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Introduction to the Special Issue

Inequality is a complicated word in our field’s lexicon. On the one hand, it represents something that is our raison d’être and the basis for our practice. The existence of certain inequalities—for example, the fact that students differ—are not equal—with respect to their educational needs—is what makes gifted education necessary as an alternative to onesize-fits-all educational approaches that ignore individual differences and individual needs. However, inequality has another meaning and a set of connotations that are more problematic, the kind that come to mind when one encounters the phrase “inequality in America.” This is the kind of inequality that reflects unfair advantage and damaging disadvantage; power and status disparities; conditions resulting from racism, ethnic and linguistic bias, and poverty. It is this kind of inequality that has plagued gifted education from the beginning and that provokes some of the most damning criticisms of our field. Historically, this sort of pernicious inequality and gifted education have been inextricably linked. For example, Francis Galton has often been cited as our intellectual forebear, the first person to attempt to study individual differences in a systematic manner. He was, unapologetically, no champion of equality. In his landmark work Hereditary Genius (Galton, 1869), he wrote, “it is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality” (p. 14). Lewis M. Terman, commonly regarded as the father of gifted education in this country, conducted a massive longitudinal study of high-IQ individuals that is the source of much of what we believe about gifted students. It is noteworthy that, of his sample of about 1,500 subjects, half came from families headed by a father engaged in a professional occupation (compared to 4%–5% in the general population) and that African American, Latino, and Asian American subjects, along with subjects of non–Anglo