Giftedness Isn’t a Lie. It’s Just Much Broader Than We Realize.

A response to “The Mirage of the Gifted Child” (New York magazine)

Source: Klaus Vedfelt | Getty

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 was a slow learner who 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 the feeling of reading a long New York magazine essay by Katie Arnold-Ratliff arguing that “giftedness itself is a lie.” But what you imagine is probably wrong. Because instead of ending up as a warrior against gifted education, I’ve actually become a fierce advocate of gifted education. Here’s why.

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I’ve spent my entire adult life studying the question what is intelligence, really? I went on to study cognitive science, earn a Ph.D. at Yale, and write a book called Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, all of it driven by a desire to redefine intelligence. So I came in sympathetic to her critique, I really did. The trouble is that the part she’s right about and the part she’s wrong about are two different claims, and the entire essay depends on us not noticing the difference.

What does she get right? Well, some things. Testing a four-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. None of that is defensible. The machinery we use to find gifted kids is broken in ways that should embarrass everyone who runs it.

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. You can demolish the SAT without proving that some kids don’t read at three; you can expose a rigged casting process without proving that talent doesn’t exist. The lie isn’t giftedness. The lie is the essentialist label: the fantasy that a Tuesday-morning test reveals a fixed kind of person, a caste you’re assigned at five and can never leave, or (in my case) a caste of ungifted that you can never escape.

Here’s where the argument actually breaks down, claim by claim.

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Let me first say something very clearly, as someone who has spent a career publishing on this exact question: for all its length and confidence, the NY Mag piece is scientifically thin. It’s a beautifully written personal essay that leans on a handful of selectively chosen criticisms and almost none of the actual data: the decades of evidence on how ability is measured, how it develops, and how much of it our current system misses. That matters, because this is at bottom an empirical question, and you can’t settle an empirical question with a well-told story. The real science is more nuanced, and frankly more hopeful, than the piece lets on.

She writes that the whole pro-gifted story, that you can put a number on a child’s intelligence and that bright kids benefit from enrichment, contains “not a single part” that’s true. That claim is simply false. Cognitive ability is one of the most reliably measured and predictively valid constructs in all of psychology. The longest-running study of intellectually precocious kids, the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, has tracked its participants for nearly half a century and finds that ability spotted in childhood predicts patents, doctorates, and creative work decades later, far above base rates. And the claim that enrichment doesn’t help runs straight into one of the most lopsided literatures in all of education: the evidence that well-designed acceleration works is about as settled as anything we have. You can argue we find the wrong kids. You cannot argue the ruler measures nothing.

Then there’s her best material, which is about instability. She quotes a test-maker mocking the old belief that a child found gifted at four is gifted for life “just like you have curly red hair,” and notes that scores shift over time. She’s right, and honestly, I part company here with the people loudly defending the tests too, because I am not an advocate of early one-shot tests.

But here’s some really interesting nuance. On the one hand, it’s actually possible to detect at least some signs of giftedness in infancy. The data here is kind of remarkable. Brief tests of infant attention (basically, how fast a baby gets bored of a picture it’s already seen) predict adult IQ and academic achievement years later, at around .3, and independent of how educated the parents are. IQ at age three already tracks IQ at twenty-one at about .7. So no, this isn’t nothing. There’s real signal there, even that early.

On the other hand, those same scores are nowhere near fixed. Follow the same kids over time and you’ll watch IQ swing around quite a bit, especially in childhood and adolescence. In one study of teenagers, a full third showed a clear change in IQ: one kid’s score jumped 21 points, another’s fell 18. Intelligence in those years is tied to the dynamic way the cortex is still maturing, not to some fixed quantity you’re handed at birth. As my mentor, the British IQ researcher Nick Mackintosh, used to say, if you scored the same at forty as you did at ten, something would have gone badly wrong in your life.

So which is it, real or a mirage? Both, and neither, which is precisely the nuance the article never reaches for. The early signal is real, and a single early score is still no verdict. You have to hold both of those at once. That’s not fence-sitting. That’s just what the actual data require.

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The fix: stop betting a child’s future on one test at age four. It’s exactly why I’ve argued for re-screening kids and assessing them over time instead of a single dramatic moment. And I’m the evidence for that, too: my own ceiling was set wrong by people holding a clipboard, and then it moved.

Arnold-Ratliff also calls intelligence tests “unreliable,” and that’s the wrong word for the real problem. There’s a difference between a bad way to make a high-stakes decision and an unreliable measure, and she’s collapsed the two. One number, caught on one morning, isn’t noise. The mistake is treating it as a verdict on a whole human being and what they are capable of becoming in life.

The biggest contradiction in the piece is quieter. Arnold-Ratliff writes that a gifted child is just one who performs differently from peers, “rather than any inherent characteristic,” as if the category were drawn in sand. And then, a few paragraphs later, her own reporting blows that up. She notes that highly intelligent kids are far more likely to be diagnosed with autism and ADHD, and she quotes a neuropsychologist describing their “overexcitability,” brains “firing nonstop,” acutely sensitive to everything around them. One of her own sources says she doesn’t think there are “truly gifted neurotypical children.” Friends, that is not the description of a mirage: That is the description of a real, embodied, neurologically distinct way of moving through the world! It is, in fact, the twice-exceptional and asynchronous development I’ve spent years studying, and that I lived. You cannot call giftedness a social fiction in one breath and describe its neural fingerprints in the next.

So what do we actually do? Not what she suggests, which is to wave the existence of giftedness under the rug. In my view, we need to do the opposite. We look harder, and we look wider.

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Start with the disparities, because they’re the strongest part of her case and they point somewhere she doesn’t go. Most gifted programs are entered through referral. A teacher or a parent has to flag the child first, and referral is precisely where bias lives. The fix for a biased front door is not to brick up the building. It’s universal screening: test every child instead of waiting for an adult to notice them. When districts have actually done this, they’ve found the low-income, Black, and Hispanic gifted kids who were sitting in the same classrooms the whole time, invisible to a system that was never pointed at them. The cleanest demonstration is Card and Giuliano’s research, which showed exactly that. Universal screening is the single most pro-equity reform available in this entire debate, and somehow it’s the one almost nobody is shouting about. (Years ago I surveyed how states actually define and identify giftedness, and the variation is staggering, which tells you most of this is a policy choice, not a law of nature.)

Second, widen what counts. Here’s an irony: the U.S. government’s own 1972 definition of giftedness was already broad, naming six dimensions including creative thinking, leadership, and ability in the visual and performing arts. We just stopped looking for most of them and kept the slice that fits on a Scantron. The cost is enormous. The creativity researcher E. Paul Torrance estimated that identifying gifted kids by IQ and achievement alone misses about 70 percent of the most creative children, partly because creative kids tend to be unconventional and teachers reliably nominate the pleasers instead. And unlike IQ tests, creativity measures show almost no ethnic gap. Sit with that. We have a whole category of real creative giftedness that’s far more equitably distributed, and we mostly don’t bother to look for it.

I want to name the other error too, the one being made by the people firing back at this article, because I find their rebuttal a little boring even though it isn’t technically wrong. They’re answering with eminence statistics: “BUT identified-gifted kids become professors and prizewinners at many times the base rate, so the label works!” OK, fine. But that quietly accepts her terms, that giftedness only counts if it cashes out later in achievement. It doesn’t. Giftedness is a trait, not a trophy. A gifted child who never becomes eminent was not a mirage. They were a gifted child. We understand this everywhere except the intellect. Nobody writes “the myth of athletic giftedness.” Nobody runs an exposé on basketball camps for talented twelve-year-olds, or calls a kid’s jump shot a fraud because she didn’t reach the WNBA. We see the gift, we feed it, and we don’t need it to ripen into fame to call it real. The talent is real now. Measuring a child by the output they might someday produce is the same mistake we keep making with worn-out adults: confusing a person for their productivity.

The most revealing moment is Arnold-Ratliff’s own moment. She adored her gifted years, the tidepooling, reading The New Yorker during silent reading, the night hikes built to teach courage, and she also lets slip that she may never have actually qualified for the program. Read that again. The education that changed her life was never causally connected to the test that supposedly justified it. That is the whole argument, made by accident. The problem was never the enrichment. It was the gate. So tear down the gate, not the education. Give every child the enrichment they need, when they need it.

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Which brings me back to where I started. The article spends thousands of words on what the gifted label does to the kids who carry it. It never once asks what the other label does, the one I wore, the quiet verdict handed to the kids left behind that they’re the limited ones. I know that label from the inside, and I know what undid it. In ninth grade, a special-education teacher pulled me aside and asked, in effect, why I was still in her class. It had genuinely never occurred to me that I had a choice. That one question moved my ceiling more than any test ever did, and everything I’ve done since, Cambridge, Yale, a career spent studying the very intelligence I was once presumed to lack, started with a single question by a single compassionate teacher who really saw me and my potential. So when smart people decide the compassionate move is to throw out the entire idea of human potential, I get twitchy, because the kids who pay for that are never the ones at the citywide gifted school. They’re the ones nobody bothered to look at.

So, is everyone gifted? Probably not. Not everyone is gifted at everything, and a word that includes everyone describes no one. But far more kids are gifted than the gate ever lets in. In Ungifted I define intelligence as “the dynamic interplay of engagement and abilities in pursuit of personal goals.” Not an ability devoid of passion and interest. Not a fixed quantity issued at birth. A trajectory you’re allowed to be on, if someone bothers to put you on it. Somebody finally bothered with me. I want to pay this forward.

The gifted child isn’t a mirage. What’s a mirage is the velvet rope we strung around an education that should have belonged to all of them. Take down the rope, widen the lens, screen every kid, and I promise you’ll be astonished by how much was sitting in the room the entire time.

P.S. I'm bringing my Columbia course, The Science of Living Well, to the public this summer — learn with me: scottbarrykaufman.com/livingwell.