Excellence at the Cost of Social Justice? Negotiating and Balancing Priorities in Gifted Education

Abstract

Gifted education is often faulted as compromising the principle of equity and perpetuating social inequalities. This article focuses on making gifted education socially defensible and educationally productive. To accomplish this goal, key values and priorities guiding policy and practice, such as excellence, selectivity, diversity, equity and social equality, and efficiency or educational productivity, must be endorsed. To understand how these issues have been dealt with, several cases and examples that have a bearing on how to negotiate and balance these values and priorities without resorting to radical, dogmatic positions are discussed. Finally, several recommendations for practice that will help resolve the tension between excellence, selectivity, and efficiency on the one hand and diversity, equity, and social equality on the other are made.

Keywords:

• differentiation
• education
• educational excellence
• equality
• giftedness
• gifted programs
• identification of the gifted
• underrepresentation

Notes

1. The difference between equity and social equality can be roughly equated with the distinction that Nozick (1974) made between his own historical entitlement theory of justice and Rawls's (1971) theory of justice, particularly his postulation of the difference principle. Nozick's (1974) historical entitlement theory emphasizes the equitable (or inequitable) processes of acquisition and transfer of holdings, whereas Rawls's (1971) theory of justice, according to Nozick, is based on a nonhistorical, end-result principle, focusing on particular patterning of the distribution of holdings at a given moment (or current time-slice). The debate between Rawls and Nozick in the 1970s and its more current renditions have profound implications for our understanding of social justice in education, though a presentation that can do full justice to their theories is beyond the scope of this article.