TikTok’s For You Page has decided I was a gifted child. That genre is everywhere right now: “signs you were a gifted kid,” the kind of video that treats a trip to the state geography bee as both evidence and diagnosis. (Two people on our team, I learned last night, made it to their state competitions).

Count me in, though my school called it enrichment. What I remember most from those pull-out sessions is dying of dysentery in Oregon Trail. Which is closer to the point than it might sound. The label suggested a distinct kind of education but often delivered a loosely defined block of time.

Russell Warne would say that isn't an accident. In Education Next, he argues that "gifted" should join the long list of terms education has quietly retired. Vocational education became career and technical education. Remedial courses became developmental coursework. English as a second language gave way to English learners and then emerging bilinguals. In each case, the new language was supposed to reflect new thinking.

Warne's case against "gifted" is that the word asks schools to make a claim they can't support: that they have identified a distinct and enduring kind of child. Abilities exist on a continuum. Cutoffs are arbitrary. A student can qualify as gifted in one district and fall short in the district next door.

"Advanced," he argues, changes the question from who the child is to what the child is ready for. The label stops being a verdict about identity and becomes a description of educational need.

That distinction matters because the old label can follow people for decades. Last month, in New York magazine, Katie Arnold-Ratliff wrote that being gifted had anchored her identity since elementary school. At 44, after months spent reporting on the flaws in gifted education, she pulled her childhood records and discovered she had missed the qualifying score by a single point. She set the papers down, walked into the bathroom and threw up.

That's the line running from a TikTok trend to a New York City admissions fight: an administrative category hardens into an identity, a status marker and a promise about the future.

Changing "gifted" to "advanced" will not settle the harder questions. Who gets access? How is readiness measured? Why do selective programs remain so racially unrepresentative? But Warne's language forces a better conversation. Schools could stop asking which children belong to a special category and start asking what each child is ready to learn, and whether the school is prepared to teach it.

– Thomas

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