When Did Excellence Become a Problem?
You may be wondering why an elder-law and estate-planning attorney is writing about gifted education. After nearly two decades of working with families, I have come to believe that planning for the next generation involves far more than wills, trusts, and protecting assets. I spend my professional life talking with parents and grandparents about what they have built, what they value, and what they hope to leave behind. Increasingly, I think we need to talk not only about what we are leaving to our children, but what we are asking of them.
And on that subject, I am concerned.
There was a time when discovering that a child was academically gifted was considered something to nurture.
We challenged that child. We gave that child harder books, more difficult mathematics, advanced classes, honors courses, and opportunities to learn alongside other students capable of moving at a similar pace.
Somewhere along the way, however, parts of American education began treating academic differences as a problem to be concealed rather than a reality to be addressed.
In the pursuit of equality, we have too often confused equal opportunity with identical instruction.
They are not the same thing.
And our children are paying the price.
Children Are Not Academically Identical
We accept differences among children almost everywhere else.
One child may be an extraordinary athlete. Another may have remarkable musical ability. One may struggle with reading but excel mechanically. Another may read years above grade level but struggle socially.
We would never tell a gifted violinist that she must stop progressing until every other student can play at her level. We would not tell the fastest runner on a track team that allowing him to run at full speed is unfair to the other athletes.
Yet academically, we increasingly seem uncomfortable acknowledging the obvious:
Some children learn faster than others. That is not an insult to other children. It is not a statement about a child’s worth. It is simply a difference in educational need.
The National Association for Gifted Children recognizes precisely that point: gifted and advanced learners may require changes in curriculum, instruction, pacing, and educational environment because ordinary grade-level instruction may not provide sufficient challenge.
So why would the appropriate response be to eliminate the opportunities that meet those needs?
Raising the Floor Should Never Require Lowering the Ceiling
There are children in our schools who desperately need additional help. HELP THEM!
There are children who need intensive reading intervention. PROVIDE IT!
Children who need tutoring, smaller classrooms, additional instructional time, better technology, stronger teachers, counseling, special-education services, or simply someone who refuses to give up on them. Give them everything we reasonably can.
But none of those children benefit because the child sitting three desks away is prevented from taking algebra. A struggling reader does not become a better reader because another child is denied advanced literature. A student performing below grade level does not suddenly master mathematics because an honors course disappears.
Educational opportunity is not a pie.
Giving one child an education appropriate to his or her abilities does not require taking an appropriate education away from someone else.
The better principle is remarkably simple: Meet children where they are; and then move every one of them forward.
For some children, that means remediation. For some, it means grade-level instruction. For others, it means acceleration.
Equality Does Not Mean Sameness
This distinction matters. There are legitimate concerns about how gifted students are identified. Children from disadvantaged families, minority communities, rural districts, and schools with fewer resources can be overlooked.
That is a problem worthy of serious attention. But the solution to unequal access to advanced education should be expanding access, not eliminating advanced education.
Indeed, the National Association for Gifted Children advocates broader identification of advanced learners, including universal screening, multiple opportunities to enter advanced programs, and measures designed to identify talented children regardless of background.
That is what genuine educational equity should look like.
Find the brilliant child whose parents cannot afford private testing.
Find the gifted child in an impoverished school district.
Find the child whose first language is not English.
Find the advanced learner whose disability has hidden an extraordinary academic ability.
Then give those children opportunities.
Do not eliminate the opportunities.
We Have Asked Teachers to Do the Impossible
One proposed answer has been to put students with vastly different levels of academic readiness into the same classroom and ask the teacher to “differentiate.”
In theory, it sounds wonderful. In practice, consider what we are asking.
A teacher may have one student struggling with foundational concepts, another performing at grade level, another a year ahead, and another capable of mastering material several years beyond the assigned curriculum.
The teacher is expected to teach all of them simultaneously, keep everyone engaged, address behavioral and emotional needs, comply with individualized educational requirements, communicate with parents, assess progress, and somehow design genuinely individualized academic experiences.
That is not educational reform. That is often an impossible job description.
Research summarized by the National Association for Gifted Children supports grouping advanced students according to demonstrated readiness when accompanied by appropriately challenging curriculum. The organization distinguishes flexible ability grouping from rigid “tracking” and notes that grouping can allow instruction to better match a student’s readiness and pace.
Boredom Is Not an Educational Strategy
Imagine spending six hours every day in a classroom where you already understand much of what is being taught.
Imagine being told to wait. To review it again. To complete another worksheet demonstrating something you mastered months ago.
Eventually, many children learn a lesson we never intended to teach: Effort is unnecessary.
A child who can earn an “A” without studying does not necessarily learn how to study. A child who is rarely intellectually uncomfortable may never learn perseverance. A child who never encounters material beyond his immediate ability may reach college, graduate school, or the workplace before discovering what it feels like to struggle academically.
That is not a gift. It is a handicap we created.
Acceleration, by contrast, is one of the most extensively supported interventions in gifted education, and current professional guidance recommends that schools provide advanced learners opportunities for subject or whole-grade acceleration where appropriate.
We Should Be Very Careful About Making Excellence Embarrassing
There is another consequence that is harder to measure. What message do children receive when adults become reluctant even to acknowledge exceptional academic ability?
Children are extraordinarily perceptive.
If athletic excellence earns trophies, artistic excellence earns applause, and academic excellence earns an uncomfortable conversation about whether recognizing it is “equitable,” children notice.
We should want children to aspire.
We should want the child who loves mathematics to become obsessed with mathematics.
We should want the child fascinated by biology to spend Saturday afternoon reading about genetics.
We should want children building robots, writing stories, studying history, learning languages, composing music, solving equations, and asking questions their parents cannot answer.
We should not be frightened by exceptional ability.
We should be frightened by a culture that teaches children to hide it.
Gifted Does Not Mean “More Valuable”
Perhaps this is where the discussion has gone most wrong.
Calling one child academically gifted does not mean that child is more valuable than another. A test score is not a measurement of human worth. Neither is a GPA. After all, when I was in law school the saying was “a C will get you a JD”. Not that I aspired for a C! In fact, I received one C during law school in my first semester. It was a wakeup call. That never happened again! NOW THAT’S learning…..
Children possess different abilities, personalities, interests, disadvantages, strengths, weaknesses, and potential. Our obligation is not to pretend those differences do not exist.
Our obligation is to educate the child standing in front of us. That means refusing to abandon struggling students. It also means refusing to abandon advanced ones.
The Goal Should Be More Opportunity, Not Less
San Francisco provides an interesting example of how educational policy can circle back. After removing Algebra I from its middle-school curriculum in 2014, the school board voted in March 2026 to restore an eighth-grade Algebra I option.
Perhaps there is a larger lesson there. We do not make education fairer by making it less challenging. We do not create opportunity by eliminating opportunity. And we certainly do not help one group of children by deliberately asking another group to learn less.
A public education system should have room for the child who needs three attempts to understand fractions and the child who is ready for algebra years ahead of schedule.
Both children matter. Both deserve our investment. Both deserve teachers equipped to meet their needs. And both deserve the opportunity to become as capable as they can possibly become.
The answer to inequality in education cannot be intellectual mediocrity.
It should be more doors, opened to more children, with every child encouraged to walk as far through those doors as his or her ability, curiosity, discipline, and ambition will carry them.
Because the purpose of education was never supposed to be making sure every child reaches the same place at the same time.
It was supposed to be making sure every child has the opportunity to keep going.
Perhaps that is why this subject matters so much to me, even though education law is not what I practice. As an elder-law and estate-planning attorney, I spend my days helping people decide what they will leave to the generations that follow them. We talk about homes, businesses, savings, family traditions, and the values they hope will survive them. But a legacy is more than the property we leave behind. It is also the kind of society we leave behind, and the expectations we place upon the children who will inherit it.
I don’t want us to leave our children a world in which excellence must be muted so no one feels different, or in which achievement is treated with suspicion rather than encouraged. I want us to leave them a world that recognizes that children are different, gives help generously to those who need it, and gives opportunity just as generously to those who are ready to reach higher.
After all, estate planning is ultimately an act of optimism. We plan because we believe there will be a next generation worth planning for. Perhaps we should be just as thoughtful about preparing that generation as we are about preparing what we intend to leave them.
