Dear Colleagues, 
 
The education sector is understandably focused on helping students recover academic ground lost during the pandemic. That’s an important goal. But that work has masked what is arguably a larger challenge that predates the Covid crisis: the dissolution of the national commitment to educational rigor, to ensuring that schools have high expectations for every student.
 
The need to return educational excellence to the top of the nation’s agenda is reflected in a decade-long decline in national test scores and measures of college readiness. And it’s reflected in public education’s failure to provide advanced learning opportunities to many highly capable low-income students and students of color. High-achieving students from the wealthiest 20 percent of U.S. families are six time more likely to receive gifted-and-talented services than high-performing students from the poorest 20 percent.
 
The paucity of advanced programs has embroiled school boards, state legislatures, and the U.S. Supreme Court in battles over access to the scarce resource and has led, ironically, for calls to abandon advanced learning altogether in the name of equity. But in a handful of states and school districts, new models of advanced education are emerging that have sought to bridge the debate by being both rigorous and inclusive.
 
In Excellence with Equity: The Case for Rethinking Gifted Education, a new report written by FutureEd senior fellow and New York Times-bestselling author Peg Tyre, we examine the current landscape of gifted education and profile three school districts that have embraced this third way in advanced learning, working to tap the talents of many more students than in the past: Gadsden Elementary District #32 in Arizona, the New York City Department of Education, and Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools. And we summarize the research on a range of advanced-learning strategies.