Writer: Ignoring Gifted Students Imperils US Economy

In a New York Times (9/19, Subscription Publication) op-ed, Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, writes that all gifted students deserve the opportunity to have a strong education. "But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous private schools." Finn writes that public schools are "failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands of these high-potential girls and boys," and argues that policies that sacrifice cultivating the talents of gifted students place the nation's economic prosperity at risk.