Education experiments focusing on anti-merit policies from the 2010s and early 2020s are losing favor and proving ineffective.
Critiques of gifted education have existed for a long time, but recent discussions have become increasingly contentious. In one recent example from New York, writer Katie Arnold-Ratliff posed the question of whether student giftedness was genuine. She sought to argue that gifted education programs are ineffective by highlighting a statistic: only 12.3 percent of gifted students in a particular study attained a significant level of achievement by the age of 50. As a result, 88 percent did not achieve exceptional success, such as becoming Fortune 500 executives or winning prominent journalistic awards.