Study Finds Lower-Ranked Students Get Little Benefit From Gifted Programs

Education Week (6/14, Sparks) reports that according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, "some aspects of gifted education that have been appropriated to improve the achievement of a broader population of students may provide less of a boost than commonly thought." The study "evaluated the effectiveness of both in-class gifted programs and magnet schools for more than 8,000 middle school students in an unnamed Southwestern school district of more than 200,000 students." Researchers "found that students in these programs were more likely than other students to do in-depth coursework with top teachers and high-performing peers. Yet students who barely met the 5th grade cutoff criteria to enter the gifted programs fared no better academically in 7th grade, after a year and a half in the program, than did similarly high-potential students who just missed qualifying for gifted identification."