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 , 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 — 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 , 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 shows that only about a quarter of eighth-graders are proficient in math, and gaps by race and income remain wide. By , 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.

But suggests that in an attempt to right these inequities, those reforms often got it wrong. 

State school finance policies designed to close funding gaps between high- and low-income districts did not reduce racial and ethnic funding inequities and in some cases increased them, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Educational Research Association. 

“I was quite surprised. And depressed, frankly,” said Emily Rauscher, lead co-author and professor at Brown University. “My guess going into the study was that these income based school finance reforms that worked to reduce inequality of funding by income would also at least slightly help reduce racial inequality of funding.”

The U.S. is unique in that school district budgets are tethered to property taxes, meaning schools in wealthier communities automatically start with a larger pot of local funding. Since school desegregation efforts slowed after the 1980s, civil-rights minded policymakers have tried fixing this discrepancy between low-income districts that serve lots of students of color and rich districts that serve lots of white students by directing more money to districts with more low-income kids.

State funds are typically distributed through a formula, or set of formulas, that send money to districts. From there, districts send it to schools. Each state uses different criteria in their formulas, but most try to target at least a portion of their funds to school districts that enroll lots of students with greater needs and those that struggle to raise funds from property taxes. Sometimes, courts make them do it.

According to the , the number of states with co-called “progressive” funding systems — where high-poverty districts receive more per-student funding than low-poverty districts — more than doubled, from 13 states in 2012 to 28 in 2022. States such as New Mexico, Wyoming, California, and Colorado saw some of the largest gains in funding equity during this period. As it stands, more than half of the 48 states studied have at least a modestly progressive distribution of state and local funding, providing at least 5% additional funding to high-poverty districts. That is twice as many states as a decade ago.

But Rauscher and co-author Jeremy Fiel, a professor at Rice University, found that while these reforms narrowed funding gaps by income, they did not lessen — and sometimes widened — disparities by race and ethnicity. 

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics, the researchers examined the effects of school finance reforms across the U.S. from 1990 to 2022. They found that such policies reduced school spending gaps between the highest- and lowest-income districts by over $1,300 per pupil on average. However, the reforms also increased the spending advantage of districts with low percentages of Black and Hispanic students—by $900 and $1,000 per pupil, respectively.

Reforms were more effective at reducing racial disparities in states where those inequities were already relatively modest. In contrast, reforms were less effective, or even regressive, in states with high levels of racial and economic segregation between school districts. In these more segregated states, reforms not only exacerbated racial and ethnic disparities but also failed to narrow economic gaps.

While the study did not pinpoint the exact reason for this, researchers posited that it may be driven by demographic and political processes related to implementation. Additionally, many funding reforms boosted spending broadly rather than targeting it, leading to minimal effects. Many court-ordered solutions, by contrast, stipulate that states must target racial and ethnic inequality. 

Notably, the funding reforms worked best at directing money to historically marginalized students in districts that were less segregated, likely a reflection of separate policies aimed at supporting students of color, low-income students and their families, Rauscher said. Moreover, the study showed that the biggest inequities exist between states – not within them.

Rauscher offered that it’s likely not random that states funding their education systems the least are also the ones with the highest concentration of students of color. And that’s exactly why, she said, the federal government needs to step up to fix it. 

For many school funding experts, this realization is not surprising. After all, while most states distribute funding relatively evenly by the racial and ethnic composition of districts, wealthier states still spend significantly more per pupil than poorer ones. And since these states tend to have higher shares of white students and lower shares of Black and Hispanic students, national disparities are bound to persist.

“The concentration of non-white students is in the lowest-funded states, and the concentration of white students is in the highest-funded states,” says Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a nonprofit that funds school finance research. “So when you compare the funding levels of a low-income school district in Mississippi that has a lot of Black and Hispanic students to a tawny suburb of Boston in Massachusetts where all the kids are white, you’re going to pick up a huge gap. It just distorts the amount of money when you’re comparing across the entire U.S.”

It’s worth noting, Sibilia says, that recent state funding reforms, like those in Tennessee, Colorado, Mississippi and Alabama, are poised to make a real difference. Tennessee’s model, adopted three years ago, directs more funding to students who need it most, including those living in high concentrations of poverty. It also accounts for students in small and sparsely populated districts, which formulas sometimes shortchange. Meanwhile, Alabama’s model — the newest in the country — includes additional funds for students with special needs, such as those with disabilities or who are English language learners.

“There’s no way that you’re going to change interstate funding differences, because people are so focused on schools in their communities, and because half of the money is coming from local property taxes,” she says. “The federal government can’t touch those dollars, so you have to focus within the state. And when you look at the effect of the intrastate reforms, you tend to see that they’re working.”

The new research comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department, eliminate policies aimed at increasing equity for students of color and significantly curb federal spending, including on long-standing programs like Title I and IDEA, which are the federal government’s two biggest levers for bolstering state education funding.

In other words, it’s a political environment not likely to prioritize issues of racial inequity.

“You’re never going to have a funding formula that says we’re going to add x hundreds of dollars per Black student in each state, because that’s just not a viable policy,” says Eric Hanushek, an economist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “We’ve had these differences all along, and there’s no way that you’re going to suddenly get the federal government stepping in on overall spending differences between states.”

Rauscher says that given the political environment, she’s concerned that her research may be used in bad faith by policymakers who have no interest in closing racial gaps in education. 

Her message to them: “You are mortgaging the future of the country, because all these kids who are under-resourced in school are going to enter adulthood without adequate skills and training. It’s an ongoing battle. We’ve been here before.”

That’s what Shenandoah Valley School District Superintendent Brian Waite says he needs to properly serve his students. His school system is in one of Pennsylvania’s poorest regions with 80% of Shenandoah Valley’s roughly 1,200 students economically disadvantaged. 

Waite was glad Gov. Josh Shapiro acknowledged the longstanding inequity in the state’s education funding formula during his budget address earlier this month. But Shapiro’s proposed isn’t enough, Waite said, nor what he and others were hoping for when they successfully sued the state over the formula.

“We are grateful for every dollar of funding we receive,” the superintendent said. “But the final budget must be larger to meet the urgency of this moment. The size of the proposed budget increases are not the down payment we need to provide the quality public education guaranteed in the state constitution — and to begin to plan out a system that gives our kids what they deserve.”

Likewise, the attorneys who fought on behalf of his district and five others across the state — alongside parents and other plaintiffs, including the Pennsylvania NAACP — said the governor’s plan “does not do enough to meet the standard set by our state constitution.” 

The comments came a month after Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer issued a 786-page decision ruling Pennsylvania’s school funding formula unconstitutional after the long-running litigation. She found the stark disparities in student outcomes between high- and low-wealth districts were directly related to the vast difference in resources made available to them.

A spokesman from the governor’s office told The 74 that no one could predict allocations beyond this budget cycle, but that the current proposal “is not the final step” in addressing school funding inequity. 

Shapiro is asking for an additional $103.8 million for special education programs and $100 million for school safety and security grants. His proposal also includes $100 million to reduce and remediate environmental hazards in schools and a more than $60 million increase in higher education funding.

Attorneys from the Education Law Center-PA, The Public Interest Law Center and O’Melveny & Myers LLP said in a statement that this year’s increases to the basic education fund are .

Last year’s education budget, the attorneys noted, included a $225 million supplement for the 100 most underfunded school districts. These so-called Level Up monies prioritized those districts for the past two years. 

“This proposal also takes a step backward: while last year’s budget provided additional support for the Commonwealth’s most deeply underfunded districts through the Level Up program, this one does not,” the lawyers said in a joint statement. 

Waite, the Shenandoah Valley superintendent, said his students have waited long enough. The district’s English learner population has more than tripled in the past 15 years and classroom teachers of other disciplines are stretched thin.

“I have math teachers in the secondary level teaching more than one content area in the same classroom: Honors Trigonometry and Algebra II in one class — with geometry and trigonometry in another,” he said.

Many of the district’s rooftop exhaust fans and HVAC systems date back to 1982. It is also in need of masonry work on retaining walls, sidewalks and outdoor stairways, some of which are disintegrating and have not been upgraded in decades.

Susan Spicka, executive director for Education Voters of Pennsylvania, founded in 2008 to promote a pro public education agenda with the public, said she recognizes the enormity of creating a fair funding formula but wished to see a far bigger number in this latest budget proposal: She lamented that it did not appear to prioritize those school systems most in need. 

“For two years, the Legislature and governor, on a bipartisan basis, recognized we need to target money to the neediest districts,” she said. “To see he took a step backward was really strange, and very disappointing. That supplement has really made a very big difference in those school districts.”

Shapiro’s office, which at first insisted that Level Up funding was in the budget, did not respond to later pushback from critics.

The new governor addressed head-on Judge Jubelirer’s “call to action” in his recent budget announcement.

“Her remedy was for us to get around the table and come up with a solution that ensures every child has access to a thorough and efficient education,” he said of the judge’s decision. “While theoretically there’s still time left to file an appeal, all indications are that Judge Jubelirer’s ruling will stand. And that means we are all acknowledging that the court has ordered us to come to the table and come up with a better system, one that passes constitutional muster. I’m ready to meet you there.”

The budget will require approval from a Republican-control Senate and . The Legislature is required to approve the budget by June 30.