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When New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani announced plans to phase out the city’s kindergarten gifted-and-talented programs, he did so in the name of equity. For years, these programs have enrolled disproportionately few Black and Latino students — an inequity rooted in unequal access to early enrichment and test preparation. Mamdani’s proposal and public comments suggest he views early gifted placement as a systemically unfair program that accelerates some children while denying others similar opportunities.
He’s right about the underrepresentation. But ending gifted programs doesn’t fix inequity; it removes one of the few formal routes to advanced learning. Wealthier families replace it with tutoring and private schools, while low-income parents are left with fewer options. Eliminating public gifted programs doesn’t level the field; it tilts it.
Even more concerning, it narrows the very top of the nation’s talent funnel — exactly the opposite of what should be happening. True equity comes from identifying more talent earlier, broadening how it is identified and ensuring every child has a pathway into demanding coursework.
When I moved my family from Newark to Moorestown, New Jersey, an affluent suburb outside Philadelphia, I saw how wealthier school systems deliberately nurture talent. In kindergarten, children took a standardized test; the top scorers entered gifted programs in first grade. By fourth grade, they were tracked into advanced classes. It was systematic and designed to nurture academic potential.
I’ve seen that kind of cultivation in another field entirely: sports. When I was a middle school principal in Newark, one of my students was an average basketball player in sixth grade. Two years later, scouts were at our games; Dariq Whitehead went on to Duke and then the NBA. Athletics systems are relentless about finding and developing talent early. Academic systems rarely are.
At Thrive Scholars, we identify thousands of high-achieving teens from low-income backgrounds — through a national selection process that looks for exceptional academic performance and persistence — and give them the sustained help they need to excel in rigorous colleges and high-growth careers. These are remarkable young people who made it from kindergarten all the way to high school largely unnoticed. During the summers after their junior and senior years, they spend six weeks taking three hours of calculus and three hours of academic writing each day — the kind of deep preparation wealthier peers often access through private programs. Throughout college, they receive four years of one-on-one career coaching, so academic gains translate into opportunity.
Some 95% of our scholars graduate from college, many in STEM fields; their average GPA rivals that of their wealthiest peers, and their starting salaries are roughly twice their families’ household income.
But providing academic catch-up and economic mobility, while essential, are not the same as cultivating excellence. Charters and programs like mine help more students reach and finish college, and that is progress. But it is not the same as moving more students into the most influential seats in American life. Look at who occupies executive boardrooms, elite research labs, federal clerkships, venture capital firms and tenured STEM faculties: they still overwhelmingly come from affluent, largely white pipelines. While getting more low-income students to college is necessary, it isn’t sufficient for diversifying who leads, invents and allocates capital.
You can see the structural gap in our intake. Even exceptional scholars arrive having had uneven access to advanced math and writing. We compress years of enrichment into two pre-college summers. If gifted students were identified and nurtured earlier, far more would enter college ready to lead rather than catch up — and programs like Thrive could help them accelerate instead of remediate.
That’s why the top of the funnel matters. The fewer districts that identify and challenge high-achieving students early, the fewer promising high schoolers organizations like mine will have to work with. Some charter school networks have raised expectations for all students from the earliest grades — but many lack gifted-and-talented programs. In focusing so heavily on bringing everyone to grade level, they fail to push advanced students further. The unintended message is that low-income students of color aren’t gifted — or aren’t in ways that merit cultivation. That isn’t equity; it’s a missed opportunity.
America needs an ecosystem that does both: lift every student and accelerate the most advanced learners. I’m encouraged by newer initiatives like National Math Stars — which finds mathematically gifted students as early as second grade and surrounds them with advanced coursework, mentorship and competitive opportunities —and by established programs like the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which identifies exceptional middle schoolers and supports them through college. These programs show what’s possible when talent discovery is treated as a national priority. The country needs many more like them.
The blueprint already exists. The challenge is scale and scope. Policymakers and education leaders can act now by requiring early talent identification in Title I schools and reporting on advanced achievement, not just proficiency; funding advanced learning from the early grades, including acceleration, enrichment and summer study; and backing partnerships among schools, nonprofits and universities that place promising students in rigorous academic settings early and sustain them through college and into careers.
This is more than an equity issue; it’s about America’s competitiveness. The Nation’s Report Card shows that only about a quarter of eighth-graders are proficient in math, and gaps by race and income remain wide. By 2045, Americans who are now labeled minorities will collectively be the majority. If the nation keeps overlooking talent in the communities growing fastest, it will be choosing decline over dynamism.
The nation’s talent is its greatest asset — but only if it is found and developed wherever it lives. Strength will come not from shrinking advanced opportunities, but from expanding them so every child with potential has a fair chance to reach the top.
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