Across the nation, policymakers and education leaders are embracing the “science of reading” to bring evidence-based literacy instruction to American classrooms. Millions of American children will now have a better opportunity to learn to read.
It’s time to apply the same strategy to other persistent challenges in K-12 education, including ensuring that gifted children have an opportunity to reach their potential. As with the “science of reading,” policymakers and school leaders have an opportunity to leverage best practices identified through rigorous, federally-funded research.
Decades of a well-intended national focus on ensuring that struggling learners aren’t left behind has resulted in too many students with advanced academic potential being neglected. A 2019 Purdue University study estimated that more than 3 million American children could be identified as gifted but are being overlooked.
The nation’s failure to identify and support students with the highest academic potential has many costs. It denies society potential scientific discoveries and technological innovations that could improve our collective wellbeing and prosperity. It undermines American security and economic competitiveness. It denies human flourishing and forces too many American children onto a path to boredom and disengagement.
Robert Bellafiore, my co-author for the report “Winning the Talent Race: A National Strategy for Identifying and Developing America’s Future Scientists and Innovators,” highlighted this issue in a recent essay for City Journal:
The result has been a persistent failure to identify and nurture exceptional talent—the “lost Einsteins,” as economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have described such children. Chetty et al. have found that low-income students with great math skills are far less likely to hold patents than wealthier students with much lower aptitude. This suggests that becoming an inventor depends not only on “excelling in mathematics and science,” as it should, but also on “having a rich family.”
Policymakers and school leaders have an opportunity to reprioritize advanced learning. Promising interventions to promote advanced learning include universal screening to identify high-potential students, academic acceleration (such as skipping grades), automatic enrollment in advanced courses for qualified students, and grouping students based on academic ability. Beyond the classroom, summer and outside-of-school enrichment programs offer additional potential to accelerate high-aptitude students and expand opportunity.
Advanced education has been the focus of ongoing federally funded research as well as past federal policy strategies. During the Cold War, the United States prioritized advanced education. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 included provisions requiring national efforts to identify and nurture talented students. Specifically, the law provided a federal grant to states, which required them to establish a plan for testing students, identifying those with “outstanding aptitudes and ability,” and helping them succeed through secondary and eventually higher education. In the 1980s and 1990s, Congress funded a “Young Scholars Program” to provide promising middle- and high-school students with academic acceleration and enrichment opportunities, including during summer and after school. However, since the 1990s, the federal government’s single enduring program to support gifted students has involved funding academic research.
After spending tens of millions on gifted and advanced education research, it’s time to use that research to establish a “science of advanced learning” that states, school districts, and school leaders can implement.
As a starting point, the Trump administration and Congress should require federal agencies that have been funding research projects on advanced education – including the Department of Education and National Science Foundation – to review this research and develop evidence-based best practices to provide a blueprint for state, district, and classroom reforms.
This shouldn’t be a heavy lift. Federal agencies could consult with federally funded research centers to identify these best practices. The federal government can then disseminate these findings so that educators can put them to use in classrooms and other educational settings.
For example, researchers at the National Center for Research on Gifted Education at the University of Connecticut recently published a summary of the top findings from a decade of research. Key insights include the persistent inequality in access to gifted education resulting from uneven availability of services and “systemic under-identification of underserved populations.” In addition, their researchers cast doubt on the traditional “pull-out” strategy of removing gifted students from regular classes for 1-5 hours per week (particularly since these programs “rarely focus on core academic domains such as reading and mathematics, despite these being the areas in which students are commonly identified as gifted”). Instead, they recommend a greater focus on differentiation and flexible pacing to provide advanced learning opportunities in core subjects and give gifted students more opportunities to accelerate their learning.
Researchers with the National Research Center on Advanced Education at Johns Hopkins could provide similar insights about best practices. Professor Jonathan Plucker, who leads the center, has highlighted promising evidence-based reforms such as universal screening and automatic enrollment that have the potential to improve outcomes for advanced learners while also expanding equal opportunity.
Beyond education reform policies, federally funded research has also identified specific classroom interventions that could promote advanced education. For example, the UCONN Center is also conducting a research project, Project BUMP UP, which combines pre-testing, differentiation, and accelerated learning opportunities in elementary mathematics. The researchers found that students benefited from the opportunities to learn new mathematics content each week and that “more students met and/or exceeded proficiency in BUMP UP classroom than comparison classrooms.”
The Trump administration has an opportunity to further this evidence-base of best practices by prioritizing research grants to improve learning opportunities for students with advanced academic potential.
The success of the “science of reading” movement highlights both the need for rigorous research to identify best practice, and the critical importance of translating research evidence into actionable and relevant guidance for policymakers, school leaders, and teachers. The Trump administration and Congress should urgently apply this lesson to helping the nation’s brightest students reach their potential.
