“High achievers & Equity”
America’s reckoning with racial injustice and the pursuit of equity have led some public school systems to reduce or terminate (or at least question) special programs for high achievers, such as “gifted” education, honors courses, and selective high schools. Historically, such programs have served disproportionately few Black, Hispanic, Native American, and low-income students. Their critics have used this fact to call for their overhaul or elimination—a position they often justify with claims that the programs don’t improve participants’ academic outcomes, especially those of marginalized students, and that more heterogeneous classrooms work just as well.
This policy brief considers four frequent arguments that opponents of advanced education programs use to advocate for their elimination.
Claim 1: Programs for advanced students don’t work, especially for marginalized students. False. Interventions including acceleration and readiness grouping benefit high-achieving students from all backgrounds and don’t harm their lower- and middle-achieving peers.
Claim 2: What’s commonly termed “differentiated instruction,” i.e., grouping all readiness levels into single classrooms, works just as well as advanced programs that group some of them separately.
False. No high-quality research shows that heterogeneous differentiation can work at scale for the full range of student readiness levels that are typically present in American classrooms. And several large-scale meta-analyses say it doesn’t work.
Claim 3: School systems under-identify marginalized students due to biased practices. Perhaps. We can’t deny that bias can take place, but the problem is deeper—and it is up to us to intervene early.
