Why decades of trying to end racial segregation in gifted education haven’t worked

BUFFALO, N.Y. — On a crisp day in early March, two elementary school gifted and talented classes worked on activities in two schools, three miles and a world apart.

In airy PS 64 Frederick Law Olmsted, in affluent, white north Buffalo, 22 would-be Arctic explorers wrestled with how to build a shelter if their team leader had frostbite and snow blindness. Unusually for Buffalo’s public schools — where 20 percent of students are white and 46 percent are Black — about half of the fourth grade class was white.

In PS 61 Arthur O. Eve, on the city’s majority-Black East Side, 13 first graders, all of them Black, Latino or Asian American, folded paper airplanes in their basement classroom as part of an aerodynamics and problem-solving lesson. Unlike at Olmsted, the highest-scoring elementary school in the city, students at Eve scored around the dismal city average in math and English in 2019, when fewer than a quarter of students passed state tests.

The gifted program at Eve opened two years ago as a way to increase access to Buffalo’s disproportionately white, in-demand gifted and talented programs. Buffalo educators hoped Eve’s new program would give more children — particularly children of color — a chance at enrichment and advanced learning.

Yet two years in, Eve’s gifted classes are under-enrolled, while Olmsted always runs out of room — last year, more than 400 children applied for 65 gifted spots. And even though the district made it easier to apply for gifted classes, Olmsted gifted classrooms still don’t look like the rest of the district. White families flock to Olmsted, and eschew the new program at Eve, while families of color have come up against barriers, including an IQ test children take as young as 4, that experts say keep gifted education out of reach for kids who need it. 

Inequity is the norm. Wealthy schools identify more children as gifted than poor ones. Black, Latino and Indigenous groups are often left out.

Buffalo’s struggle to create an integrated, equitable gifted program demonstrates a longtime challenge that has recently gained attention: Gifted education in America has a race problem.

Nearly 60 percent of students in gifted education are white, according to the most recent federal data, compared to 50 percent of public school enrollment overall. Black students, in contrast, made up 9 percent of students in gifted education, although they were 15 percent of the overall student population.  

Many factors contribute to this disparity. Gifted education has racism in its roots: Lewis Terman, the psychologist who in the 1910s popularized the concept of “IQ” that became the foundation of gifted testing, was a eugenicist. And admissions for gifted programs tend to favor children with wealthy, educated parents, who are more likely to be white.

Though it took several decades for gifted education experts to raise concerns, they have been trying to diminish segregation for a generation. If it were easy, it would be done by now.

In a three-part series, The Hechinger Report and NBC News examined the ways that gifted education has maintained segregation in American schools; how some districts are trying to diversify gifted classes or get rid of them altogether; and how scientific progress in gene testing could boost — and complicate — efforts to make gifted programs fairer.

School administrators often see gifted education as a frill. Nationally, 3.3 million public school students were identified as gifted in 2015-16, about 6 percent of the total school population, according to the federal Department of Education. The Covid-19 pandemic, which forced many districts to cut budgets, pushes gifted education even farther down the priority list. However, addressing its continuing racial inequality could not be more urgent, education advocates say, especially after the summer’s civil rights protests.

It’s not just Buffalo. Purdue University’s Gifted Education Research and Resource Institute found in 2019 that inequity is the norm. Wealthy schools identify more children as gifted than do poor ones. Black, Latino and Indigenous students are often left out.

South Dakota and Alaska, for instance, have a combined 46,000 Native children, fewer than 300 of whom, 0.6 percent, were considered gifted in 2015-16. Black and Latino children fill 65 percent of New York City classrooms but just 22 percent of gifted seats.

The Hechinger Report’s analysis of U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights data suggested the problem is acute in some cities that also have high levels of racial segregation by neighborhood. In Cincinnati, for instance, Black students made up 63 percent of the student body but just 16 percent of the small gifted program, according to 2015 data from the Office for Civil Rights.

In Buffalo, administrators say they know that their district’s gifted education racial imbalance is a problem: The Office for Civil Rights investigated the district six years ago. In response, the district made it easier to apply for Olmsted’s gifted program, created the new program at Eve and began the process of infusing every classroom from pre-K through fourth grade with enriched lessons.

Other districts are also wrestling with the problem. The New York City and Seattle school districts have considered proposals to eliminate gifted education altogether. And even before June’s historic civil rights protests, the issue of racism permeated the National Association for Gifted Children’s (largely white) November 2019 conference in Albuquerque. In panel after panel, experts and educators wrung their hands and proffered solutions. Gifted education needs to diversify, they said — for racial and social justice, and because otherwise it might not survive.

But is it possible to make gifted education representative? Does letting more kids in fix the underlying inequities? Can we even agree on what “giftedness” is at all?

Despite a century of research, definitions of giftedness are fuzzy. People disagree over whether it should be measured in absolute or relative terms; whether there is a limit to the proportion of humanity that is gifted; whether giftedness can be cultivated; whether it must be backed up by achievement; and whether it should include athletic abilities.

Terman set the stage by writing in the 1910s that giftedness was very high intelligence, which he defined as the top 1 percent of scorers on his IQ exam, researcher Jennifer L. Jolly wrote in 2005. Psychologists later poked holes in that definition. They said that giftedness could also be creativity, and found that a high IQ score did not necessarily correspond with leadership, professional accomplishment or even success in school. There are gifted dropouts.

The National Association for Gifted Children defines its target group as kids whose “ability is significantly above the norm for their age.” Maria Valenti-Barone, a gifted and talented teacher at Olmsted, said that giftedness is “the potential to do great things in society.”

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

Psychologist Joseph Renzulli, probably the most influential person in gifted education today, views giftedness as dynamic, not as a fixed quality you either have or don’t. He proposed a Venn diagram: Giftedness is where creativity, above-average ability and commitment to completing a task meet. He speaks not of gifted peoplebut of gifted behaviors that can be developed and that show up “in certain people, at certain times, under certain circumstances.” Renzulli’s summer workshops for educators have trained more than 35,000 teachers over 40 years, including numerous Olmsted staff.

Then there’s the question of personality, of what a gifted person is like. A number of experts said that gifted kids come in all personality flavors — for every perfectionist, there’s a wild, messy kid whose backpack is a pit of despair. Yet the internet and reference books teem with professionally endorsed lists of so-called gifted traits. These lists are often proffered to general education teachers and to parents to help them look out for children who might be gifted. The traits are all over the map; NAGC’s list includes emotional oversensitivity, nonstop chattering, “feelings of being different,” “unconcern for social norms,” “high expectations of self and others” and “keen sense of humor.” It’s like reading a horoscope: You can always find something that fits.

“Every child has gifts. All kids do have special talents. But we only measure a very few.”

Gary Orfield, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project

Many teachers support Howard Gardner’s well-known theory of “multiple intelligences.” A standard textbook in the field, “Education of the Gifted and Talented,” says in the first pages of its latest edition that “We must recognize multiple forms of giftedness.”

Gary Orfield, co-director of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, believes schools define giftedness too narrowly. “Every child has gifts,” he said. “All kids do have special talents. But we only measure a very few.”

Nowadays, many states build off the federal government’s kitchen-sink definition: Gifted and talented students are those 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.”

But in practice, districts often still identify gifted children through IQ and other cognitive ability tests, and Terman’s attitude still lingers. Buried in the back, the “Education of the Gifted and Talented” textbook states that “basic intelligence … is best measured by IQ tests,” and that those scores, “whether we like it or not, and whether it appears elitist, racist, unfair, and/or undemocratic,” are the single best predictor of life outcomes as wide-ranging as “social competence, child abuse, delinquency, crime, poverty, accident proneness, death from auto accidents … smoking during pregnancy, health problems and Medicare claims, and getting a divorce within five years of marriage.”

A clear definition of giftedness is elitist while a broad definition is useless. But however Buffalo was defining giftedness, advocates for Black children knew that something must be wrong because their city couldn’t possibly have so few gifted Black kids.

Surrounded by portraits of creative thinkers such as Muppets creator Jim Henson, the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and the anthropologist Jane Goodall, four students in an Olmsted fourth grade gifted class debated an early step of the Arctic shelter challenge: phrasing the problem so that they could come up with a solution. “This is hard,” one muttered, bending over her paper.

“Black hat,” Valenti-Barone instructed them, “add a few more details.”

By that, the students knew, their teacher meant one of the psychologist Dr. Edward de Bono’s six “thinking hats,” specifically the one that called on thinkers to assess their ideas and look for potential flaws.

Olmsted’s program is based on Renzulli’s three-tiered whole-school enrichment model. The entire school learns about critical thinking and creativity, and gifted kids take most of their classes with their peers, except for the special gifted class, taught by Valenti-Barone, which meets every other day.

While gifted education generally took off in the U.S. after Russia launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, it arrived in Buffalo only after a 1976 federal court ordered the highly segregated city to integrate its schools. Rather than force integration like in Boston, the district came up with an array of magnet programs to encourage white families to enroll their children in predominantly Black public schools. That included a gifted track housed at a largely Black campus near the city’s Delaware Park, the school that would later be renamed Olmsted.

Buffalo’s magnet programs, including Olmsted, integrated schools without Boston’s violence. White and middle-class students attracted to the magnets stayed in the school system, and mixed with Black and low-income students in the same schools. Test scores for all students went up across the board. “They were a national model,” the UCLA’s Orfield said.

To create racial balance, the district conducted outreach, expanded the attendance zone for the seats reserved for nongifted neighborhood kids and had a “prep program” for students who showed potential for giftedness but fell short of the admissions requirements, retired Olmsted middle school principal Michael Gruber said.

But Buffalo’s golden age of integration ebbed quickly. Federal court supervision of the city’s desegregation plan ended in 1995, and a white family whose child did not get into the academically selective middle-high school City Honors sued the district in 1997, alleging “reverse discrimination.” The district ceased efforts to balance race in gifted admissions, according to a report that UCLA’s Civil Rights Project produced for the district in 2015.

Without the outreach and prep program, the Olmsted gifted program began to grow whiter — from 55 percent Black and 30 percent white in 2004 to 32 percent Black and 46 percent white in 2013, according to federal data. People began raising concerns that the admissions process was onerous: Parents had to take their 4-year-olds to the school on a Saturday for a one-on-one IQ test with a psychologist. “I was stunned,” said Sally Krisel, a former president of the National Association for Gifted Children, who visited Buffalo in the late 1990s to advise on how to identify gifted students. “Low-income families, they are working on Saturday.”

The preschoolers also took math and reading readiness tests, and parents had to fill out “inventories” rating their children’s academic prowess, creativity and ability to stay on task. At one time, several people said, the district required a recommendation from a preschool teacher. The preschools that served lots of kids who went to Olmsted knew the sort of thing to write. Many of the parents who applied to Olmsted didn’t even necessarily want gifted services, said Kate Steilen, an education doctoral student and blogger who interviewed the families for a research project. They knew not all their children were especially brilliant — they just wanted to get into the best elementary school in the city.

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

In 2014, a group of Buffalo parents filed a racial discrimination complaint with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. They named Olmsted and several other magnet programs. The federal government found that the district discriminated against Black children, citing data that included Olmsted #64’s admissions numbers: Close to 1 in 5 white applicants were offered a spot at the school, compared to 1 in 10 Black applicants.

The district acknowledged the shortcomings. “Smart parents were using the system to their advantage,”  Will Keresztes, the acting superintendent during the investigation, said. The academic screening tools “were patently unfair.” The district hired Orfield’s UCLA group to recommend changes.

Rather than find a better way to slice the pie, UCLA recommended making the pie bigger. Olmsted should stop cordoning off one-third of its elementary seats for nongifted neighborhood students.  And Buffalo should create “a new high standards elementary school,” they wrote, with 10 percent of seats reserved for “students who have not been adequately prepared but show signs of strong potential.”

Buffalo Public Schools adopted many, though not all, of the recommendations. It streamlined the gifted admissions process, dropping the academic readiness tests and recommendations, but keeping the individually administered IQ test. And while the district did not duplicate Olmsted, it did expand Olmsted’s gifted program to a very different school.

At Eve #61, first grader Kaiden walked across the classroom in early March, looking for a buddy with whom to make paper airplanes. It was the second year of the gifted program at Eve. The school used to be racially integrated, but white families left after the federal court order ended. Educators have developed an arts-infused curriculum with full-time dance, theater, art, and violin teachers. The halls are dingy but lined with students’ Inuit sculptures and dreamcatchers.

Sarah Malczewski, who teaches gifted kids like Kaiden for a portion of each day, created her own curriculum for Eve, but she taught a lot of the same techniques as the Olmsted program, including the de Bono hats and other methods to think outside the box.

The 13 students in Kaiden’s gifted class, which meets daily, had started the project the day before, so they colored in their paper airplanes’ wings, practiced their tosses — and searched for even better designs. “My parents made me make five paper airplanes at home so I would win this,” Sharmin, browsing videos on an iPad with classmate Mariah, said.

“Lookit lookit lookit! Five hundred feet!” Mariah exclaimed to Sharmin, after finding a promising video. Kaiden sat down next to them and Mariah pushed the iPad closer so he could see. One boy accidentally bonked his classmate with a plane and apologized.

Finally, they lined up in the hallway for the official competition. Jumping up and down quietly in lieu of disruptive whooping, they were so excited to pitch the planes that they barely noticed how far they traveled. Malczewski praised not their airplanes but their attitudes, the way they kept working despite frustrations. “I was very happy with the way you guys handled it,” she said. That “is called ‘persistence.’ ”

Afterwards, Malczewski’s students described the gifted class with enthusiasm. Mariah said her favorite hat was the black one, “judgment. Because judgment means consequences, and when you have consequences it means you know you can’t do it and you won’t do it again,” she said. Keyon, from Malczewski’s second grade class, also preferred the black hat, because “it reminds me of the color of my skin.”

Their mouths full of egg-sausage biscuit later that day, Kaiden and his classmate King enthused about Fridays, when “Ms. M.” lets them play learning games on the computer and “sometimes she gives us her phone,” King said. “We get to do fun things,” Kaiden said, chewing.

“Kaiden is — he’s something different!” his mom, Shakeirra McDuffie, who is African American, said a couple weeks later, laughing. He used to wear costumes everywhere; he wouldn’t listen to the pediatrician until the doctor addressed him as “Batman.” For Christmas last year, he asked for a drone and a science kit. His preschool teacher told McDuffie, “You have to try to get him in a program” for advanced students, to ensure he was challenged.

McDuffie was living down the street from Olmsted at the time and applied to the school’s neighborhood program, not the gifted class, but Kaiden didn’t get in. So she chose Eve, hearing it was a good school, not knowing it was launching a gifted program.

Related: Bright black students taught by black teachers are more likely to get into gifted-and-talented classrooms

Malczewski had only three formally gifted kids in kindergarten, two in first grade and four in second in the 2019-20 school year. So Eve has opted to include children such as Kaiden who seemed like they would benefit, not just those who passed the one-on-one IQ test.

“I don’t think there are explicit ill intentions, but I think people go with what they’re comfortable with.”

Buffalo Parent Teacher Organization co-chair Rachel Fix Dominguez, on white parents’ reluctance to send their kids to majority-Black schools

Principal Parette Walker, at one time the principal of Olmsted #64, said parents just didn’t know about Eve yet. “It’s a new program. So we have to advertise it,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll get the enrollment.”

Several parents, however, suggested another reason for the gifted enrollment shortfall at Eve: White parents didn’t want to send their kids to a majority-Black school. It wasn’t the gifted education they were interested in, but the high-performing, majority-white Olmsted. Buffalo Parent Teacher Organization co-chair Rachel Fix Dominguez, who is white, said she’d talked to white, middle-class parents who had turned down a spot in the gifted program at Eve. “They don’t know anyone whose kid has gone to 61, so they’re not going to be the vanguard,” she said. “I don’t think there are explicit ill intentions, but I think people go with what they’re comfortable with.”

That’s not unique to Buffalo. Harvard University researchers found that while white parents supported racially integrated schools in principle, they were uncomfortable with having their children be the minority and less likely to enroll their children in schools with large numbers of Black students.

Howard Thompson II, a Black substitute teacher at Eve whose son passed the gifted test and is in Malczewski’s class, put it plainly: “Racism will always play a factor in most people’s decision-making,” he said.

If the point is to give more Black children in Buffalo the chance to attend gifted programs, maybe Eve’s lack of white students is for the best. “They say some people’s loss is another person’s gain,” Thompson said. When white parents shy away, “more people of color will have the opportunity.”

Both he and McDuffie still considered Olmsted’s gifted program to be better: more robust, with more hours per day of advanced instruction — though it wasn’t clear that was accurate. They hoped to move their sons to Olmsted in the fall. At Olmsted, Kaiden would “be challenged more,” McDuffie said. “I can’t feel like I’m failing my child just because the school system is.”

Even some people who were uncomfortable with the selection standards chose the selective schools. Sam Radford, a Black past president of the District Parent Coordinating Council, put one of his own children in PS 156 Frederick Law Olmsted Middle-High School and another at City Honors School even though his group filed the Office for Civil Rights complaint. He felt uncomfortable about the decision. But “we had to put them in a place where they would get a good education,” he said.

Many of the changes districts make to solve the diversity problem end up making it worse. New York City families seeking gifted education used to wrestle with a panoply of individual school requirements and applications. Critics said it confused less-savvy parents and allowed favoritism. So, in 2007, then-Chancellor Joel Klein announced a uniform admissions process based on a single test with a citywide cutoff — and the inequities grew deeper.

There are many ways to go wrong when identifying gifted children, Ohio State professor Donna Ford said, ways that result in fewer disadvantaged children and more wealthy and white children passing the bar. For instance: Using achievement tests, which better measure a child’s schooling and home resources than their potential. Measuring disadvantaged kids against a national norm instead of against other kids like them. Testing too young — a 4-year-old can have a bad day, and the results don’t necessarily hold over time. And testing only students whose teachers or parents are aware of the program and request it; few teachers get trained in gifted education, so their recommendations are often based on stereotypes (studies find that Black students are more likely to get into gifted programs if they have teachers of the same race).

“Racism will always play a factor in most people’s decision-making.”

Howard Thompson II, a substitute teacher at Eve

Discrimination in gifted education is “intentional and it’s unintentional,” Ford said. But “if you are aware of reasonable alternatives and don’t use them, then it’s intentional.”

Though no one has found a way to identify kids with extraordinary potential that doesn’t map closely onto the privileges of birth, researchers and administrators at the NAGC conference last fall highlighted several promising tactics.

In Anchorage, Alaska, administrators now flag the top 4 percent of scorers in each school on a popular national test that measures academic progress, the MAP, and consider them for gifted services — no matter whether the parent has nudged or not. “We’re supposed to be finding talent and not using [the screening process] to keep people out,” gifted supervisor Peter Ljubicich. He hopes the program will help them create greater gifted equity. As of 2015, even after increasing outreach to communities of color, gifted programs remained close to 60 percent white in a 43 percent white district, according to U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights data.

Another tactic is to include promising students who have not passed an IQ test in gifted programs, a model called “talent development.” That’s what Eve is doing with students like Kaiden. The advantage of talent development is that kids who need a challenge don’t have to meet a potentially disqualifying entrance standard. One disadvantage is that — human nature being what it is — sometimes such programs get tagged as second-best. Another is that talent development is not a sure bet for getting more students past the gatekeepers.

St. Charles Parish outside New Orleans began talent development in 2012. At first it worked: The district increased the number and diversity of students who passed the gifted test after they spent time in gifted classes. “You need these kinds of talent development programs,” Ford told Hechinger’s Emmanuel Felton in 2015. Then the publisher of the test they were using, the Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales, updated its scoring standards — and the pass rate went back down, gifted director Ginny Medina-Hamilton said. As of May 2019, only 26 of the district’s more than 3,200 Black students had been identified as gifted, according to data that Medina-Hamilton shared. (Additional Black kids were “talented,” which in Louisiana refers specifically to the arts.) St. Charles has switched to the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children in the hopes of having more students qualify.

Another way to diversify is to expand the number of gifted seats, which UCLA recommended for Buffalo. About 250 of Buffalo’s more than 30,000 students are in a gifted program. If Buffalo hewed to the national average, it would have about 2,000 gifted kids. But despite the high demand for Olmsted, administrators said that they didn’t need to significantly expand gifted education, beyond adding the program at Eve, because Buffalo has plenty of other academically stimulating options, including STEM and Montessori programs.

Instead, Buffalo got a $1 million grant in 2018 from the Kellogg Foundation to help teachers incorporate bits of gifted education into all pre-K to fourth grade classrooms, an effort that is still being rolled out. (The Kellogg Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) The goal is to offer enrichment to all students, whether or not they’ve formally tested as “gifted.” 

This is in line with a new theory that envisions gifted classes as a service, like special education: an array of personalized support for a child with learning needs outside the norm. Gifted students stay in their home schools and get extra activities or support — perhaps through extra components to an assignment, or by attending fifth grade math as third graders.

Orfield supports serving students where they are. “Offering opportunities and challenges is what a school should do. Whether it’s necessary to segregate kids to do that is another matter,” he said.

But all that enrichment can get expensive. The federal government does not supplement local funding for gifted programs as it does for special education. As of 2015–16, only four states, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and Oklahoma, both mandated gifted education and fully funded the service, according to a report from Purdue University’s college of education.

New York is one of 20 states that don’t require that districts offer gifted education at all, or provide money for it. And Buffalo’s schools had no shortage of costly demands, even before the coronavirus created a budget crisis for the district. Attendees at a variety of parent group meetings in March voiced worries about safety, classrooms without books and 4-year-olds throwing desks.

Buffalo Superintendent Kriner Cash “probably believes philosophically that there should be a gifted and talented program in every school,” said Radford, the past president of the District Parent Coordinating Council. “The question is where the money would come from.”

The district did not answer questions about how much the gifted program costs.

Anne Botticelli, the district’s chief academic officer, said she hopes to be able to offer what she called “enrichment,” though not gifted and talented services, to more students in the future. “We know that we have gems in all of our schools,” she said.

On a March morning, third graders filed into class at PS 45 International School and opened their math composition books. They worked out their daily Think Tank problem to the soft strains of an instrumental version of “I Believe I Can Fly.” At home they speak 10 different languages, including Kinyamulenge and Mai-Mai, but here they focused as one on calculating the missing number that made a set of scales “balance” and writing a number sentence for the resulting equation. A sign on the wall said, “I CAN.”

“Anybody in the dip?” their teacher, Mary Anne Kulp, called out, using one of the catchphrases that encourage her kids to keep going when they’re struggling to understand.

Kulp was thrilled when the district made an off-the-shelf creative-thinking math program, Think Tanks math boxes, available to teachers. “Every student in here achieves. Every single one,” said Kulp, who flies planes and rides motorcycles in her spare time. “I want everybody growing.”

The kids said the math challenges were fun. “It starts our brain in the morning,” Aymir explained. “I just love them because it helps me a lot. And me and my friends discuss it.”

“I am so proud of you,” Kulp told the class in a circle time afterwards. “You are working so hard to get—”

“SMART!” the class yelled.

Kulp doubted whether any subset of students, no matter how gifted, needed a separate class or school. “Technology is a wonderful, wonderful thing. You can assign extra activities,” she said. “We do a lot of small groups, a lot of differentiation.” Students at her school who pass the gifted test tend to stay put instead of transferring to Olmsted, she said. It may be because there are so few seats, but she believes it’s “because they love it here and they feel at home and they feel that all of their needs are going to be met,” she said.

Buffalo administrators say they want to improve social and racial justice, especially in the area of discipline. They have an office dedicated to racial equity, hold regular professional development on racial diversity for teachers and infused The New York Times’ 1619 Project into middle and high school curriculum. They were open to talking about their stumbles.

However, the district’s efforts in gifted education have not moved the needle. For fall 2020, the parents of 403 children applied to Olmsted’s elementary gifted program and 39 to Eve’s, according to data the district provided. One quarter of the white students and the multiracial students were assigned seats. Only 11 percent of the Black and 10 percent of the Hispanic children got in.

Last year, parents asked the federal Office for Civil Rights to reopen the 2014 investigation. After they held a press conference, the New York state attorney general’s office sent Cash a letter, saying it had opened a separate “inquiry” and requesting information about racially disparate school discipline and admissions. Nathaniel Kuzma, the Buffalo district’s general counsel, wrote in response that the district would cooperate, but added that it “has become a national proof point for district transformation around issues of equity, justice, the mindset of high expectations for all children, and in forthright dialogue about race and discrimination.” The state attorney general’s investigation was still active; the office declined to comment.

Should Buffalo shutter gifted education because of its racial inequity? McDuffie and Thompson, African American parents of students at Eve, thought the opposite: that the district should expand. “Don’t shut it down,” said McDuffie, Kaiden’s mom. “Open up your doors and be wider.”

Thompson’s son, Howard III, was offered a gifted seat at Olmsted for third grade, his father said. But he and his wife decided to keep him at Eve. Howard III knew the school and had built good relationships with teachers and friends. The gifted program would expand and improve; anyway, “parental involvement plays a far more pivotal role in a child’s growth and development,” Thompson said. If anything in the classroom falls short, he will provide it. He and his wife want their child to “enjoy being a kid first, and then a wonderful student, second.”

And then attend highly selective City Honors for the rest of his school career, he said.

This story about gifted education 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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