The American education establishment loves to rebrand. Home economics became family and consumer science, while vocational education is now career and technical education. Remedial education is now developmental coursework, economically disadvantaged students are at-risk or underserved, and English as a second language students are English language learners or emerging bilinguals. The new terms that replaced the old reflect educators’ evolving perspectives on these concepts.

One label, though, has refused to die: gifted. For decades, experts in and outside of gifted education have criticized the label as elitist, simplistic, and generally problematic. Yet, the term persists in schools, among scholars, and in popular culture.

In one sense, it does not matter what label one applies to accelerated academic programs and the students enrolled in them. The need for advanced programs remains because individual differences in aptitude lead some students to learn complex material better and faster than their peers, whether or not such students are called “gifted.” As Shakespeare wrote, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

But many education scholars still find that the gifted label and the concept of “giftedness” runs contrary to psychological data and the reality of educating children. The contradictions are real.

Criticisms of the gifted label are not new. The most common response among experts who grapple with these criticisms is to advocate its elimination. But the label persists, even in the scholarly work of some of those who want to abolish it. I believe the label endures because it has some usefulness, and its critics’ true contention is with the concept of giftedness. However, this does not mean the education system must or should retain the gifted label forever.

“Giftedness” Is Dead

The critics rightfully point out that the gifted label implies that being gifted or not gifted is an either/or condition. No one ever says, “My child is partially gifted,” or “The school says my daughter is 80 percent gifted.” Categorizing children as gifted (or not) implies that there is a stark difference between gifted children and others. But such unequivocal divisions do not exist in the general population. As education scholars have pointed out, any given ability lies on a continuum, and dichotomies are artificially imposed. Children just below the cutoff to be labeled gifted differ little from those just above the cutoff.

The same problem afflicts many diagnostic labels in clinical psychology. Depression, anxiety, and undesirable personality traits (for example, perfectionism and antisocial behavior) all sit on a continuum. Everyone displays these traits to some extent, with some people having very low levels, others very high, and most of us somewhere in between. When those characteristics reach a point where they interfere with a person’s functioning, psychologists label the person as having a disorder. Clinical psychologists have dealt with this reality by recognizing the existence of “subclinical” symptoms: mild symptoms that may cause some dysfunction but do not cross the line into a full-blown diagnosis.

The field of clinical psychology has standardized criteria and labels to help guide the process of diagnosis. Even though clinicians may not always completely agree on a diagnosis, classification systems such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the International Classification of Diseases ensure that psychologists have a common understanding of which symptoms qualify a person for a diagnosis such as major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or antisocial personality disorder.

By contrast, the field of gifted education lacks this kind of standardized guidance, even for its most basic label. The scholarly discipline is highly fragmented, and experts disagree over which of the dozens of definitions of giftedness should be preferred. Some of the definitions even contradict one another. Whereas some scholars view giftedness as a solely intellectual trait, others see it as including an emotional component. Some contend that giftedness is exclusively a matter of academic aptitude (usually assessed through standardized tests), while others argue that giftedness can include motivation and interest in a given subject. These fundamental disagreements make it impossible to recognize “subclinical” levels of giftedness.

Even when experts agree on a definition of giftedness, there is no inherent cutoff point at which someone warrants the label of gifted. With mental disorders, it is at least clear that dysfunctional and maladaptive behaviors require treatment. There is no such obvious point at which giftedness should be “treated.” In the United States, the percentage of children labeled as gifted varies widely across districts and states, sometimes in nonsensical ways, if giftedness is supposed to be an enduring personal trait. When I conducted a study of six Utah school districts, the district with far and away the highest percentage of children labeled as gifted also had the lowest academic performance. Most of the “gifted” children there would not be considered “gifted” if they moved to one of the other districts.

Likewise, no one in clinical psychology would recommend that their patient be reassessed for depression solely because they move to a new town; in gifted education, children are often re-evaluated to determine whether the child “really is” gifted by local standards after a move. Experts in gifted education call this phenomenon “geographic giftedness,” which discloses the fact that being gifted is not a fixed personal trait.

This comparison to clinical psychology reveals a crucial difference between “gifted” and diagnostic labels such as “depressed.” Whereas depression truly exists, giftedness does not. When the gifted label implies that a person has a psychological quality of giftedness, intractable problems arise. This is because giftedness is always defined or measured in relation to other traits or behaviors. For example, the U.S. federal government’s 1972 Marland Report—still influential today—defined gifted children as those who have high performance, achievement, and/or ability in at least one of six areas: (1) general intellectual ability (intelligence), (2) special academic aptitude, (3) creative or productive thinking, (4) leadership, (5) visual and performing arts, and (6) psychomotor ability (athletics or fine motor skills).

Note that the Marland Report always stated giftedness was manifested in specific domains, never on its own. In other words, giftedness has no independent existence. No one has ever defined giftedness without reference to other psychological or educational constructs. Giftedness is always a parasite that depends on other traits for its survival.

Instead, giftedness is defined in the Marland Report (and elsewhere) as high potential or performance in some particular domain. What is inside people’s heads are characteristics like intelligence, academic aptitude, creativity, leadership ability, artistic talent, and psychomotor ability. When someone scores highly on a measure of one of these characteristics, they receive the label gifted. In contrast, when a diagnosis is applied in clinical psychology, there is a recognition that the underlying trait (for example, anxiety) has independent existence. Giftedness itself is the source of the problems in the gifted label.

The Marland Report also exposes another flaw in the concept of giftedness: With so many ways to be gifted, how can one term apply to all of these domains? If the Marland Report is taken seriously, then a school’s math whiz, its star basketball player, and the lead actress in the school play should all be labeled as gifted, even though their talents and abilities are vastly different. While its advocates may see this understanding of giftedness as “inclusive” or “non-elitist,” a better term would be “incoherent.” It is not clear what is gained by applying the same label to these different abilities. Unsurprisingly, the field’s leading scholars are aware of this problem.

All these problems with the concept of giftedness illustrate how the study of giftedness entails reification, which is defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology as “treating an abstraction, concept, or formulation as though it were a real object or material thing.” Scholars and educators would benefit from understanding that giftedness has no real existence and instead studying the underlying traits, abilities, and behaviors that have utility and value in education or society. Basing the label of gifted on a hypothesized underlying giftedness is incoherent and creates philosophical and scientific problems that scholars and educators have been unable to resolve.

In short, giftedness as a psychological construct is a phantom. The administrative label gifted has many of the same problems and also needs to go. But getting rid of these labels is not enough.

In the grand tradition of educational rebranding, I propose that educators and scholars replace “gifted” with the term “advanced.”

Long Live “Advanced” Learners!

The idea of giftedness as a scholarly topic arose out of the education system, and many of gifted education’s scholars and practitioners work in the context of that system. Seeing giftedness as a psychological construct causes problems, but understanding the practice of gifted education reveals a valid need for the label of advanced.

The fundamental premise of gifted or advanced education programs is the same philosophy that underpins special education. Both sets of services arise from a perceived mismatch between a child’s aptitudes or needs and the classroom lessons aimed at the typically developing student. As a result, the child requires accommodations or adjustments to learn productively in the school environment. Educational psychologists have long recognized the similarities between special education and advanced education, and they understandably see both services as natural products of individual differences in learning speed and cognitive ability.

If some students will receive special services and other students will not, it is necessary to distinguish between those two groups of students. This is where the advanced label becomes useful. Teachers, administrators, policymakers, and others need to know which children have a mismatch between their abilities and the instruction offered in a typical classroom. Without that knowledge, it is not clear to whom schools should provide an accelerated alternative.

Recognizing this need for a label solves many problems. First, it resolves the reification problem that “giftedness” produces. If the term “advanced” merely signifies that a child qualifies for special services, then advanced does not imply that the student has a condition or trait that exists independently. Likewise, a child being labeled as advanced implies they are ready for more complex material, but it does not imply that this readiness is innate or that the child is part of a special subtype of the student population. This label also does not suggest that the child will necessarily remain advanced permanently. Perhaps the state of being advanced persists for a given child, or maybe their peers eventually catch up and the mismatch between the advanced child’s needs and the standard classroom is eliminated.

Understanding advanced as meaning “eligible for services” also accommodates the heterogeneity of abilities among advanced students. Depending on the local definition of advanced and available program offerings, advanced educational services can take the form of full-time special classes, part-day enrichment experiences, Advanced Placement and dual enrollment classes, the International Baccalaureate program, accelerated classes in each subject, experiences in all the performing and visual arts, magnet schools, leadership opportunities, full and partial grade skipping, and more. Treating the advanced label as qualification for services does not imply that students enrolled in these different programs are similar—beyond the fact that their needs are not met in the typical classroom. The label simply means, “These children qualify for the services that our school is able to offer.”

That understanding of the advanced label also solves the problem of geographic giftedness. If a child who participates in an advanced program in one town moves to a new location that offers different services—or that has different standards for qualifying for the same services—then of course she or he is no longer advanced, in the sense that the child no longer qualifies for services. The standards and the environment have changed, not the child, which is why the child loses the advanced label when they are no longer out of sync with their new classmates or the local curriculum.

The only downside with understanding “advanced” as merely referring to eligibility for services is that it makes the label tautological. But at least a tautological definition is internally consistent and avoids the problems that arise from reification and interpreting giftedness as a psychological condition.

Consequences of Killing Giftedness

Dispensing with giftedness in favor of an advanced label clearly confers philosophical and theoretical advantages as well as administrative benefits in school systems—but it also has practical consequences. First, this understanding of the advanced label means that there can be no gifted or advanced adults. If the advanced label is only applied during K–12 schooling when students receive services from their local school district, then there is no need to label adults as advanced, let alone gifted. Even if an adult test-taker obtained the maximum score on an IQ test, they would not be considered advanced, because there are no special education services for them to receive.

The second practical consequence arises from the philosophy behind selecting children for advanced academic programs. When giftedness is considered part of a child’s inherent psychology, the goal is to “identify” the gifted. As a result, gifted education scholars and policymakers often fuss over false positives (the incorrect labeling of children as gifted when they “really” are not) and false negatives (overlooking children who “really are gifted”). This is why one group of authors said that “determining who is and who is not identified as gifted is a fraught subject.”

The problem with a focus on gifted identification is that it results in what I call the “treasure hunt model.” Identifying advanced learners turns into a hunt for the “truly” gifted. The problem is that, in reality, giftedness does not exist independently inside a child’s head. Therefore, there is no objective standard of giftedness that school officials can use to determine whether the children selected for a program are “really” gifted or not.

In contrast, if being advanced only refers to whether a student qualifies for advanced academic programs, then the entire concept of gifted identification no longer makes sense. The process should instead be called “program selection,” because it only entails choosing which students can enroll in a more challenging educational offering. The concept of program selection reduces anxiety over false positives and false negatives because advanced students are just a group who are judged to qualify for a particular academic program.

A third consequence of aligning the advanced label with program eligibility is that the standard way of providing special educational opportunities gets reversed. Traditionally, school personnel are first tasked with identifying or finding gifted children and then serving them with accelerated educational experiences through the appropriate gifted program. However, when labeling a child as advanced is a function of program fit, educational programs take on primary importance. This matters because no school district can offer every possible advanced learning opportunity; limitations of budgets, space, expertise, and personnel require every district to pick and choose which advanced programs to offer. When district personnel do not feel constrained to offer a traditional gifted program, it frees them to create a program that can flourish in the local context—which is then later filled with children selected to populate it. Some education experts already advocate for this program-first perspective.

Saving Education from “Giftedness”

In short, the gifted label has endured partly out of tradition but also because it remains useful in distinguishing students who qualify for advanced learning opportunities from those who do not. The problem is not with labelling per se, but rather with conceptions of “giftedness” that imply that it is an enduring quality inherent in a person’s mind. These conceptions fly in the face of psychological and educational reality.

The solution is to discard the ideas of “giftedness” and “being gifted” and to focus on challenging “advanced” learners. This will help the scholarly field of advanced education to shed its historical baggage and the incoherent philosophical underpinnings that have troubled scholars and administrators for decades. Thinking and speaking about “advanced” students in the context of specific learning opportunities solves semantic and scholarly problems that have had unfortunate practical implications for far too long.

It is time to let “giftedness” and the “gifted” label die the quiet death they deserve. The label “advanced,” properly understood as nothing more than a bus ticket to more complex coursework, can and should live on, unapologetically useful and finally free of philosophical baggage.

Russell T. Warne, formerly a psychology professor, is the chief scientist at Riot IQ and the creator of the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test.