“I taught him most everything up until kindergarten,” Lee said. “And then he surpassed me.” 

Managing Xavier’s outsized ability proved challenging. His mother, a teacher and performer, was constantly chasing down new opportunities for him in what felt like a job of its own, one that came with numerous out-of-pocket expenses. 

Lee paid a math tutor $70 a week to work with him for just 45 minutes and was constantly buying books and other materials to support him. One coding program alone cost $900. It was terrific, she said, but unaffordable in the long term. 

It wasn’t until summer 2023 that she learned about a brand new nonprofit created to support high-achieving young math students with more than $100,000 in educational assistance over 10 years. Xavier was recommended to by an he attended in Ohio. 

Soon, he and his mom were bombarded with help. 

“Now I have a partner,” Lee said of the organization. “They are begging us to tell them what he is interested in so that they can follow up. They make things so much easier.”

Born in June 2023 and funded by more than $16 million in grants from foundations focused on mathematics and supporting underserved youth, National Math Stars already paid for her son’s $299 3D printer and sundry items through , a math tutoring service that offers online classes, books and other learning tools.  

The program began with 12 children from around the country and added another 61 from Texas last fall. All were between the ages of 7 and 11. 

It will soon expand to the Midwest: It plans to bring on another 100 students later this year — half from the Lone Star State and the remainder from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. It intends to grow incoming classes to 200-plus children, as long as funding allows for the duration of their decade-long commitment.  

It finds participants by asking select schools — it’s in communication with more than 1,500 of them — to identify students in the second and third grade who score in the top 2% or 3% of their class on standardized math exams. Parents can also apply on their child’s behalf: and will close June 15.

Ilana Walder-Biesanz, National Math Stars’ founder, wants to identify and help mathematically gifted students when they are young, before factors like race and socioeconomics wear away at their opportunity and achievement. 

“If we look for top performers in second grade, we’re going to have a more diverse and representative group … than if we first look for them in eighth grade or in high school, when there has been more time for the people with more resources to get ahead — and the people with fewer resources to fall behind,” she said. 

Walder-Biesanz knows what it’s like to be unchallenged at school. She skipped three grades — she entered college at 15 and graduated four years later — but was another three years ahead in what was her favorite subject: She took algebra in sixth grade at age 9 and calculus in 10th grade when she was 12. 

She earned her bachelor’s from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, her master’s in European Literature at the University of Cambridge and her MBA from Stanford. Walder-Biesanz previously worked as a product manager at Microsoft and Yahoo and later as a management consultant at Bain.

While her family was well resourced, her local schools’ math curriculum wasn’t challenging enough: She had to seek outside sources to supplement what it lacked. 

She knows not all children have that chance, which is why she is focused on widening opportunity for all mathematically gifted kids. 

While future classes will skew younger, the pilot included older students like Xavier to amass a group quickly and to serve as a vanguard: These children will reach middle, high school and college ahead of their peers, allowing National Math Stars time to further refine its offerings. 

Xavier, 11 and who enjoys coding, said he loves math because, “It can describe almost anything if you use it right.” 

The sixth grader said he’s currently trying to build a , an for generating a sequence of numbers whose properties approximate ones. They’re often used in programming, simulations and electronic games. 

He’s also interested in pentomino tilings — think of the shapes used in the game Tetris, which have four squares and add a fifth. 

“I just think it’s cool,” he said. 

And, through National Math Stars, he was able to talk to the creators of , which offers a free suite of math tools — including what Xavier calls a “super awesome” graphing calculator — to help users represent their ideas mathematically.

After being asked to speak to National Math Stars students at large, Desmos recognized some of them were already quite familiar with its offerings. Those students were invited to meet with the company’s product team and give their advice on what it could improve upon. 

Xavier said he was elated to speak to people so well respected by the mathematics community. 

Another participant, Haripriya Patel, 9 and in the third grade, attends school online. Her mother said she breezes through her core curriculum, electives and homework in just three to four hours each day.

A part of National Math Stars for about five months, she particularly enjoyed the welcome weekend in Houston, where she and other students made mathematical origami and completed logic puzzles and math-based games. 

Haripriya, who aspires to be a marine biologist, said she loves algebraic equations, geometry and number theory. 

“I like problem solving,” said Haripriya, who lives in Katy, Texas. “I enjoy the process, the opportunity.”

Johan Banegas, 8 and from Dallas, was thrilled to be accepted to the program because “not a lot of people can do it.” 

He said school doesn’t always provide the rigor he needs and that he’s already skipped second grade. 

“To be honest,” he said bashfully during a recent interview, “it’s still so easy in fourth grade.”

National Math Stars has paid for, among other items, Johan’s premium subscription to , which mails him technology packs meant for teens and adults.

Walder-Biesanz recognizes that participating families are asked to make a major commitment to the program. Their children must be enrolled in advanced math courses outside of school, regularly check in with their adviser, attend weekly math mentoring sessions and STEM-related summer programs each year.

“Obviously, we fully fund that, including travel and all the associated costs, but they do have to make the time for it and make it a priority,” she said. 

Johan, who wants to be an engineer, said he is determined to stick with it through high school. 

“They pay for a lot of stuff and they also let us learn more than usual so we can keep on being advanced in math,” he said.

Walder-Biesanz said her organization learned much from its pilot year, including how children value in-person interaction, how participating students didn’t need tutoring in advanced math — they were gifted enough to handle it on their own — and how families from lower socio-economic levels were more hesitant to ask for money to support their students’ academic ambitions. 

“We initially had a kind of free-form funding approach where we said, ‘Hey, you know, if it’s STEM related and you ask for it, we’ll probably say yes,” to telling families they had a certain budget and that “we want you to use the whole thing.”

Walder-Biesanz said her organization asks early on in the admissions process about family income and first-generation immigrant status, looking for indicators that the opportunity might be particularly valuable. 

“We take that strongly into consideration as we try to put student’s scores into context,” she said. “I’m more impressed with an ESL student from a low-income family who scores 99th percentile on our admissions exam than with a super well-resourced student who scores 99.9th percentile.”

Melodie Baker, executive director of , a nonprofit that uses research data and storytelling to shape and advance policies, said timely, early identification is crucial for cultivating and developing mathematical talent.

“Continuous support during formative years, especially for students who face economic stressors, can mitigate typical distractions — needing to work to help support family — and allow students to remain engaged,” she said. “Like the saying goes, while talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not.”

Walder-Biesanz said not all highly gifted children are well served by their local public schools and that it’s tragic to lose out on their abilities.

“As a country and as a world, we face a lot of big challenges,” she said. “We are going to need people with really strong STEM skills, really strong analytical ability, really strong problem solving and collaboration skills to tackle the world’s problems and to stay competitive as a country.”

Georgia’s program for gifted students has problems with too-large class sizes, teacher training and student selection, a new from the state auditor’s office finds.

In the 2020-2021 school year, about 199,000 Georgia students were designated as gifted, representing about 12% of the 1.7 million statewide student body. The state Department of Education says these students need “special instruction and/or special ancillary services to achieve at levels commensurate with his or her ability(ies).”

To help make sure they get that instruction, the state spends between 30% and 68% more on each gifted student based on Georgia’s Quality Basic Education formula for per-student spending. That makes the gifted program the largest non-general education program funded according to the formula.

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Class sizes and instruction methods

Gifted funding is based on a ratio of 12 students per teacher, but the auditors found more than 77% of gifted classes across the state exceeded 12 students, and gifted classes averaged 23 students per teacher. That means that the state is paying a higher rate for gifted students but may not be reaping the intended benefits of more individual instruction for gifted students, the auditors found.

Gifted coordinators told auditors that a lack of resources can lead to larger classes.

The auditors found that this issue was exacerbated in larger school systems – Georgia’s 36 school systems with more than 10,000 students had an average of 23 gifted students per teacher, while 11 systems with less than 1,000 students had an average of 12 students per teacher.

The auditors recommended that the General Assembly should consider tweaking funding for gifted students in discussions about altering QBE, and the state Department of Education should periodically review gifted class sizes.

The DOE agreed with these findings but added “Georgia is a local control state, which allows school districts to choose which gifted service delivery model(s) best serve the students in the various grade bands. For all QBE categories, school districts earn funding based on a formula but are afforded flexibility per state law.”

The DOE also noted that the 1:12 ratio is the formula for funding, not a limit, and that local districts can waive class sizes under state law.

But different methods of teaching may prevent gifted students from receiving individualized attention, the auditors found.

The DOE allows eight models for gifted instruction, including resource classes, in which students are pulled out of classes one day a week for a class that can only include gifted students. Seventy percent of Georgia gifted elementary students have at least one resource class.

Other methods include cluster grouping, in which six to eight gifted students are placed in an otherwise general education classroom led by a teacher with a gifted endorsement who provides different lesson plans for both groups, and collaborative teaching, which is similar to cluster grouping, but the classroom is led by a teacher without gifted certification who is assisted in lesson planning by a teacher with certification.

Statewide, 40% of gifted elementary school students were enrolled in a class with cluster grouping and 12% had at least one collaborative teaching class.

The National Association for Gifted Children says gifted students should receive differentiated instruction – lessons that give them the opportunity to be challenged and grow their skills – and general education services should not replace differentiated instruction provided by models like the resource class.

“Cluster and Collaborative models, however, are at higher risk of lacking differentiation because students may have a broad array of skills in the same classroom,” the auditors found.

The education department disagreed with the audit’s recommendations to review class data and work with districts to ensure differentiation, noting that “Georgia is a local control state, which allows school districts to choose which gifted service delivery model(s) best serve the students in the various grade bands.”

Teacher training

The education department requires gifted classes to be led by teachers with gifted in-field endorsements, certificates which typically require nine to 12 hours of college credits, equaling about 200 hours of coursework, which can be expensive and time-consuming for working teachers.

The courses and field work are designed to allow teachers to nurture students’ talents and provide them with appropriately challenging work, but auditors found 7,500 of 76,000 gifted classes in the 2020-2021 school year were taught by teachers without an endorsement.

The auditors found that rural districts were more likely to have higher percentages of teachers without the endorsement, but there were also other outliers, including one suburban system in which 805 classes, half of the total gifted classes, were taught by teachers without a record of an endorsement. Only 34 systems, or about 20%, had all gifted classes taught by an endorsed teacher.

That means the state may have overpaid up to $9.7 million to gifted classes without a certified gifted teacher, the auditors estimated.

The auditors also found that about 3,800 students, about 2% of children in gifted classes, were not identified as eligible for the program and that the state may have paid an additional $3.6 million for gifted classes for ineligible students.

The education department partially agreed with the auditors’ recommendations to handle these discrepancies and said new policies are already in place starting this school year, but they noted that most of the data was collected during a time when the pandemic was at its height, which limited opportunities to attain endorsements.

Student selection and instruction

The auditors also found fault with schools’ processes for selecting students.

One problem they listed was that the DOE does not require screening all students for gifted status, which they said may cause students to miss out, especially those in disadvantaged groups.

Students can be referred by teachers, counselors or others with knowledge of their academic abilities, or they can be automatically referred if they score high on standardized tests. Referred students are reviewed by a panel, and, if approved, can be enrolled subject to parental approval.

But eligibility declines as poverty levels increase, the researchers found, and Asian and white students are overrepresented in gifted programs compared with members of other races, both in Georgia and nationally. The researchers noted that most school systems do provide universal screening, but that it is not required as it is in other states.

The National Association for Gifted Children recommends universal screening as well as steps including training for general education teachers to recognize gifted students early and providing information to parents in multiple languages.

The education department partially agreed with the auditors’ recommendations, saying it would be willing to incorporate universal screening guidance into its best practices if it were “added in state law and with additional appropriated state funding.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on and .

The magnitude of this announcement is that it represents a shift away from models of gifted and talented programming that rely on labeling, sorting and segregating students, and toward designs that encourage inclusion and integration of all children in mixed-ability classrooms. It also represents a philosophical shift in the understanding of gifted education because of its recognition of all children’s innate potential for demonstrating strengths and high intellectual performance.

The Javits program reflects our position on the future of G&T education because it addresses equity through the excellence targeted in gifted education. Some school leaders and policymakers are already re-envisioning what gifted programs should look like, rather than tweaking admissions systems and maintaining separate classes that serve only a select few. For example, students in ; , Minnesota; ; , New York; and at in Brooklyn, New York, are being exposed to accelerated learning and enrichment opportunities based on the philosophy that all children have unique gifts and talents — and it is the school’s job to identify and cultivate them. 

One district that is working toward the goals of the Javits program is New York City. Last fall, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he would eliminate separate G&T programs and replace them with “,” . The plan was to stop testing 4-year-olds for coveted G&T slots, a practice that ended up with more than 70% of the 2,500 seats “, who make up less than a third of the city’s overall student population,” each year. The new plan was to offer all kindergartners access to accelerated learning starting in September 2022. Yet, because de Blasio announced this change three months before Mayor Eric Adams took office, the city still seems to be at a crossroads, even after extensive .

This is unfortunate, as a in New York City and beyond finds that the separate and segregated nature of most G&T programs sustains inequities inside schools . In 2013,  at Michigan State University compared how students of comparable academic abilities perform when they are admitted to a public school for gifted children versus when they remain in regular-track schools and classrooms. After a year and a half of G&T classes, there was essentially no difference in test results between students in G&T who had scored right above the admissions cutoff and children in regular classrooms who had scored just below. A 2019  of 2,000 elementary schools across three states by the National Center for Research on Gifted Education echoed those findings: Third graders in gifted programs made no significant learning gains in comparison with their peers in general education. 

The problem starts with , which lead to inequality and exclusionary behaviors by some parents who can access test prep and other means to secure scarce seats for their children. Students in G&T classes who are segregated from their peers miss out on the numerous benefits of , , including higher test scores in math and science and cultural competency skills for global literacy. In addition, sorting students into separate programs or classes unfairly labels them. As Linda Darling-Hammond wrote, “. All children are motivated to learn the next set of skills for which they are ready; few are motivated by labels that rank them against others or communicate stigma.”

Discriminatory and subjective admissions criteria such as achievement tests, grades and teacher recommendations that districts typically use to identify students for G&T have been blamed for the segregation — and they are certainly part of the problem. Yet districts must change not only how they .��

We believe, based on our research and advocacy work with urban and suburban schools, that what is holding some districts back from offering G&T education to all is the assumption that parents with children in separate programs will oppose it. This , based on winners and losers, is morally, ethically and . It perpetuates a system of and racial entitlement. But there is an alternative to such an us-versus-them mentality: the solidarity dividend, also known as a “rising tide lifts all boats” mindset.

There is evidence that New York City families, students and educators will support phasing out separate G&T programs and replacing them with schoolwide enrichment models, such as STEM or International Baccalaureate. It was a that led the school to end G&T. A group of NYC students are plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the city that .” And District 13 Superintendent Kamar Samuels said this about his district’s replacement of separate G&T classes with schoolwide programs: “It’s about all students in the school and all teachers in the school (emphasis added).” Commenting on NYC’s shift to G&T education for all, education scholar , of the National Association of Gifted Children, said, “We should absolutely be doing a lot less separating of these kids, unless there is literally no other way to provide a particular service.”

Many more students lack access to G&T classes than have it. Why not use those numbers as the rationale to provide gifted education to all? What is now a private commodity that benefits mostly white and Asian students can become a public good for all children. It is time to set a new path forward and celebrate all students for their unique abilities and strengths, rather than labeling and sorting them. As the Javits gifted and talented program proposes, more districts should move toward the goal of gifted-for-all programs — and receive funding to do that important work.

Allison Roda is an assistant professor of education at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, New York. Yvette Jackson is an adjunct professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and senior scholar at the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education. Halley Potter is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation.

But suggests that access to educational opportunity is also unequally distributed among children at the top of the academic heap, and that even some of the brightest young students are at a high risk of being overlooked within their schools and districts.

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The study, commissioned by the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute, points to clear disparities in the prospects of high-achieving students along lines of race and class. Black and low-income elementary schoolers in Ohio who scored well on state exams were less likely to be classified as gifted and talented than comparable white and high-income children. Into middle and high school, they achieved at lower levels on standardized tests, Advanced Placement exams, and college entrance exams, and they were less likely to enroll in college.

Scott Imberman, the report’s author and an economist at Michigan State University, said that it wasn’t certain whether the lower rates of gifted identification exacerbated the performance gaps between student populations. Beginning in 2017, Ohio mandated more comprehensive screening for gifted status in the early grades, but historically, even some students who received that status have gone without gifted services.

“The main thing here is that there was, and probably still is, a problem with these gaps,” Imberman said. “These higher-achieving minority and disadvantaged students were not performing as well, over time, as high-achieving students who were advantaged, and they were also less likely to be enrolled in gifted programs.”

To study the long-term trajectories of academically promising students, Imberman sought student-level records from the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive, which included third-grade performance on Ohio’s state standardized test for over 900,000 participants between the 2005-06 and 2011-12 academic years. Imberman focused on students of all backgrounds who scored in the top 20 percent statewide — a sample of roughly 180,000 — and matched those results with scores on the ACT and SAT, as well as college enrollment figures from the National Student Clearinghouse.

In terms of both short- and long-term academic performance, poor and African American students who scored in the top 20 percent fell behind their peers. Subsequent standardized test scores from grades 4-8 revealed that high-achieving students generally lost ground to their classmates in the bottom 80 percent, principally due to improvement among lower-performing students in late childhood and early adolescence. But in both reading and math, the relative performance of high-achievers who were white, Hispanic, Asian American, and higher-income held up significantly better than their economically disadvantaged and African American classmates.

High school assessments showed evidence of the same persistent differences. Black and disadvantaged students who were high-achievers in the third grade were less likely to take the ACT test and AP tests, and scored lower than other high-achievers when they did. The average AP scores for more affluent students (3.2 on a five-point scale) and white students (3.1) were notably higher than less affluent students (2.6) and African Americans (2.3).

Finally, 57 percent of white high-achievers later enrolled in a four-year college, compared with 53 percent of Asian Americans, 30 percent of Hispanics, and 26 percent of African Americans; among students who weren’t classified as economically disadvantaged, 58 percent later enrolled in a four-year college, compared with 35 percent of high-achievers who did receive that classification.

In a separate set of conclusions that may offer a partial explanation for those sharp divergences, Imberman found that students from different demographics were identified for gifted and talented services at vastly different rates. Black and low-income high-achievers are less likely to be identified in the third grade than other student groups, and the gaps substantially grow by the time they’ve reached the eighth grade.

In fact, the report finds that simply being identified as gifted may carry some achievement benefits: Receiving the gifted classification in math led to a modest increase in reading scores of .02 standard deviations and a boost to math scores of .03 standard deviations — equivalent to a performance boost of roughly one percentile annually. What’s more, those effects were relatively larger for African American and Hispanic students than white ones.

The findings echo those of published by economists David Card and Laura Giuliano, which found that when a large urban school district adopted universal gifted screening for second graders, it led to large increases in the number of minority and low-income students who were classified. A from Fordham found that just 61.5 percent of K-12 schools in Ohio offered gifted programming, and less than 8 percent of students enrolled at those schools received access to them.

Imberman called the effects on achievement “plausibly causal,” noting that social factors other than gifted identification might play some part in explaining the effects.

“I’d say that this provides some prima facie, suggestive evidence that expanding access to gifted education among minorities, in particular, could be a way to help reduce these gaps among high-achievers,” he told ����Ӱ��.