Giftedness is real. You can argue that we find the wrong kids, not that the ruler measures nothing.

Signs of giftedness often show up in infancy, yet scores keep moving—real signal, but no single early verdict

The fix isn't abolishing gifted ed, but universal screening and widening what we count, like creativity.

When I was a kid, I was placed in special education. Recurrent ear infections had left me with a central auditory processing disorder, and the school’s verdict was that I needed to be sorted into the room for slow learners. I stayed there for years. I was the opposite of the gifted child.

So you can imagine how I felt reading a New York magazine essay by Katie Arnold-Ratliff arguing that “giftedness itself is a lie.” But what you imagine is probably wrong. Instead of ending up as a warrior against gifted education, I’ve become a fierce advocate. Here’s why.

I’ve spent my adult life studying the question What is intelligence, really? I studied cognitive science, earned a Ph.D. at Yale, and wrote a book called Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, all driven by a desire to redefine intelligence. So I came in sympathetic to her critique. The trouble is that the part she’s right about and the part she’s wrong about are two distinct claims, and the entire article hinges on our not noticing the difference.

Problems With Current Gifted Identification Methods

First, what she gets right. Testing a 4-year-old once and stamping “gifted” on them for life is bad science: A child’s scores keep moving as they develop. What’s more, the equity numbers are a disgrace: About 60 percent of kids in gifted programs are white in a system that’s roughly 40 percent white, and of the 781 students admitted to Stuyvesant last year, eight were Black.

But watch what she says next: She goes from the way we identify gifted kids is broken to giftedness is a lie, and those are wildly different sentences. The first is about a measurement. The second is about reality. The lie isn’t giftedness. The lie is the essentialist label: the fantasy that a Tuesday-morning test........

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