Once a week, I was quietly pulled out of class, put on a bus, and taken to a small sunlit building where the work felt different : harder, faster, strange. This episode traces the arc of U.S. gifted education, how intelligence has been tied to eugenics, and the conspiracies surrounding the G.A.T.E. to CIA pipeline.
Further Reading
Australasian Association for the Education of Gifted and Talented. (n.d.). AAEGT.
Brody, L. E. (Ed.). (2014). Grouping and acceleration practices in gifted education. Corwin.
Card, D., Domingue, B., & Rothstein, J. (2015). Universal screening increases the representation of low-income and minority students in gifted education. National Bureau of Economic Research.
Domino, G., & Domino, M. L. (2006). Psychological testing: An introduction. Cambridge University Press.
Jisc National Centre for AI in Education. (2025, May 21). Student perceptions of AI: 2025 findings.
National Association for Gifted Children. (2023). Understanding twice-exceptionality.
National Association for Gifted Children. (n.d.). Identification.
New York Civil Rights History Project. (n.d.). Tests, labels, and segregation: The Binet–Simon legacy.
Pearson Assessments. (n.d.). Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, Third Edition (NNAT3).
Peters, S. J., Matthews, M. S., McBee, M. T., & McCoach, D. B. (2009). Beyond gifted education: Designing and implementing advanced academic programs. Gifted Child Quarterly, 52(3), 232–249.
Riverside Insights. (n.d.). Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT®).
Shamshirgaran, S., & Jamil, M. (2025). Reconsidering gifted education in the age of AI: Ethical implications and equity challenges. Education Sciences, 15(8), 1012.
Shurkin, J. N. (1987). Terman’s kids: The groundbreaking study of how the gifted grow up. Little, Brown.
Stanford Magazine. (2024, March). The vexing legacy of Lewis Terman.
Subotnik, R. F., Olszewski-Kubilius, P., & Worrell, F. C. (2019). Rethinking giftedness and gifted education: A proposed direction forward based on psychological science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 20(1), 1–49.
U.S. Office of Education. (1972). Education of the gifted and talented: Report to the Congress of the United States by the U.S. Commissioner of Education (The Marland Report).
U.S. Senate. (n.d.). Sputnik spurs passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Senate.gov.
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. (2024, August). Project MK-ULTRA: The CIA’s program of research in behavioral modification [Declassified hearing transcript].
Waddell, D. D. (1980). The Stanford–Binet: An evaluation of the technical data available since the 1972 re-standardization. Journal of School Psychology, 18(3), 203–209.
Warne, R. T., & Liu, J. K. (2017). Income differences among grade skippers and non-grade skippers across genders in the Terman sample, 1936–1976. Learning and Instruction.
