This is very important work. Almost no one in the space is advocating for gifted students.
The entire philanthropic and academic space is dedicated to bad techniques and ideology. CEP is fighting the good fight for students
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Charting the Policy Landscape of Advanced Education in America
Description of Proposed Project
Polls overwhelmingly show that the public supports advanced education:
A 2025 report from Welcome, the Democratic-aligned PAC, Titled "Deciding to Win", found that voters strongly oppose eliminating tracking (ability-grouping) in public schools, ranking it among the most toxic policies associated with Democrats.
A 2024 report by David Shor, Head of Data Science at Blue Rose Research, found that removing advanced classes was “literally the single most unpopular thing Democrats can talk about.”
A 2022 New York Times poll found that 79% of voters support gifted and talented programs.
An October 28, 2025 poll by the Manhattan Institute showed that a plurality of New York State and New York City voters believe that G&T programs should be expanded, not eliminated. This includes almost 60% of Democrats, nearly three-quarters of Republicans, and almost two-thirds of independents.
Yet, the policy landscape tells a different story. According to the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC):
No federal mandate exists for gifted education.
The only federal funding that specifically supports gifted education is the Javits Grant, which was funded at $7 million in the FY2025 budget.
Only 28 states mandate that advanced programs exist for students who are identified as gifted, and just twenty-three set standards and guidelines for those programs.
Only 13 states have an acceleration policy.
Only 10 states have a policy addressing equity problems in their gifted programs.
Why the disconnect? Why doesn’t public support for gifted education translate into strong public policies that help advanced learners succeed?
The reason: the public believes schools are doing a good job when it comes to meeting the needs of advanced learners.
A 2019 Institute for Education Advancement survey found respondents gave schools an A or B for serving advanced learners – significantly higher grades than they gave schools for serving other learners, including disabled students.
The conclusion of the report sums it up well:
“The public seems unaware of the disparity in gifted education policies among states, or the inadequate levels of funding for gifted education nationwide. Making the general public fully aware of the current state of gifted education should become an integral part of gifted education advocacy.”
This is the reason the Center for Educational Progress (CEP) is seeking funding to produce and publicize two new research reports.
Reports
America’s Missing Gifted
Every other year, the federal Department of Education Office of Civil Rights releases publicly available data on every district and school in the United States. Included in this data is whether a district and/or school has a gifted program, the number of students enrolled in the program, and demographic composition of the program.
The next release of this data, which will cover the 2023-24 school year, is scheduled for December 2025.
CEP’s first report will be an analysis of this data, as well as all previous releases of the data going back to 2013. We will be answering the following questions at both the national and state levels:
What percentage of schools have gifted programs?
What percentage of students attend a school that has a gifted program?
What percentage of students are enrolled in gifted programs?
What is the demographic composition of gifted programs?
What is the demographic composition of gifted programs compared to student enrollment?
What number of students would qualify for gifted programs if they were offered at their school?
What number of students would qualify for gifted programs if their school followed best practices for identification?
Answers to each of these questions will be published as separate pieces on CEP’s substack starting in early 2026.
State of the States
CEP’s second report will be an analysis of state laws to determine whether they have in place best practice policies for gifted student identification and flourishing. We will be looking to see whether states do the following:
Produce an annual report on gifted programs
Monitor or audit gifted programs
Require schools to identify gifted students
Require schools to identify gifted students using universal screening
Provide funding for universal screening
Require schools to provide unique services to gifted students
Provide specific funding for gifted programs
Have an accountability system that includes measures of advanced learning and excellence
Have a policy that allows early entrance to kindergarten, taking above grade level courses, grade-skipping, and early graduation
Have a policy that allows for middle/high school concurrent enrollment
Have an automatic enrollment policy
Have a concurrent/dual enrollment policy for high school students
Provide financial support for SAT/ACT/AP testing
Require teachers, administrators, and/or counselors to take coursework on gifted education
Like the previous report, answers to these questions will be published as separate pieces on CEP’s substack starting in fall 2026.
Why are You Qualified to Work on This?
The Center for Educational Progress is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research and advocacy organization devoted to studying and promoting excellence in education. We reject the one-size-fits-all model that has dominated American education for half a century, instead embracing a vision where every student can advance as far and as fast as their curiosity and determination will take them. Through research, policy advocacy, and community building, we work to create educational environments that foster genuine excellence — not by pretending all students learn the same way at the same pace, but by meeting each student where they are and enabling them to soar. Our work spans from early childhood development to advanced academic acceleration, from classroom discipline to cognitive science, centered around a common mission: to understand how humans learn and excel, and to build systems that let them do so without artificial constraints.
Our immediate goals are to build profiles of each state's gifted education regulations and get in a posture of preparedness to push back via formal public policymaking (amicus briefs for active cases; white papers and position statements for education committees, school board hearings, etc.; and model policies for schools, teachers, and administrators) and public pressure against attacks on academic excellence.
The national scope of our project means that reaching a "critical mass" — of both readers and potential operational impact — will take some time to build up. But we have nevertheless begun. This summer we have been building out our national map of gifted and talented state regulations, writing coverage of attacks on national excellence, and researching the history of school reform efforts.
Building out our technical and legal capacity is going to be a priority focus until summer 2026, though, when we aim to kick our operations into full gear. By that time we will have developed the journalistic reach and coverage, the financial capacity, and the legal/institutional impact plan that will allow us to defend pro-excellence education policies nationwide.
Our cofounders are Jack Despain Zhou (Tracing Woodgrains) and Lillian Tara. Jack has a long track record of education policy commentary starting from his winning entry in the 2018 SSC Adversarial Collaboration Contest, alongside investigative research and work on other high-profile topics such as his reporting on the FAA hiring scandal. Lillian Tara is a recent graduate from Harvard Education School who previously directed pronatalist.org. Thomas Briggs is currently a writer and Director at the Center for Educational Progress, and is a recent graduate of UCLA Law School.
Joshua Dwyer, a recent addition to our staff, has significant experience in policy and government affairs. He has authored more than half dozen reports, including reports on advanced education in Illinois and Colorado, and has written and lobbied for six bills that have become law, including the Invest in Kids Act, a $100 million tax credit scholarship program, and the Accelerated Placement Act, which created a statewide acceleration policy in Illinois.
Education policy is a hard problem, and we are outsiders to the area, but we have the advantages of more prominence in the public eye than most in the education field, an established base of trust in the rationalist-adjacent and Silicon Valley / tech communities, and obsessive interest in the topic.
What would you do if not funded?
If this doesn’t get ACXG funding, we will continue to operate and pursue funding from other sources. We have enough money for near-term operations thanks to generous grants from GT School and several private donors. More funding will allow us to accelerate our gifted and talented regulations project, building out a map for gifted education regulations around the country, and to pay contributors to jump-start similar projects.
How much money do you need?
$5,000-$50,000.
$5,000 is enough funding to get the research program off the ground, but a full $50,000 will allow us to fully support our researchers and get additional analyses and reports out more quickly.
Supporting documents
Our Substack
https://www.educationprogress.org/p/straight-talk-on-gifted-education
https://www.educationprogress.org/p/what-went-wrong-with-math-instruction
https://www.educationprogress.org/p/what-should-the-department-of-education
https://www.educationprogress.org/p/hobson-v-hansen-and-the-decline-of
donated $3,000
donated $5,000
