I didn’t think much about gifted and talented programs until I saw my husband’s shirt. It sits folded at the bottom of his T-shirt pile because — not surprisingly — he would never leave the house wearing a shirt that reads “Gifted and Talented Education — Allegheny Intermediate Unit.” Zhe started in such programs the year his family immigrated to America from China, when he started second grade in Fairbanks, Alaska.
His father would soon find work in Pennsylvania’s collapsing steel industry, and his mother waitressed and took community college classes to train for a technical role at an engineering firm. Meanwhile, Zhe enrolled in gifted programs at public schools in rural Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh suburbs, and at Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Sciences, a free summer residency camp for high-achieving students. Eventually, he attended Harvard on scholarship.
Having grown up in Massachusetts, I marveled at this story. I knew of no schools with gifted and talented programs. Several high-achieving students at my public middle school went on to private high schools, but that was an expensive option for students who might’ve otherwise stayed in the public system, if advanced or enrichment courses had been offered free of charge.
But Massachusetts is an outlier. While close to 60 percent of public schools across the country offer gifted and talented programs, fewer than 4 percent of Massachusetts schools do, according to a 2019 report presented to the.
