Being “gifted” — and by that I mean smart — has been woven into my sense of self for so long that it has become one of the surest things I know about myself. I was reading at age 4. And though I hated math by kindergarten, I excelled in art, reading, and writing, and every teacher loved me. It was not surprising to me when, in third grade back in 1991, I was invited to take a test to determine whether I should move to a school across town — the school for really smart kids, as I precociously told relatives, neighbors and strangers at the grocery store. Nor was it surprising when my parents told me I had been accepted to that school’s Gifted and Talented program. There, in grades four, five, and six, I had the kind of public-school education that many parents dream of, filled with discovery, creativity, and nerdy magic.

We went tidepooling on the coast, prodding shy sea stars with our fingers, and made papier-mâché dioramas of the titular fruit from James and the Giant Peach. We reenacted the Battle of Lexington and Concord using balled-up paper as bullets and argued about national politics. (Memorably, one debate about George H.W. Bush’s 1988 pledge “Read my lips: no new taxes” ended in shouting.) We went on class camping trips designed to teach the value of emotional risk-taking, pushing ourselves on night hikes to walk solo through a pitch-black tunnel to our teacher on the other side. Our classrooms were always a merry mess of paint and construction paper. I spent most of my in-school silent reading hours with the class copy of The New Yorker. My teachers, thrillingly, asked a lot of me academically, and in return, they gave me the latitude to follow my curiosity. I remember these years as some of the most invigorating of my life.

For nearly a century all across America, shrewd parents have known that the best first step in a child’s academic life is to get them into a gifted program, like the one I attended, where they can have an academic experience that is stimulating and confidence-boosting, that sets them apart from the pack. They understand that a Gifted and Talented, or G&T, program in elementary school broadens a child’s intellectual horizons, which then places them on a course toward honors classes in middle school and AP classes in high school. All of this culminates, finally, in the strategic launch of the child toward “a very good college,” maybe even one in the Ivy League. The first plotted point on the ascent is vital — it’s what makes the rest possible.

Many of these shrewd parents also know that in many parts of the U.S., G&T has a race problem. As of 2022, roughly 60 percent of American students enrolled in a gifted program are white, though recent data shows that white children are only around 40 percent of the total public-school population — a disparity that has been in place for as long as G&T has existed. The gap is apparent in New York. Recent figures on the city’s kindergarten G&T enrollment indicate that white and Asian students are vastly overrepresented relative to their proportion of the city’s student body. The Anderson School, a citywide K–8 gifted institution, barely cracks double digits for Latino students and admits even fewer Black students; the stats for another K–8 citywide gifted school, NEST M, are no better. The trend continues in high school. Of the 781 students accepted to the highly competitive Stuyvesant High School last year, eight were Black. Among the city’s other eight specialized high schools, 3 percent of offers went to Black students while 6.9 percent went to Latino students. Combined, Black and Latino students make up roughly two-thirds of the city’s public-school population.

These disparities have helped to make G&T a perennial subject of debate, particularly in New York City, where it has bedeviled mayors for years. At the moment, the city’s families with school-age children are waiting to learn how Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to reshape (or extinguish) G&T, an issue he touched on during his campaign. While he has made plain his distaste for pre-kindergarten G&T testing and feels the third-grade entry point is more logical (Mamdani himself is the product of a specialized public high school, the Bronx High School of Science), thus far no action has been taken.

Some parents I spoke to have already washed their hands of the whole G&T business, refusing to participate in what they view as a corrupt system of segregation. But countless others still place significant stock in the G&T designation and what it offers and are comfortable relying on cognitive testing, should it be required, to determine whether a child qualifies. For decades, people in favor of G&T have promoted the notion that we can put a concrete number to a child’s intelligence, that the smartest children need extra enrichment or acceleration to reach their potential, and that we can measure the beneficial impact of that enhanced learning on the children who receive it.

There is just one problem: Not a single part of this story is true.

According to most definitions proffered by advocacy groups for high-ability children, a child is said to be “gifted” if they perform (or have the potential to perform) at a higher level than other kids their age. Rather than any inherent characteristic, it’s their difference that defines them.

What causes a child to perform at that higher level? A person’s intelligence has been shown to correlate with that of their parents, but researchers view this genetic component as a baseline with which countless life circumstances interact. The number of environmental factors that might impact a child’s intelligence is staggering: their socioeconomic status, and the food, shelter, and stability that it does or does not provide, but also things like level of physical activity or even how much greenery there is in their community. Research suggests that the calibration of nature versus nurture shifts over time, with environmental aspects playing their greatest role when a child is very young. Some theorize that highly gifted children stay in this spongelike developmental window — when factors like enrichment programs, good teachers, and shelves full of books make a big difference — longer than their peers with typical intelligence, which leads to their superior abilities.

But that is just an idea, of course. The bases of high intelligence (and what we even mean when we say “intelligence”) are vast and mysterious, and multiple schools of thought have spent decades battling it out across the landscape of academia. Some educational theorists posit that high intelligence is a single quality that manifests generally in various aspects of thought, while others assert that there are numerous forms of intelligence, such as linguistic, musical, or kinesthetic. Still others say it’s a form of neurodivergence. Research indicates that highly intelligent people are 20 percent percent more likely than their peers to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and 80 percent percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. “I don’t know that there are truly gifted neurotypical children,” says Laura Phillips, a New York pediatric neuropsychologist whose practice includes gifted kids. “One not yet well studied idea about giftedness, and neurodivergent brains in general, is the overexcitability hypothesis, this idea that these kids’ brains are just firing nonstop. They’re so acutely sensitive to information and to stimulation in the environment, and that in and of itself is its own vulnerability.”

Other psychologists reject the notion of a genetic or biological component of intelligence altogether and believe there is no such thing as innate talent or aptitude, that we can all learn anything with the right teacher. In 1972, the U.S. government settled on an official definition of giftedness, which eschewed the longtime standard that any IQ over 130 was “gifted” in favor of six dimensions of high intelligence, including “general intellectual ability, specific academic aptitude, creative or........

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