enroll her younger child there, too. This time, there was a pandemic going on and the child was tested over Zoom. Her daughter dutifully cooperated with the process. With little doubt of a successful outcome (the school also has an admissions preference for siblings) Searle was more relaxed this time, yet hardly sanguine about the admissions process. She never figured out exactly what district officials were trying to accomplish, but in the end worried that the test mostly measured privilege. 

*Clarification: This article was updated to reflect the fact that the dual language program in Mamaroneck, New York, is now open to all interested families, including those with disabilities.

This story about dual language programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter

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At one elementary school in rural Appalachia, most of the children are white and poor; 90 percent qualify for free or reduced priced lunch. Guess how many of the 800 students are gifted? The answer: three. At least, that’s the determination of a widely-used national intelligence test, on which few students living in poverty score highly.

School administrators wanted to boost the number of gifted students and invited a team of researchers to come up with another way to find them. The researchers asked 16 teachers to rate their students to indicate which ones were far above average in their classrooms, if not the nation, and could benefit from advanced instruction. 

When the research team tallied up the teacher ratings for all 282 students in this 2021 experiment, they were startled. Different methods of creaming off the top 10 percent produced entirely different groups of students who would be identified as gifted with almost no overlap. The top 10 percent in each classroom yielded one group of gifted students. The top 10 percent school-wide yielded another. Only six kids were in both groups. 

“It was inconsistent from classroom to classroom,” said Karen Rambo-Hernandez, an associate professor of education at Texas A&M University, who presented her unpublished findings at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April 2022. “Teachers may be making different judgment calls.” 

Related: Gifted programs provide little to no academic boost, new study says

Despite the training that teachers received on assessing students by answering a list of 37 questions, some teachers were inclined to rate their students more generously than others. The definition of who is gifted appeared to change as you walked across the hallway. 

This experiment is important because many school systems around the country rely on these sorts of teacher checklists, often called  “scales” or “instruments” in the field of education, to identify who is gifted. New momentum is building to lean even more on these teacher ratings as school systems wrestle with how to address the underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students in gifted education. Only 10 percent of the nation’s gifted students were Black, far less than their 15 percent share of the school population in the federal government’s most recent data. The gap is even larger for Hispanic students, who made up only 18 percent of gifted students but over 25 percent of the school population.  

In April 2022, New York City permanently eliminated a gifted test for four-year-olds that resulted in a terribly lopsided allocation of only 16 percent of the gifted and talented seats to Black and Hispanic children, who make up 63 percent of the city’s kindergarten population. The city is replacing the test with teacher evaluations of students, which will involve judgments of traits, such as perseverance and curiosity. 

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

The advantage of teacher ratings is that they can assess important aspects of giftedness that tests cannot measure.  A newer HOPE scale of teacher ratings was expressly designed to improve racial equity in the selection of gifted students, and includes questions on social behaviors, such as whether a student shows compassion for others. 

The teacher rating scale used in the Appalachian experiment was developed by education psychologist Joseph Renzulli. He theorized that a combination of creativity, motivation and ability indicate a high potential for inventiveness and productivity that can be nurtured even if a student doesn’t score high on an intelligence test.

Among the evaluation questions used at the Appalachian school were how often a student demonstrates “imaginative thinking ability,” “the ability to concentrate intently on a topic for a long period of time,” “curiosity about scientific processes,” and “is eager to solve challenging math problems.” A sense of humor is an important indicator of intelligence on Renzulli scales too. 

All of these questions involve subjective judgment calls. To some, five minutes is a long period of concentration. For others, it’s a half hour. Some teachers might see exceptional curiosity when a child asks questions. Others might see questions as normal child behavior.

In the Appalachian school, math and science were emphasized in the questions about each student because the school wants to create a gifted program in computational thinking and computer coding for students. Teachers’ math ratings were more consistent from classroom to classroom, but science marks were much higher in some classrooms than others. Across all 16 classes, teachers tended to think that girls were more creative than boys. 

Rambo-Hernandez, the Texas A&M professor who conducted this experiment, fears that teacher ratings of giftedness may ultimately benefit children from wealthier families with more educated parents who tend to be more verbal. Their imagination, curiosity and tenacity may be more visible to a teacher. Quiet students could be overlooked. 

The field is in a pickle. Intelligence tests disadvantage children in poverty. Efforts to shift the test score for giftedness school by school, giving poorer schools lower cutoffs, haven’t moved the needle as much as many had hoped and don’t improve racial balance in more integrated schools. Even lotteries for children above a certain threshold will end up advantaging demographic groups that do better on the test. Now this experiment shows that teacher ratings of gifted indicators aren’t a clear solution either. 

Related: What research tells us about gifted education

Joni Lakin, an associate professor of educational research at the University of Alabama who has developed tests to identify gifted children, praised the study. “I think we’re too fixated on identification,” Lakin Said. “I’ve lost my faith in fixing gifted’s equity problem by fixing how we identify students.”

Lakin and Rambo-Hernandez both want the field of gifted education to focus more on improving the services offered to gifted children first. They point out that most schools have one sort of gifted program that doesn’t necessarily help many children who are in them. 

“Children are diverse in their characteristics,” said Lakin. “Some are creative. Some are rigid but have stick-to-itiveness. If you put them in the same services, they’re not going to be served well.” 

The Appalachian research team is going back to the drawing board on how to select which students will get the extra instruction in computational thinking next year. They are considering using other assessments that the school is already giving children. It’s a work in progress.

This story about gifted identification was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: How do you find a gifted child? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

After years of discussion, New York City announced in October 2021 that it is overhauling gifted and talented programs, eliminating the testing of thousands of 4-year-olds and the city’s separate education system of schools and classrooms for students who score high on this one test.  I wanted to know what the research evidence says about the model that New York is discarding and how education researchers would remake gifted and talented programs.

In New York City, roughly 2,500 kindergarteners a year are put into separate gifted and talented classrooms. That’s less than 4 percent of the city’s public school population and below the national average where almost 7 percent of students are tapped for gifted and talented programs. Gifted and talented programs are especially popular in the South. Maryland has the highest percentage of gifted students at 16 percent. By contrast, in Massachusetts, where students consistently post the highest test scores in the nation, only one half of one percent of students — 0.5 percent — are labeled “gifted” and given extra services.

Regardless of the number of students, the racial and ethnic composition of the students in gifted and talented programs is often askew. In New York City, the difference between gifted and general education is especially stark. White and Asian parents who have the resources and inclination to prepare their 4-year-olds to excel on standardized tests snag more than three quarters of the coveted seats, although these two groups account for less than a third of all students. Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic students make up more than 65 percent of the public school system but win only 16 percent of the gifted seats.

Nationally, more than 13 percent of all Asian students are enrolled in gifted programs compared with just 4 percent of Black students, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Among whites, 8 percent get tapped for gifted classrooms. Among Hispanic students, it’s 5 percent. That mirrors long-standing achievement differences on standardized tests but researchers have also found that gifted Black students are often overlooked, especially by white teachers.

A 2021 study in Ohio found that high-achieving students who score among the top 20 percent on third-grade tests were much less likely to be identified as gifted and stay high achieving if they are Black or low-income students. As they grew up, these Black and low-income high achievers were less likely to go to college.  

“If we want to improve the racial or socioeconomic diversity of our colleges and beyond, these are the kids who have the best shot at doing so, and yet our schools are letting them down,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank, which published the Ohio study.

Researchers have been studying ways to diversify the ranks of gifted-and-talented programs. Testing all students rather than relying on teacher recommendations and parent initiative has helped districts identify more students of color who qualify. In New York City, the system relied on parent initiative and many Black and Hispanic parents didn’t register their 4-year-olds to take the test. 

Scholars applaud New York City’s plan to stop testing 4-year-olds and wait until later in elementary school to identify students. 

“As a general rule, test scores become more accurate as students age with second- or third-grade being when they tend to stabilize,” said Scott Peters, an assistant professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, who studies gifted education. “It was ridiculous to ID students at age four for any kind of long-term services.”

Even with universal screening, which New York City said it is planning to do in the future, the numbers of Black and Hispanic students selected for gifted-and-talented programs can remain disappointing, researchers have found. That’s true even in school districts, such as Raleigh, North Carolina, that also review student work, not just test scores, when deciding who is gifted. 

One popular idea is to cream the top from each school, creating a threshold for giftedness that varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. While that qualifies many more students of color from low-income schools, they would still be underrepresented in gifted classrooms, researchers have calculated. In a simulation across 10 states, Black students would still account for only 8 to 10 percent of the gifted classroom seats, even though they make up 14 percent of the student population. Hispanics would have 8 to 9 percent of the seats while they make up 13 percent of the population.

Racial achievement gaps are real in our society and it isn’t easy to overcome them simply by changing test-score thresholds or formulas for who gets admitted.

A second, equally important line of research is whether gifted-and-talented programs are worthwhile for the students who are in them. Several studies have found that students aren’t learning any more when they receive gifted services. A 2011 study in the Southwest found that gifted-and-talented programs throughout the district generated no discernible impact on math or reading. The study did detect higher science scores but only for students who attended a particular gifted-and-talented magnet school. Another 2012 study also found that gifted instruction had no effect on achievement. Most recently, a 2021 study published in the journal of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis found that gifted programs across the nation provided little to no academic boost.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that students aren’t achieving more in gifted classrooms when most educators admit they don’t even try to teach advanced material in them. A 2019 survey of teachers in gifted programs found they primarily focused on “enrichment activities” such as creative, fun projects and critical thinking exercises and discussions, keeping children on grade-level material, rather than moving them ahead to advanced academic content. 

The research consensus, by contrast, argues for propelling high-achieving children ahead with accelerated lessons. 

“Acceleration has a larger impact on student learning than many common instructional strategies and yet schools tend to rarely use it,” said Peters of the University of Wisconsin.

While some students display talent in all subjects, it’s far more common to have talent in one domain, such as math but not reading. Scholars say advanced lessons in specific subjects might be more effective and targeted to a student’s needs. 

Some argue for the elimination of gifted-and-talented education altogether. But other researchers, including David Card, a University of California, Berkeley, economist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics in October 2021, have found that bright students of color especially benefit from being surrounded by high-achieving peers. He and his University of California, Santa Cruz co-author Laura Guiliano, are now studying the long-term outcomes for gifted students in Florida.

University of Wisconsin’s Peters also argues for preserving gifted education.  

“Schools love to say that they will just challenge all kids in the regular education classroom,” said Peters. “The problem is this tends to include five to seven grade levels of readiness. The result is teachers have to make hard choices on who gets to learn and there is self-report data that kids who are already at grade level don’t get attention.”

There’s still no consensus on how best to administer higher-level instruction for children who are already several grade levels above their peers. Across the country, gifted services vary widely. Sometimes, students learn in separate classrooms. Sometimes, they are pulled out for separate instruction. And sometimes, a specialist is sent into a classroom to work with advanced students in small groups.

As New York City fleshes out the details of its future gifted-and-talented program, the research evidence isn’t yet clear on which model is most effective.

This story about gifted and talented programs was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: What research tells us about gifted education appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

“I like building stuff,” said 11-year-old Isabella Martinez,* describing the appeal of her science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) after-school program, Girlstart. “In school we don’t really do a lot of projects, mostly reading. I like [after school] because it’s more hands-on. It’s being more creative.”

When the pandemic forced Austin-based Girlstart to go remote, the priority for Tamara Hudgins, its executive director, was finding a way to maintain that hands-on experience for the girls in her program, the majority of whom come from low-income households and likely have few other options for this kind of academic enrichment.

“Learning via the screen is a real challenge, for the adults as well as children,” Hudgins said. Her solution was to create physical kits containing all the supplies the girls would need. Before the start of every program, each girl receives, either by mail or drop-off, an entire semester’s worth of materials that correspond to the girls’ weekly activities, whether they are working on a DNA phenotype project or exploring the principles of aerodynamics.

“We built a rocket launch,” Isabella said. “That was really fun.”

Going remote but delivering physical materials is one solution to a problem that has plagued after-school providers across the country — how to continue providing their enrichment and child care solutions during a pandemic.

“The school districts are focusing on the school walls and the people inside those walls and [after-school providers] are outside that.”

Jodi Grant, Afterschool Alliance

“For low-income kids it’s really hard for programs to run in person,” said Jodi Grant, executive director of Afterschool Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group. “It costs a lot more to run a program now because you have to have all of the Covid interventions, the PPE and you need to have smaller groups of kids.”

In a pre-pandemic Afterschool Alliance survey, almost 60 percent of parents reported that their children were receiving STEM instruction at least two days a week in an after-school program. An overwhelming majority of those surveyed said that after-school programs helped their children to build social skills, gain confidence and make responsible decisions.

“One of our biggest fears in the field is that it’s not just the academics [affected by the pandemic],” Grant said. “Socially isolating kids for what’s going on a year now is a horrific thing to do to them. We’re seeing increased anxiety, increased mental illness, increased depression. It is absolutely clear to us that if kids can be with other kids and caring adults in person, that’s huge.”

When the pandemic hit, providing those supervised social experiences became impossible. After-school programs across the country were hit with the twin catastrophes of plummeting enrollment and the loss of their physical space. Many simply went out of business. Others, with the funding to do so, went online. Still others were left with the overwhelming task of providing emergency child care that they were not set up to offer. And a year into the pandemic, federal financial support has only now begun to arrive in the form of public education dollars set aside for enrichment.

The lack of systemic support at city and state levels has come at a great cost. According to a November survey by Afterschool Alliance, the number of students with access to after-school programs had been cut in half since the start of the pandemic. Of those who do take part in such programs, children from more affluent families are more likely to be enrolled in programs that are operating in-person than are their lower-income peers, whose participation tends to be limited to online models. 

Related: Nonprofits step in to help parents making ‘impossible choices’

For Hudgins, who runs Girlstart, the pandemic meant she and her team had to re-think how to expand access to the sciences for under-represented populations.

“[Pre-pandemic] we had 90-plus after-school programs that met at partner schools. We were reaching 2,750 to 2,900 girls each week,” she said. With schools no longer allowing third-party after-school programs in their buildings due to safety protocols, Hudgins went virtual. She launched Girlstart At Home in April 2020, beginning with weekly Zoom meetings aimed at maintaining relationships with girls already in their program.

Hudgins treated that early endeavor like a pilot program, using it to see what worked and what didn’t. The experience was invaluable for fine-tuning what became her online summer camp and then the model — dubbed Afterschool At Home — now in use during the school semester. But she knew that designing a program was one thing; ensuring access to it was something else.

“One hundred percent of the schools we are reaching are Title I schools,” she said. “Seventy-five percent of the girls we serve qualify for free and reduced-price lunch; 40 percent of them speak another language at home. We’re all about equity.”

The pandemic has highlighted disparities in online access. When Hudgins started the virtual summer camp, she found that many students who had been provided laptops by their school districts had to turn them in when the spring semester ended. She had to provide laptops, tablets and even mobile hotspots to a number of her kids just so they could participate. Luckily, she had the funding to make this possible, with government contributions coming from sources like NASA in addition to substantial support from philanthropic foundations like the Overdeck Family Foundation. (The Overdeck Foundation is one of many supporters of The Hechinger Report.)

Hudgins determined that equity also meant stocking the at-home kits with household items that more affluent families take for granted. “We’re providing general office supplies because we don’t want to make any assumptions about what a family has at home, whether it’s a pencil sharpener or LED lights,” Hudgins said in late January. “To a certain degree, we’re now in the fulfillment business. We have 2,000 boxes going out this week.”

Related: Just 3% of scientists and engineers are Black or Latina women. Here’s what teachers are doing about it

More general after-school child care providers faced a challenge that was entirely different from Hudgins’. Many, especially those with their own facilities, encountered a sudden shift to full-day child care — a difficult transition, even for larger organizations.

“We have kids that have attention disorders or severe family situations that we only used to see for five hours and now we’re caring for them for 12 hours a day,” said Sarah Bolyard, president and CEO of the YMCA of Kanawha Valley in West Virginia.

“We have kids that have attention disorders or severe family situations that we only used to see for five hours and now we’re caring for them for 12 hours a day.”

Sarah Bolyard, YMCA of Kanawha Valley

Closed during the state-mandated shutdown of non-essential services, the YMCA of Kanawha Valley had to become licensed as an emergency child care facility to reopen, adhering to regulations including the minimum number of square feet of usable space per child and how long children must spend washing their hands. Once students were allowed back into the building, the hardest part was managing each child’s remote learning.

“Navigating virtual learning has been very challenging,” Bolyard said. “The kids are all on different [school] schedules. If you’ve got kids who are supposed to be on a classroom conference at 9 a.m., you cannot have them mixed with kids who don’t have one until 10.” Bolyard said that to keep track of it all, she and her staff have become masters of Excel spreadsheets.

Like many after-school providers, Bolyard has seen the pandemic’s dramatic effect on her program’s budget. Even as they’ve offered more hours of care, fewer families have been able to afford their services.

“We went from a $5 million-a-year budget down to less than $3 million,” she said. The only thing allowing them to stay afloat, she said, is a statewide reimbursement program that covers child care expenses for frontline workers. Without this program, which is only renewed on a month-to-month basis, “we could lose a majority of our kids,” she said.

For a majority of single-site, after-school providers, staying open was simply not a feasible option.

When Carmelo Piazza, aka Carmelo the Science Fellow, closed his 20-year-old after-school science program in Brooklyn, New York, last April the decision was as obvious as it was painful.  

“We shut down, per state guidance, right before our spring session was going to start,” he said. “At that point no families had even paid yet.” While enrollment income plummeted to zero, Piazza still had to cover rent for his storefront space; a sum he had watched increase from $3,000 a month two decades ago to $9,000 in 2020. The city’s public schools had already shifted to virtual learning, which dampened interest in taking his program online.

“Being on the computer with remote learning all day and then doing it for after-school would mean that kids aged 6 and 7 would have to be on a computer almost 10 hours a day,” he said. “None of our parents were asking for a virtual model.” 

Related: After mass closures, too little support, post-pandemic child care options will be scarce

For Sherri Hellman, who for the past 25 years has run Creative Arts Studio, an after-school dance program near downtown Brooklyn, the lifeline to remaining open came from her landlord, who agreed to reduce the rent on her dance studio.

“That was a lifesaver,” she emphasized. “If it wasn’t for that I would have lost my whole business.” Still, it’s been a struggle to stay afloat. “We used to have 300 families a week and now it’s down to 40.”

Despite the risks, she decided to restart in-person classes once state restrictions allowed her to reopen.

“Dance and movement is all about connecting; being able to see each other, being able to see the shapes and being able to deal with energy,” she said. “You can’t really feel those things online the way you can when the children are next to you.”

Located in a neighborhood that began gentrifying more than a decade ago, Hellman has long struggled to maintain as much diversity in her classes as she would like. And the pandemic has only exacerbated the gap between families who have access to her classes and those that don’t.

“It’s become a luxury to do in-person after school at the moment for families,” she said. “Affluent people can afford it.”

“To a certain degree, we’re now in the fulfillment business. We have 2,000 boxes going out this week.”

Tana Hudgins, Girlstart

Programs already aimed at families who paid out-of-pocket didn’t have to wait around for slow-to-come public dollars to cover the added costs of pandemic operations; well-to-do families with children were less likely to have high-risk older relatives at home; and those with white collar jobs were more likely to keep both the jobs and the disposable income needed to cover after-school programs.

Kisha Edwards-Gandsy, co-founder of the World Explorers after-school program, found the disparities also meant many families able to afford her fees left town. Edwards-Gandsy had been following the Covid outbreak back when the virus was limited to Asia. She began implementing safety protocols in her Brooklyn center, which also houses a preschool, as early as January 2020.

“When a lot of people were not taking it seriously, we had basically sourced information from Taiwan,” she said. “We started taking temperature checks, keeping classrooms separate, and not allowing parents inside our building.”

None of that seemed to matter when the city closed in-person after-school programs in March. Her center wouldn’t open its doors again until the end of June. And by then, large numbers of the middle- and upper-class families she served had fled the city.

“Enrollment was like half of what it was before,” she said. “There was a mass pilgrimage out of Brooklyn. So many families left for New Jersey and upstate New York.”

When the shutdown was announced, Edwards-Gandsy made the difficult decision not to refund tuition, but to offer a credit that families could redeem, with no expiration date. This allowed her to retain most of her Brooklyn staff and pivot to a virtual preschool model. But her true lifeline came from an unexpected place: Greenville, South Carolina. A former parent, with ties to a children’s museum in Greenville, suggested Edwards-Gandsy move south and use the museum space for in-person programming. She did.  

By July, Edwards-Gandsy had negotiated a revenue-sharing arrangement with the museum and relocated to Greenville while her business partner stayed to manage their Brooklyn program. Edwards-Gandsy hired local staff in Greenville and opened the Museum School with a summer camp offering arts, math and science activities inside the museum.

When Greenville’s schools reopened in August on a hybrid schedule of both in-person and remote learning, Edwards-Gandsy had to pivot once again, offering not just after-school services, but a full-day program where children could conduct their remote schooling in a safe environment under adult supervision. That was as an attractive proposition for many Greenville families.

“[Museum School] was a game changer,” said Adrienne Burris, who enrolled her 6-year-old son, Isaiah, in the fall of 2020. “My son has some special behavioral needs. Just being me and him alone together in the house for so many months when school was all-remote, was a real struggle.”

Burris said she felt like she couldn’t meet all of her son’s needs herself and that they both needed some space. “Being able to send him somewhere that was safe and he was excited to go to, giving us that distance, made it so that when we were together at home, we got along so much better.”

Grant, from the Afterschool Alliance, sees major obstacles to getting where she’d like the country to be in providing adequate and equitable after-school access. She said it’s frustrating that the concerns of after-school and child care providers are not being heard in the same way as other businesses. And she would like to see coordination with government institutions and businesses to provide opportunities for after-school providers in spaces like libraries, parks, community centers or even empty office buildings. But the biggest hurdle, she said, is that the pandemic has meant that school districts are preoccupied with adapting their own systems to serve unprecedented needs.

“The school districts are focusing on the school walls and the people inside those walls and [after-school providers] are outside that,” she said. “I’m hopeful that we can break that down and really start thinking about our whole community as an area of learning.”

This story about after-school programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

*Correction: This story has been updated to correct Isabel Martinez’s last name.

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Gifted education is often a flash point in school desegregation debates; in large cities, these programs often operate as an essentially separate school system, dominated by white and Asian children. Though gifted programs touch only 3.3 million school children, about 7 percent of the U.S. student population, it’s disturbing that Black and Hispanic children are rarely chosen for them. 

Some progressives have proposed eliminating gifted programs altogether. Others are seeking ways to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students. Only 4 percent of Black children and 5 percent of Hispanic children are in gifted programs compared with 8 percent of white and 13 percent of Asian children, according to the most recent federal figures.

Against this political backdrop, a new study raises big questions about whether gifted education benefits the kids who are lucky enough to be in it. Researchers analyzed the records of about 1,300 students, drawn from a nationally representative sample of children across the country, who started kindergarten in 2010 and participated in a gifted program for at least one year during their elementary school years through fifth grade. 

In school systems that offer gifted programs, children generally begin their schooling in a regular kindergarten classroom with children of mixed abilities. Some are labeled as gifted during that first kindergarten year. Others get assigned as late as fifth grade. Researchers compared student performance before and after participating in a gifted program.

Students’ reading scores were only slightly higher after receiving gifted instruction, moving from 78th to 80th percentile in reading on a national yardstick. The boost to math achievement from gifted instruction was much smaller, about a third of that size. No improvements were detected in how engaged or motivated students were in school after joining a gifted program. For example, teachers reported no difference in how hard students worked, how much they participated in discussions or how much they paid attention and listened in class.

Black students didn’t experience even the small reading gains that their white peers did in gifted programs, showing zero difference after receiving gifted services, on average. Similarly, low-income students of all races tended not to reap the academic gains that their wealthier peers did. Asian children, by contrast, posted larger gains in math after joining a gifted program.

“What was most concerning to me was that even this small benefit wasn’t equally distributed across all students subgroups,” said Christopher Redding, an assistant professor at the University of Florida and one of the study’s co-authors. “It seems like Black students benefit less than white students and that high income students benefit the most.”

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

The study, “Do Students in Gifted Programs Perform Better? Linking Gifted Program Participants to Achievement and Nonachievement Outcomes,” is slated to be published in May 2021 in the journal of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Redding and his co-author, Jason A. Grissom at Vanderbilt University, presented their study in April 2021 at a session of the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. 

This federal data was only recently made available to researchers and it’s the first time that we’re getting a comprehensive national picture of how well kids are doing in gifted programs from kindergarten through fifth grade. Previous research, most of it limited to specific states and school districts, has been mixed. Some studies have shown sluggish learning growth for gifted students. However, high achieving students tend to improve less than average or below average students whether they’re in gifted or regular classrooms. 

A well-designed 2011 study of one city found no evidence that students in the gifted program outperformed those just below the cutoff for giftedness by the time they reached seventh grade. It also found that high achieving students who won a seat in a lottery to attend a popular magnet school did better in science but not in math or English compared to similar students who lost the lottery. 

A 2016 study of a school district in Florida found no benefit for white students but large benefits for Black and Hispanic students who were assigned to separate gifted classrooms. This national study found the opposite, that white students reaped benefits from gifted programs that children of color did not. The Florida study wasn’t wrong but this national study shows that different schools administer gifted services differently and can get different results.

What to make of these small-to-nil benefits across the nation depends on your perspective. Advocates of gifted education might see promise in the fact that high achieving students saw any gains at all from gifted programs. In many schools children might receive only a few hours a week of extra instruction. Students are pulled out of their regular classroom or a teacher is sent into their classroom to work with advanced students in small groups. One might rightly wonder if “gifted” students would see a larger boost if they received more hours of advanced instruction. 

Related: Brainy black and Hispanic students might benefit most from ‘honors’ classrooms

Unfortunately, the federal data that the researchers relied upon didn’t document the type of gifted instruction or how many hours each student received. So the researchers weren’t able to see if higher dosage — or separate full-day classrooms for gifted students — generated better learning outcomes for high achievers.

Virginia Roach, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which operates programs for high achieving students, commended the study in an email.  She said the disappointing results are a sign that teachers need better training to teach gifted students differently. She added that pressures to increase the number of students who pass annual state tests discourage teachers from focusing on advanced students and giving them an “optimal” challenge. 

A startling finding from the study is that most students in gifted programs are only slightly above average in achievement, far from anyone’s idea of a genius. The average “gifted” student across the nation ranked between the 75th and 80th percentiles in math and reading, according to the national yardstick tests used by the researchers. The process for deciding which students get assigned to gifted programs varies a lot by state and school district but clearly the identification process is broken if it’s not targeting students who are several grade levels ahead of their peers and in need of more challenging material. 

Perhaps it should be no surprise that students aren’t achieving more in gifted classrooms when most educators admit they don’t even try to teach advanced material in them. A 2019 survey of teachers in gifted programs found they primarily focused on “enrichment activities,” such as creative, fun projects and critical thinking exercises and discussions, keeping children on grade-level material, rather than moving them ahead to advanced academic content. 

The research consensus, by contrast, argues for propelling high achieving children ahead. “This acceleration question is a really important one,” said Redding, arguing that researchers need to re-examine ideas for exceptionally advanced kids, from starting kindergarten early and skipping a grade to giving advanced instruction in a particular subject. “We need to learn whether other approaches would be more beneficial for supporting gifted students versus some sort of a pullout or enrichment model,” said Redding.

It’s possible that standardized achievement tests and teacher surveys on student engagement are unable to measure the benefits of a gifted education. Perhaps placement in a gifted program raises a child’s self-esteem and confidence and the results don’t emerge until decades later in the form of PhDs, poems and patents. 

But based on the measures we have now and the current state of affairs of these programs, it appears that gifted education isn’t much of a gift to students.

This story about gifted programs was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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ROCKVILLE CENTRE, N.Y. — It was 7:58 a.m., and Bruce Hecker’s 12th grade English class at South Side High School had the focused attention of a college seminar, with little chitchat or sluggishness despite the early hour. Students discussed the relevance of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” to the McCarthy hearings and to  current competing fears of terrorism and technological surveillance.

The conversation that morning in December 2019 followed the lead of the seven or eight most vocal students. Occasionally, Hecker interrupted to encourage participation from a handful of students who receive support services to keep up with the class’s rigorous curriculum.

The students Hecker called on hesitated, cleared their throats and said “um.” But when they did speak, their comments were clear and cogent.

“If you’re a kid and you break a vase,” one student reflected on the theme of scapegoating in Miller’s play, “you don’t get these concepts. But your first thought is still to blame the dog.” His peers laughed in appreciation.

More than 30 years ago, Rockville Centre began a gradual but determined effort to do away with gifted classes in its elementary schools as well as many of the tracked classes at the middle and high schools. The goal wasn’t to eliminate all tracking, South Side Principal John Murphy said. Upperclassmen can still choose to take more challenging math, science and foreign language classes. It was, instead, to avoid creating a caste system by assigning students to remedial, average or advanced classes before they’d had a chance to develop their academic potential.

Those assignments often became self-fulfilling prophecies even though they didn’t always accurately reflect students’ abilities. This can have a long-term impact; the rigor of high school courses has been found to be the No. 1 predictor of college success. In Rockville Centre, tracked classes also led to racial and economic segregation in a high school where a fifth of the nearly 1,100 students are Black or Latino and the rest of the student body is nearly entirely white.

Early on, administrators found that many Black and Latino students and students from low-income families avoided the most challenging classes even after being given the option to enroll in them. So now, some of South Side’s college-level classes, like Hecker’s 12th grade English, are not only open to all, but also required.

Around the country, gifted and talented programs have come under fire for exacerbating school systems’ already stark racial and economic segregation. In 2019 in New York City, a group commissioned by Mayor Bill de Blasio, The School Diversity Advisory Group, recommended doing away with all gifted and talented programs, while that same year Seattle attempted unsuccessfully  to eliminate its programs as a way to alleviate school segregation. Screens used to select students for high performing schools and advanced classes based on grades and test scores also face mounting criticism for exacerbating segregation. Last winter, a district near Philadelphia agreed to reduce its number of tracked classes at the middle and high school levels and increase access to Advanced Placement courses in response to a discrimination lawsuit brought by parents..

But some educators, parents and students worry about what might replace screened classes and accelerated programs. Is it possible, they wonder, to teach all students at all levels together in one class? And, if it is, will teachers receive the support they need to succeed?

“I have gone to a lot of conferences about educational diversity that were held during the weekday during the school year,” said Amy Stuart Wells, professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a proponent of eliminating gifted programs. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.) “There were no teachers at these conferences. There was a lot of talk about moving kids around. There were a lot of recommendations thrown out there. But when it came to how they’d really work, the attitude was, ‘Let’s let the teachers worry about it.’ ”

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

Even when school systems do have a plan for how to bring students at different academic levels together while supporting and challenging each student, those plans don’t necessarily succeed at undoing long-standing racial and economic segregation.

In Washington, D.C., new magnet schools based on the University of Connecticut’s Schoolwide Enrichment Model, which aims to provide special programming for students at all performance levels, have been met with enthusiasm, but so far have produced uneven outcomes in terms of improved school test scores, and have had little impact on school diversity. And while educators at South Side have good reason to point to their school’s academic success, students and parents say that pushing students so hard to excel takes an emotional toll, and have demanded less rigor. Some have even asked for a return to more tracking.

As school systems around the country work to address entrenched educational inequities, these experiments provide insights into the benefits and challenges of doing away with tracked classes and gifted programs.

It was 1989, and as a new Spanish teacher in Lawrence, New York, Carol Burris was assigned an eighth grade class called Language for Travelers. Its students weren’t fooled by the elegant name. All had taken a foreign language the previous year and failed, and they knew that ending up in Burris’ class meant expectations had been lowered. “There was a real culture that ‘We hate school and we hate language,’” Burris said. Out of 29 students, 27 were boys. Most were Black and Latino kids living in poverty.

The experience stayed with Burris, and when she became South Side’s principal in 2000, she found like-minded educators worried about the damage tracking could cause and who, over the past decade, had started to dismantle it.

Rockville’s administrators knew that removing academic tracks would be fraught. So, the district started by replacing separate gifted classes in elementary school with individualized, project-based “talent” classes for all students.

Those classes proved popular. Once parents bought into the idea that there didn’t have to be winners and losers, it was easier to move academic integration into higher grade levels.

The district also planned how to help students with weaker skills manage accelerated classes. Before Rockville Centre detracked math in the ninth and 10th grades, for example, it added support math classes in middle school so that all students graduated eighth grade having completed algebra.

At each step, the district used outcome data to guide its reforms and convince the community that  the efforts were working and, in particular, that the strongest students weren’t being shortchanged.

Today, the school requires subject teachers in each grade to teach the same content at the same time. Such coordination facilitates support classes that meet every other day during the school day, with one teacher for every six or seven students. Students in these classes are pre-taught material, making them better prepared to understand material in their mainstream classes.

Taking such a systematic approach to shrinking the achievement gap may sound obvious. But around the country, efforts to broaden access to accelerated classes and, in some districts, to mandate Advanced Placement classes for all students have been implemented without ensuring that students have the background material necessary to succeed.

Related: Up to 3.6 million students should be labeled gifted, but aren’t

South Side also turned to the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma, a Swiss-based program that offers a demanding high school degree. (Forty-three percent of South Side students earn a full IB diploma, according to the principal.) The model was chosen as South Side’s main honors program in the mid-1990s not only for its rigor, but also for its flexibility. Compared to Advanced Placement classes, which require students to master a large and specific body of factual knowledge, the IB program focuses on depth of analysis.

So, for example, South Side replaced Dickens’ ”A Tale of Two Cities” with James Joyce’s ”Dubliners,“ both of which provide students the opportunity to analyze a complex and canonical work of English literature. Russ Reid, who taught English at South Side for more than 40 years, explained: “If you take ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ out of the curriculum, there are those that go, ‘Oh, my God, you’re not teaching Dickens.’ But a reluctant learner sees that 450-page novel and says, ‘The hell with it.’”

“It’s hard to argue that ‘Dubliners’ is an easy read,” Reid added. But each story is relatively short. “If students read 12 stories and blow off the other three, they’re not going to be lost. I don’t think we’re teaching to the middle when we’re talking about ‘The Dead.’ But we have made it more manageable.”

As academic integration advanced, students’ test scores improved —  not just for weaker students, but also for students already achieving at a high level.

Nothing was simple about the experiment undertaken at Rockville Centre, but having only one high school with a relatively low-needs population did make it easier. Just 15 percent of the roughly 1,000 students at the school receive free or reduced-price lunch, a federal marker of poverty.

By contrast, in Washington, D.C., 77 percent of public school students are economically disadvantaged. Many students from higher-income families go to private schools or move to the suburbs to avoid attending schools where a large proportion of students perform below grade level.

This trend intensified when, in 2005, D.C. Public Schools closed its gifted and talented programs. So, in 2012, the district created an office of advanced and enriched instruction to keep more middle-class families in the system and simultaneously serve the learning needs of its high-performing, low-income students. Like Rockville Centre, the goal was to provide enrichment without exacerbating racial and economic inequity or further segregating an already segregated school system.

To achieve that tricky balance, D.C. turned to the Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM), used in  more than 4,000 schools nationwide, and internationally. Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis, professors at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, created their model to help diversify accelerated classes and gifted programs by encouraging school systems to broaden their concept of giftedness and ferret out student potential beyond what’s measured by standardized  tests. The method assesses qualities such as motivation, curiosity, empathy, creativity and self-regulation, and exposes young students to a wide range of enriching experiences to discover what excites them.

Renzulli and Reis are proponents of diversifying gifted programs, not eliminating them. In fact, they believe it’s unreasonable to expect one teacher to teach students at all levels effectively together. “A lot of lower-achieving kids feel even worse about themselves when they’re forced to be in classrooms where the content is consistently above their level,” while the learning needs of higher performing students are regularly ignored, Reis said.

Despite this, Renzulli and Reis do encourage the use of their model in systems like D.C.’s that don’t offer gifted programs because they believe that discovering and deepening students’ individual passions — a mainstay of gifted education — is useful for all students.

To accomplish this in mainstream schools, their model calls for flexible small group instruction within classes — based at times on ability, at times on interest — as well as a focus on project-based learning so students can pursue their passions. They also encourage all SEM schools to have a full-time talent specialist so that the burden of differentiating instruction doesn’t fall entirely on the classroom teacher.

Ida B. Wells Middle School, D.C.’s newest SEM school, opened just last year. Although roughly two-thirds of its students entered the school performing below grade level in math and three-quarters below grade level in English, according to the city, the school said it was able to recruit a small group of high-achieving Black and Latino students, including a handful from private schools and gifted programs in neighboring states. They came for the enrichment, as well as for the school’s low teacher-student ratio, made possible by having all classes inclusive of students in special education, a quarter of the school’s population, and English language learners. The model means that there’s funding for every class to have two teachers, and for English and math classes to have three, with abundant opportunity for small group instruction.

Related: Twice exceptional, doubly disadvantaged? How schools struggle to serve gifted students with disabilities

In addition, Ida B. Wells’ talent specialist Nila Austin provides pullout classes for both struggling and accelerated students, as well as enrichment classes that all students can choose to attend.

A speech elective that Austin offers called Soap Box is open to all. In class last December, each student performed a speech on a topic of personal importance. One sixth grader decried colorism, explaining how darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields while lighter-skinned slaves worked indoors, and described “bizarre tests” later used to determine “how Black” a person was, like the pencil test in South Africa, which judged the kinkiness of people’s hair.

Students in need of extra academic support also receive this kind of personally meaningful enrichment. Before Ida B. Wells’ sixth grade English class began reading Mildred Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” Austin assigned her small group of struggling readers Kondwani Fidel’s “Hummingbirds in the Trenches,” which explores similar themes of race, class and trauma, but is more accessible in language and setting. They also studied the psychology of trauma, wrote their own trauma narratives and had the opportunity to meet  Fidel. When asked if students in her support class feel stigmatized, Austin said, “Students ask me all the time how they can get into that class.”

And yet, eight years in, it’s not clear how much impact D.C.’s SEM program has had on the kinds of outcomes most commonly used to measure academic success.

Students at most SEM schools in D.C. are more likely to perform below grade level than at or above it. A couple of SEM schools have seen striking improvement in their standardized test scores in just a few years, even though most students haven’t reached grade level, but other SEM schools have seen minimal or no improvement. (Ida B. Wells is too new to provide such data.)

The model has also failed to create greater racial or economic diversity in D.C.’s schools. At more than half of D.C.’s 11 SEM schools, nearly all of the students are economically disadvantaged.

Ida B. Wells’ Principal Megan Vroman acknowledges that there are benefits to racial and economic integration, but she said she also sees advantages when students attend schools like hers that aren’t integrated and instead “reaffirm their identity.”

But the schools’ overall low academic performance concerns some in the field. “All education should be enriching. But in some cases, all students getting enrichment may mean that no students are really getting opportunities to take on more advanced work,” said Adam Tyner, associate director of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who co-authored a report on ways to increase the representation of Black and Latino students in gifted programs.

Renzulli and Reis themselves have noted that teachers don’t always implement SEM in ways that serve the learning needs of their highest-performing students. Much of the research done on SEM, which has been in schools for decades, has shown positive results, including increased math and literacy skills, increased creative output from students and even long-term impact on college and career choices. But Renzulli and Reis conducted many of the studies, while others were written by administrators who’d had success with the program.

Still, Renzulli and Reis are impatient with the idea that all progress can be measured in a few years by standardized tests. “Creative productivity, which is the ultimate goal of the model, isn’t always something you can measure in achievement scores one or two years in. Students first have to develop interests. They have to develop habits of mind over time,” Reis said.

Matthew Reif, director of extended learning and academic recovery for D.C. Public Schools, believes SEM has helped D.C. create a more engaging and challenging learning experience, even if that’s not yet captured in test scores. The most important SEM outcome to date, he said, is an ever-growing number of D.C. educators who want to bring SEM to their schools.

The results in Rockville Centre are more concrete. In 2019, 98 percent of South Side students graduated with a New York State Regents diploma, while 89 percent of all students and 67 percent of economically disadvantaged students earned a New York State Regents with Advanced Designation. Statewide, a third of the students received an advanced designation diploma.

But 10 students interviewed in a group last year at South Side High School also said that the school is a competitive pressure cooker and that they feel pushed to take advanced classes. A white student whose parents both have advanced degrees said she feels stressed, as did a Black student who is on track to be one of the first in his family to attend college.

When the experiment at Rockville Centre started in the late 1980s, Principal Murphy said, it was families of the highest-performing students who were skeptical. Today, resistance comes from parents who believe the academic pressure is not good for their children. In 2018, parents demanded that the school lower its graduation requirements. In response, though every student must still take the IB English and history classes in 11th and 12th grades, this year the school removed the requirement that they sit for the IB exams. Students can also exempt themselves from some of the longer writing assignments that the IB requires.

Hecker, the English teacher, said he sees that requiring high-level classes does have its costs. But he believes the cost of segregating students based on academic performance is far greater.

“I think it’s better for struggling students to be in my classroom and not in some other room wondering what’s going on in those classes where the real learning is happening,” he said. “I think that is completely demoralizing.”

This story about SEM schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Many factors boost a child’s chance of success in school — like having wealthy parents who can afford tutors. But recent research has raised another possibility — one that is discomforting to many — the idea that scientists might someday be able to spot the genetic markers associated with academic performance.

To do this, researchers are turning to a relatively new genetic approach called the polygenic score, which assesses a person’s likelihood for a specific future based on a combination of genetic variables. It’s a research technique that some scientists are using to assess obesity or cancer risk, for instance. Now, researchers are exploring this approach in non-medical contexts, like academic or athletic success.

The scientists studying genetic markers in education are trying to untangle how nature and nurture together explain school performance. In principle, genetic screening might enable teachers to tailor their approach to groups of students. Educators might then more effectively instruct kids together in one classroom, rather than separating students into accelerated and low-level courses, which can deprive Black and brown children and children from low-income families of academic opportunities.

But some researchers fear this gene screening work could be misapplied and used to further racist or eugenic thinking, even though race is a social, not a genetic, classification.  There’s an ugly history of proponents of eugenics, who believe in reshaping humanity by breeding “superior traits” and removing “inferior traits,” justifying their thinking with genetics. And there are debunked racist theories that have endeavored to falsely connect race and intelligence.

Related: College graduation may be partly determined by your genes, genome study of siblings finds

For now, the science is almost entirely based on data collected from people with European ancestry, which limits the conclusions that can be drawn from it, so researchers feel that they’ve at least temporarily sidestepped the issue.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worried about it — and about the other ways this research could exacerbate inequities in education. Screening is expensive, for instance, increasing the odds that privileged students will qualify for extra enrichment or support before their less privileged peers.

Indeed, the idea of predicting students’ academic performance based on their genes comes with such a raft of ethical questions and unknowns that scientists in the field are urging caution. “Polygenic scores are a potentially useful new scientific tool. At the same time, there are clear reasons to be concerned,” Stanford University social scientist Ben Domingue said. “We’re going to have the capacity, with a vial of spit, to be able to predict all these different things.”

Scientists and ethicists are also concerned about commercializing this work while the research is still evolving. Already, several companies sell reports to consumers that incorporate polygenic scores for health or various physical characteristics — despite the fact that the scores are not perfect forecasters of a person’s future.

Researchers in the field want to see more critical discussion of how their work could be applied in educational settings.“If we don’t pay attention now, systems will be created, constructed around us, responding to our genetic difference,” said Sophie von Stumm, a psychologist at the University of York, in the United Kingdom, who studies genetics and education. “It’s high time to have this discussion. Honestly, we’re late to the party.”

Related: College graduation may be partly determined by your genes, genome study of siblings finds

The polygenic score that could help predict academic performance aims to assess genetic markers related to educational attainment. In other words, it combines hundreds of common genetic variants that are linked to the number of years a person stays in school. In 2016, this score could explain about 5 percent of the variation in the level of education completed.

In 2018, researchers studied data from more than a million people across countries and found they could strengthen the polygenic score to explain 11 percent of the variation in educational attainment. That value puts the score on par with factors like a mother’s level of education attainment, which explains 15 percent of variation, and household income, which explains about 7 percent.

“There are genes that affect educational attainment — that is for certain now,” said Aysu Okbay, an economist at Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands who contributed to the 2016 and 2018 studies.

The score’s ability to explain variation in years of schooling could improve with more data. Rough estimates indicate about 80 percent of the variation in educational attainment comes from environmental factors — the rest is genetic. With enough data, some scientists believe, the polygenic score could get close to explaining 20 percent of the difference in people’s level of education.

If so, the score would be an incredibly powerful single factor for making predictions about an individual’s academic future — even though the combined environmental variables still eclipse the role of genes. “It’s really not a puny predictor at this point,” Domingue said.

“Polygenic scores are a potentially useful new scientific tool. At the same time, there are clear reasons to be concerned”

Ben Domingue, Stanford University

In February, Domingue and his colleagues found that the polygenic score could help identify which groups of high schoolers had been placed into advanced math classes. The score could also point to students most likely to stick with advanced math courses across all four years of high school.

But polygenic scores also come laced with caveats. So many, in fact, that Okbay and her colleagues published a massive list of public FAQs — including how the study was designed and whether the research could lead to stigmatization of people with certain genes — to help readers interpret their research.

Paige Harden, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin — and a co-author on the math study — likens the polygenic score to a credit score. Neither the polygenic nor the credit score can really forecast what will happen to a particular person. Instead, they provide a rough sense of how people with that score will, on average, fare. The score is better at gauging a group’s overall performance than an individual’s performance.

Harden and others acknowledge that it’s still a mystery how the genetic variants behind the score contribute to how far a person gets in school. “We don’t know what the mechanisms are,” Okbay said. “We don’t know whether it’s causal or not.”

Some research suggests the genes associated with education are related to the nervous system and the brain, raising the possibility that they’re connected to cognitive functions — things like strong memory, creativity and perseverance — that serve people well in school.

But the relationship could be nuanced. Domingue pointed out that there could be genetic factors that make a person more likely to be a supportive parent, which, in turn, would correlate to better school performance in their children. Because the child and parent share DNA, the polygenic score could capture gene variants in the child that explain educational performance but actually reflect the parent’s behavior.

There is also an enormous shortcoming in the datasets used for this research: Virtually all are built with DNA from people of European ancestry. Although there are biobanks in the works in Asia and Africa that could address this omission, for the time being, the scores are essentially only applicable to people of European descent. “You’re basically developing a tool that’s only useful for one segment of the population,” Harden said.

“If we don’t pay attention now, systems will be created, constructed around us, responding to our genetic difference. It’s high time to have this discussion. Honestly, we’re late to the party.”

Sophie von Stumm, a psychologist at the University of York in northern England

Given all of these limitations, most scientists believe it would be unlikely, and inappropriate, for educators to use polygenic scores to determine student placement in specific classes or schools. “Will someone be mad enough to track or stream on the basis of genetic predispositions?” von Stumm said. “Fortunately, I think we’re far from that.”

There could be other ways of using this genetic information. Once genetic variants are better understood and enough data is in hand, for example, it might be possible to identify children with a predisposition to learning disabilities and intervene early. In May, von Stumm and her colleagues published a paper exploring whether a toddler’s polygenic score for educational attainment could identify children at risk for language or literacy delays later in life. The conclusion: We’re not there yet.

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

Critics caution that there is too much to establish ethically and scientifically before we confront those scenarios. “Someday we’ll understand the genetic contribution to educational success or to life success but it will be our grandchildren who understand it. It won’t be us,” bioethicist Arthur Caplan at NYU Langone Health, said.

And even if we understood this information, it’s not clear how to best use the scores in schools. Last year, Stanford’s Domingue and two colleagues wrote about a hypothetical case study: What happens when a parent tries to use genetic data, like a polygenic score, to make the case that their child deserves additional classroom support?

“I don’t know that I have good answers to that,” he said. But the scenario hints at another serious concern: inequality. Not everyone will be able to afford genetic screening, even when there are meaningful scores for people across ancestries.

Still, researchers are already using the polygenic score to explore long-standing conundrums like why children with very similar advantages follow different trajectories in life.

Using data from more than a million people across countries, researchers found the polygenic score could explain 11 percent of the variation in educational attainment. That value puts the score on par with factors like a mother’s level of education, which explains 15 percent of variation, and household income, which only explains about 7 percent.

“We are all subject to a big genetic lottery that corresponds to an environmental lottery,” von Stumm said. She added that research into the links between genetics and academic attainment could push people to examine “fairness” in meritocratic societies, given that some people may carry genetic strengths that give them a slight but significant academic advantage, that, in turn, improves other aspects of their lives.

Measuring a person’s genetic advantage (or disadvantage) also allows scientists to control for it in their studies. That is, they can better study factors that society can change, such as  spending on special programs, compulsory education and school interventions, without having their results biased by a sample of students who are genetically advantaged or disadvantaged.

And researchers can use the polygenic score to assess whether a school has failed students with high potential — or if an intervention helped retain children who were otherwise likely to drop out. In the math paper published in February, Domingue, Harden, and their colleagues found that some schools better supported high school students with low polygenic scores than others, ensuring those kids stayed in school.

Harden hopes to see the science applied in ways that emphasize social justice and provide resources to programs that need them: “That’s how I think we should be using the polygenic scores — if we use them at all.”

This story about the polygenic score was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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The Seattle School Board is taking steps to dismantle a gifted and talented program at one of its middle schools to make room for a more racially inclusive curriculum. Gifted and talented, or G&T, programs are directed at children whose outstanding abilities and potential for accomplishment will not otherwise be challenged and developed.

But, too often, gifted and talented programs create separate tracks that end up creating segregated systems within schools. For instance, Seattle Public Schools began offering advanced courses in the 1980s through its “Individual Progress Program” to prevent white families from leaving the district. According to school district documents, the separate track of courses, which was limited to “extremely gifted” (read white) students, appealed to white families. These courses evolved in the 2000s into what’s known now as the “highly capable cohort” program (HCC).

However, the racial composition of the highly capable cohort looks like the original conception. Black students comprise about 15 percent of the district’s overall enrollment but represent only about 1.6 percent of students in the highly capable cohort program. The program is offered in several of the district’s schools.

Related: By suspending protesting students, what lessons are Syracuse University leaders teaching?

These racial disparities prompted the Seattle Public Schools superintendent, Denise Juneau, to call the program’s legacy “unacceptable and embarrassing.” She has sought to abolish the program altogether and replace it with a more integrated model. But the school board, in response to opposition by livid parents, failed to pass the resolution to phase out the program last year. So this year Juneau put forth a new proposal that would phase out a highly capable cohort program at just one school in the district, Washington Middle.

The Seattle board approved a million-dollar partnership between Washington Middle School and the nonprofit Technology Access Foundation (TAF), which will manage the school, overseeing major functions like hiring and implementing a project-based learning curriculum that uses real world problems to teach students academic disciplines. Washington Middle’s current gifted program will be phased out. The district selected Washington Middle because of its close proximity to Seattle Central College, building a bridge to a postsecondary institution, according to KUOW 94.9 FM reporting.

I certainly applaud any effort to integrate schools. However, getting rid of a G&T program at one school in a district isn’t a systemic effort to end segregation. To the contrary, it can be seen as a statement that black and brown students aren’t worthy of an enriched curriculum.

Related: Test the water and HVAC systems just as much as the students

Washington Middle is a diverse school. White students represent 37 percent of the school population, and black students comprise 23 percent, while they are 14 percent of the district overall. Students who identify as Asian are also overrepresented at Washington, at 17 percent of the student body; Asians represent 13 percent of all students systemwide. Hispanic students are underrepresented at Washington Middle, but just barely: They comprise 10 percent of Washington’s school enrollment, compared to 13 percent of enrollment districtwide. Native American students make up only 0.4 percent of the district, but 0.2 percent of the Washington Middle student body.

I could understand the district’s decision if Seattle Public Schools shut down one of the seven HCC programs at a less diverse campus, but not this decision: If there was a place to demonstrate that HCC can serve a diverse population, it was Washington Middle. Instead, less diverse schools continue to maintain a program that was founded to protect white school choice, and that continues to exclude black and brown children.

Here’s a novel idea: Have students determine their own readiness for advanced coursework instead of determining readiness by a flawed test.

Or, the Seattle district could abandon the label gifted and talented, as the Washington, D.C., Public Schools did years ago. “DCPS believes in developing student’s abilities through learning opportunities, rather than labeling a student and placing them on a restrictive track,” states the district’s website. “We believe that it is more important to invest in the design, implementation, and growth of specific instructional programs to meet the needs of high-ability learners, rather than in conducting a screening program that limits who can participate in advanced learning opportunities.”

Here’s another novel idea: Have teachers differentiate instruction to meet the needs of every child.

Two-thirds to three-quarters of black children who should be considered gifted aren’t identified, according to Marcia Gentry, a professor at Purdue University and director of its Gifted Education Research and Resource Institute. Black and Latino students represented 26 percent of students enrolled in gifted and talented education programs across the country, but made up 40 percent of total enrollment in schools offering gifted and talented programs, according to a 2014 report by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education.

The same 2014 report found that a “quarter of high schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students do not offer Algebra II; a third of these schools do not offer chemistry.” These courses are requirements for postsecondary institutions with selective admissions. The report also found that less than half of Native Indian and Alaska Native high school students have access to the full range of math and science courses that will prepare them for college.

Related: Dress codes are the new ‘whites only’ signs

Separate but equal may have been officially outlawed by the Supreme Court in the landmark 1954 case Brown vs. Board of Education, but the spirit of that racist policy lives on through “gifted” programs and other mechanisms that ostensibly place students in separate tracks based on skills, but in reality separate students by race and income. In Brown v Board, the Court ordered that states end segregation with “all deliberate speed.” But the limited busing programs that followed placed the burden of integrating white schools on black families.

We have yet to desegregate all schools since the Court’s decision because deliberate speed really meant when white people are ready. The courses that black and brown students are offered — or not — are proof that white people are still dragging their feet on integrating schools and educational equity.

To be clear, tracking in general isn’t inherently bad. We should have different curricular options to meet students’ differing academic levels and career interests, including offering college prep courses provided to those deemed worthy of academic investment. However, racism has corrupted tracking by limiting the ability of black and brown students to be deemed worthy, making it less about sorting students based on academic and career aptitude and more about affirming established racial hierarchies.

School districts have used talented and gifted programs to mask their inaction to integrate schools fully. To shut down one program within a district falls short of addressing the systemic nature of the problem. It’s a version of ending segregation with “all deliberate speed.”

Education leaders must deal with segregation at a district and state level. Meaning, the district should open up the courses in the HCC program and consider all students gifted as they are, or phase it out for the sake of all students.

We simply can’t piecemeal fairness and call it a step toward justice.

This story about the highly capable program was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — As many as 3.6 million gifted children are being overlooked in school — more than the 3.3 million U.S. public school children already labeled as gifted.

That’s according to a report from Purdue University’s Gifted Education Research and Resource Institute, GER2I, released this month at the annual convention of the National Association for Gifted Children, or NAGC.

Four of 10 children attended public schools where not a single student was identified as gifted, even though most states legally require schools to find and serve gifted children and provide money to do so.

There’s “untapped potential around the country,” the report’s co-author Gilman Whiting of Vanderbilt University said.

The report comes at a time when New York City and Seattle are arguing over proposals to eliminate gifted education altogether due to racial discrimination and inequality in gifted programs.

Research has shown for many years that Asian, white and higher-income students are disproportionately likely to be classified as gifted.  The GER2I report paints a dismal picture of ongoing inequality in gifted education despite efforts to find more gifted children of color and gifted children from low-income families.

 [pullquote author=”” description=”” style=”new-pullquote”]As many as 3.6 million gifted children are being overlooked in school — more than the 3.3 million U.S. public school children already labeled as gifted.[/pullquote]

After analyzing public school civil rights data from the federal Education Department for the 2015-16 school year, the most recent available, researchers were startled to find very few bright spots.

“Nothing has actually changed,” GER2I director Marcia Gentry said to a room of educators at the conference. “You came here to be depressed, right?”

On average, in the six of 10 schools that have identified gifted children, 10 percent of students were classified as gifted. However, there was a wealth gap: Low-income schools identified 8 percent of their students as gifted, compared to 13 percent of students at wealthier schools, according to the report.

Gentry estimated that two- thirds to three-quarters of gifted African American students are overlooked. “We’re losing talent,” she said.

Gifted students typically get to jump ahead in lessons, take more challenging classes or participate in enrichment activities, such as engineering or drama. As with special education students, gifted children may attend separate programs, or they may receive services in an ordinary classroom. Some bright students who don’t get extra resources do fine on their own but lose the opportunity to, say, take college math in high school, experts at the conference said. However, some get bored, disengage, underperform and even drop out, or are simply never noticed or encouraged.

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

A majority of states required schools to find gifted children at the time the data was collected. Most, Gentry said, based their definition of giftedness on federal guidelines: “Students, children, or youth who give evidence of high achievement capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who need services and activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities.”

And yet, a child considered gifted at one school might not make the cut in the state next door, or even in a nearby district. State rules and oversight for identifying gifted students vary widely, and education departments generally don’t do a good job of communicating the parameters. This year, Ohio approved 27 different tests for identifying gifted students. The GER2I report measured access to special gifted services, not the quality of those services.

In some states, racial disparities are vast. In Virginia, black students make up one-quarter of public school students, but 11 percent of gifted students. Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire and Wyoming each identified fewer than 35 black children — statewide — as gifted. South Dakota has no state mandate to find or specially educate gifted students. The number of identified gifted students of color there is vanishingly small: Just 31 of the state’s almost 4,000 African American students and 56 of its 15,000 Native students were labeled as gifted. Alaska found only 241 of its almost 31,000 Native students to be gifted. The research team is currently calculating gifted identification among English language learners.

Across the board, the share of white and Asian students in gifted education was about the same as, or higher than, their presence in their overall student body. Gentry told the conference attendees that she preferred not to call them “overrepresented” in gifted education but instead to say “well-represented,” because “I don’t want to un-identify kids.”

To calculate the number of 3.6 million overlooked students, the researchers first applied the 10 percent average to the roughly 4 of 10 schools that had identified no gifted students at all, Gentry said. Then they adjusted that number for the thousands of Latinx, African American, Native American/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students who would have been included if they were found to be gifted at the same rate as their white and Asian peers.

The NAGC conference had an intense focus on remedying inequality in gifted education. “There is no question that there is a systemic bias within our system,” the association board president Jonathan Plucker said at the opening session, which was titled, “Giftedness Knows No Boundaries.” Dozens of sessions focused on “equity” or “cultural competency” or “underserved populations.”

Experts at the conference argued that screening all children for giftedness, not just those whose parents or teachers request it, can ameliorate inequality. They also advised erring on the side of helping more children, not fewer; using tasks and tests that don’t rely on children being good at math or English, to avoid mistaking early academic advantages for an overall ability to learn; and ranking low-income and minority children against their peers, not against an overall, national set of test scores.

Gentry said that the inequities are stark, and “I don’t want to whitewash it anymore.” But she believes that gifted education should be fixed, not eliminated, otherwise “maybe we hurt the underrepresented kids the most.”

This story about gifted students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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NEW YORK — To Eva Santiago, her son’s education has always felt like an impossible dilemma.

Before elementary school, the boy was diagnosed with autism, ADHD and anxiety, and in kindergarten he was placed in a small, self-contained class for kids with disabilities.

But he was articulate and curious, so when he was 6, Santiago took him to be tested for the city’s exclusive gifted-and-talented program. She was pleased when his score earned him one of the coveted spots.

But in his larger gifted-and-talented class, he became anxious and easily upset. He fought with students and teachers and spent most of the school day roaming the halls. After he kicked a security guard and the school called the police, Santiago said, she begged administrators to return him to a self-contained class. There, at least, his teachers could manage his behavioral challenges — even if it meant he breezed through his school work and learned little.

“Other kids would still be doing the assignments and he would be done,” recalled Santiago. “He just didn’t know what to do with himself.”

The boy’s experience is typical for a category of students known as “twice exceptional,” or 2e. These kids — believed to make up at least 6 percent of all students who have a disability — possess high academic aptitude but struggle with ADHD, mild autism, dyslexia or other learning and behavioral challenges.* They are notoriously difficult for schools to serve effectively for two reasons, say advocates, parents and some educators. Often, their intelligence masks their disability, so they are never assessed for special education or don’t receive the services best suited for them. In other cases, they’re placed in special education classes tailored to their disability but grade levels behind the school work they’re capable of.

“We see kids whose challenges don’t show up on their report card, so they aren’t getting services,” said Jennifer Choi, a parent and founder of the advocacy group 2eNYC and a trustee of the nonprofit Twice Exceptional Children’s Advocacy. “And we see kids who are gifted, but they also have a disability, who lose the ability to participate in any sort of accelerated program because those programs often decline to provide special education services.”

But a handful of school systems across the country are searching for better ways to accommodate bright students with disabilities. Colorado trains teachers across the state in twice exceptionality, for example, while Montgomery County, Maryland, is perhaps the only school district to offer self-contained classes for students in elementary school who need both an accelerated curriculum and more support than they would receive in a mainstream classroom.

Now parent activists in New York City are fighting to get the country’s largest school system to be more responsive to 2e students. Last fall, after Choi’s group presented the New York City Department of Education with a survey of more than 500 parents that described the challenges facing 2e students, the agency began to offer training to staff in gifted-and-talented programs on how to work more effectively with students who have ADHD. In the last few years, three of the city’s most selective public high schools — Brooklyn Technical, Bard College and Townshend Harris — have sent teachers to learn about twice exceptionality from employees of the Quad Preparatory School, a six-year-old private school that focuses on educating these students. And in New York state, lawmakers introduced bills in 2017 that would require teacher training about twice exceptionality and programming for twice exceptional students.

“We’re committed to meeting the unique needs of our students with disabilities, including those pursuing accelerated programs,” the city Department of Education said in a statement. “We hold trainings for school staff and parents on personalized learning strategies that can be used in the classroom or at home, and will continue to work with communities on innovative ways to serve all students.”

But parents say there’s a long way to go.

Related: The vast majority of students with disabilities don’t get a college degree

One of the biggest barriers to educating 2e students, advocates say, is simply proving they exist. Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, all students are entitled to the special services and accommodations necessary to enable them to learn. But to qualify for those services under the law, a student’s disability must “adversely affect educational performance.”

Schools and courts are left to determine what that means. If students are passing their classes and advancing from grade to grade, they’re more likely to be denied costly accommodations and services, which can include everything from a smaller student-teacher ratio to tutoring, to speech and occupational therapy. In the 2eNYC survey, more than a quarter of parents said they’d been told, “Your child is too smart for [special education services].”

That’s essentially what happened to Choi. Her son struggled in preschool, bouncing from school to school to school. At 5, he was diagnosed with ADHD. Under special education law, ADHD is considered a disability under the “Other Health Impairment” category, and can contribute to a determination that a child is eligible for special education services if it interferes with learning. Choi brought both her son’s diagnosis and his preschool teachers with her to the meeting that would decide what special education accommodations and services he’d receive in elementary school. She was sure that with his teachers present to testify to the constant oversight he needed to stay on task, he would either be placed in a mainstream class with a special education co-teacher or in a self-contained classroom for students with greater disabilities.

She was shocked, she said, when the disabilities evaluator at her son’s public elementary school noted that he was performing at grade level and determined that he didn’t qualify for any special education accommodations or services. After that, Choi enrolled her son in private school and successfully sued the Department of Education to have his tuition reimbursed.

On the flip side, the academic pace of small, self-contained classes designed for children with severe disabilities is often too slow for kids with pronounced academic strengths, say parents and advocates. That was the case with Santiago’s son. He worked far faster than the other students in his self-contained classes, she said, and there was little of the in-depth learning that he thrived on.

After three years, Santiago decided her son needed a setting that better fit his academic abilities. The vice principal at her son’s school, a guidance counselor, a psychologist and lawyers from Advocates for Children, which provides educational legal advocacy for low-income families, all wrote letters in support of her claim that her son’s educational needs were not being met. With those letters, she was able to convince the Department of Education to pay upfront for her son to attend the Child’s School, a private school for students with disabilities.

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

Like Santiago, some frustrated parents are turning to private schools to serve their kids. In 2013, Kim Busi, a former professor of psychiatry whose son is on the autism spectrum, started the Quad Preparatory School with the goal of serving high-achieving kids with learning and emotional disabilities. The school opened in the basement of a synagogue with three students; today, it serves 113.

At the school, everything from curriculum to classroom design is tailored to students’ individual needs. On a recent weekday, two students were huddled with a teacher in a hallway strewn with orange and green bean bags, learning to code on a computer. In a nearby classroom, five students on striped beach chairs listened attentively to their teacher. The walls behind them were covered with colorful signs; the classroom was set up explicitly for kids who need stimulation, Busi said. In the room next door, the walls were bare and white — an educational setting meant to accommodate students who are easily distracted.

Class size never exceeds ten, and students spend a third of their day working individually with a teacher. The goal, Busi explained, is personalized learning that fully accommodates students’ abilities and disabilities. Two fourth graders, for example, are already studying with the school’s advanced high school math teacher, according to Busi. Students are also assigned a mental health counselor who works with them on developing goals for their social and emotional growth.

But this individualized education is expensive; Quad tuition is nearly $75,000 a year. And, because most parents have, like Choi, successfully sued the Department of Education for tuition reimbursement, it’s a cost that’s largely borne by taxpayers. In 2017, the agency spent $375 million for tuition to private schools for students with disabilities.

On their end, parents say that suing the DOE is a costly and exhausting process. They add that if the money were invested in public schools, some of those dollars would benefit other public school students as well.

Even without the resources of a place like the Quad, public schools could do a better job accommodating 2e kids, say some education experts.

The first step, according to Debbie Carroll, a private educational consultant in Connecticut and a co-chair of the subcommittee on Twice Exceptional Advocacy of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, is for schools to educate their staff about 2e students. Teachers need to be able to recognize when students aren’t reaching their potential even though they may be passing their classes, she said, and they need to understand that smart kids with behavioral problems may not just be willful or lazy, but may in fact need support. She also points to strategies that teachers in general education and accelerated classes can use to support kids with disabilities to keep them in mainstream classes, like giving autistic students more opportunities for breaks if they’re feeling overwhelmed.

Sarah Jackson, an instructional specialist who oversees programming for 2e kids in Montgomery County, Maryland, said she trains hundreds of teachers and administrators each year on twice exceptionality. Most of the district’s roughly 2,000 students designated 2e are served in general education classroom with an additional special education teacher. But roughly 40 elementary school students who need more individualized attention are taught in self-contained classes in grades three through five. District administrators believe that with the assistance of in-class supports and a special daily class focusing on self-advocacy and executive functioning, all 2e students should be mainstreamed into general education classes or into advanced programs by the time they reach sixth grade.

Related: Almost all students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time. Here’s why they’re not.

But given concerns over the use of scarce education dollars, some educators are skeptical about the 2e movement. While they acknowledge that children can be academically advanced yet struggle with disabilities, they worry that the 2e movement disproportionately benefits middle-class and affluent families. Well-off parents are the ones who typically agitate for special services and accommodations for their kids, even in cases where the child’s disabilities are not pronounced, these educators say. In New York City, affluent parents are also more likely to prepare their children for the admissions test to gifted-and-talented programs, which are under scrutiny for a lack of socioeconomic and racial diversity.

Some parents arrive at school with neuropsychological evaluations showing that their children are slightly above average in some academic areas while exhibiting minor behavioral or learning challenges, said one New York City school social worker. Then these parents insist that their children’s schoolwork and grades should mirror the capabilities indicated by the assessment.

“We all have strengths and weaknesses,” said the social worker, who declined to provide her name in order to protect her relationship with parents. “And it’s not always clear what’s a disability that the law requires us to address, and what’s just an area where a student struggles and could use a little more help.”

Wealthy parents are also more able to afford private neuropsychological evaluations, which tend to be more comprehensive than those conducted by education departments and can cost several thousand dollars. Often, assessments for children’s disabilities performed by public schools don’t cover areas such as attention, memory, language skills and social and emotional functioning, said Matthew Pagirsky, a neuropsychologist with the Child Mind Institute, which provides services to kids with mental health and learning challenges.

Some groups are trying to spread access to private evaluations to low-income families. The Robin Hood Foundation, a philanthropy in New York that supports anti-poverty programs, funds free neuropsychological assessments for poor children at Lenox Hill Hospital and Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report is based at the Teachers College at Columbia University.) Despite these efforts, some low-income parents are resistant to having their children evaluated, fearing their kids will face stigma.

That’s how Veronica Rodriguez felt when teachers first started telling her that her youngest son might need special help. At 2, the boy was speaking in full sentences and, early on, he seemed to learn new concepts with little effort. But when he enrolled in public elementary school, she received daily calls from teachers complaining that he would get upset easily and leave class, or start crying or screaming.

“His teacher would tell me, ‘He doesn’t know his name,’ when he had been writing his name from age 2,” Rodriguez said. School officials asked if there was something wrong at home. “They thought I was an ignorant mom with issues herself,” she said.

School staff encouraged her to have the boy evaluated, but she refused: “I felt like they were saying my kid was slow and I wasn’t having it.”

But after a teacher at a school her son started attending in second grade explained to Rodriguez that the boy could be both bright and have a disability, she took her son for an assessment at Lenox Hill Hospital. There she was told what she already knew: Her son had many areas of above-average academic strengths. He also had ADHD and was at risk for a mood disorder.

While she continues to have trouble finding appropriate services for her son, Rodriguez said that learning about 2e children has been an awakening. She would like to see schools get the same kind of education in twice exceptionality that she received.

“Teachers need to be trained to recognize and understand children who are 2e,” she said. “They need to try to remove the stigma that kids who have a disability cannot be smart.”

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct estimate for the share of children who may be twice exceptional. It’s estimated that 6 percent of children in special education are 2e.

This story about twice exceptional students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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