Leveling Down

How progressive education reforms chose equity over excellence, and got neither | Charting the Course

Niels Hoven is the founder and CEO of Mentava, building software for early literacy and accelerated learning. He has also developed one of the strongest pro-excellence public voices in the education space today over on his X feed. We hope you enjoy his article!

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In America we claim to value excellence, but it seems that our schools never got that memo. Compare China’s “genius program” with how the US approaches talent in schools.

China identifies kids with extraordinary academic ability early, and nurtures that talent to turn them into founders and senior leaders of some of the country’s top technology companies. In contrast, the US sees giftedness as a problem to be solved: our educational system’s goal is to equalize outcomes, and exceptional children must be held back to allow slower kids to catch up.

There’s a cruel irony at the heart of some of our most well-intentioned education reforms. Meant to help disadvantaged students catch up with their high-achieving peers, a generation of progressive policies have systematically undermined academic excellence in our schools, and eliminated opportunities for the disadvantaged students whose interests they claimed to champion.

Shuttering gifted and talented programs, eliminating accelerated math, and eschewing standardized tests in admissions: across three different initiatives, we see the same dynamic at work. Reformers claimed to be raising the floor, when in reality they were lowering the ceiling.

In a country once fixated on excellence — meritocracy, exceptionalism, counting gold medals — one would think this result was intolerable. But despite technology and global competition driving an international arms race for excellence, the excellence of America’s youth has been systematically suppressed by the institutions whose explicit job is to develop it.

The Dismantling of Gifted Programs

In October 2021, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to phase out the city’s gifted and talented program, which had admitted about 2,500 kindergartners annually based on testing. The program would be replaced with “Brilliant NYC,” which claimed it would accelerate learning for all 65,000 kindergartners. The rationale was straightforward: the existing merit-based program disproportionately served White and Asian students.

de Blasio’s plan was later reversed by incoming mayor Eric Adams, who instead expanded gifted programs to more schools. Now, however, history is repeating itself.

In early 2026, newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani (New York’s first self-described socialist mayor) announced plans to eliminate gifted and talented admissions for kindergartners, echoing de Blasio’s earlier effort. Mamdani’s claim is essentially the same: testing five-year-olds for academic talent contributes to racial and socioeconomic inequity in schools. As usual, the administration has framed the change not as an elimination of advanced learning, but as a shift away from separating students early and toward providing “advanced learning for all”.

While gifted programs beginning in third grade would remain for now, the historical pattern is to phase out gifted programs on a cohort basis, i.e. each year, one more grade is eliminated. This minimizes outcry from current program participants who get to finish out their time, but ensures no new kids get the same opportunities.

The impulse behind de Blasio’s and Mamdani’s proposals — and similar efforts in San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C., and elsewhere — reveals a troubling assumption: if a program doesn’t serve all students proportionally, it shouldn’t serve any students at all.

This assumption is wrong on two levels.

First, it confounds equal outcomes with equal opportunity. Our education system’s goal is to maximize opportunity for every student to achieve their potential. Our schools are not intended to be equalizers, holding children back in order to right imagined wrongs.

Second, and more fundamentally, the assumption treats the existence of advanced academic programs as inherently suspect — as though any structure designed to serve high-ability students must be a mechanism of privilege rather than a recognition of genuine differences in academic need. This gets the relationship between excellence and equity exactly backwards.

When New York has eliminated gifted programs in the past, wealthy families enroll their kids in private schools, hire tutors, and find enrichment programs. A family earning $200,000 a year has options. A family earning $40,000 does not. For a low-income family with a gifted child, a public school gifted program may be the only opportunity that child has for intellectual challenge. Eliminating public gifted programs doesn’t remove opportunities for wealthy kids, it just leaves the poor child with nowhere to go.

Algebra for None

In San Francisco, students used to take algebra in 8th grade. If a student was sufficiently prepared, they could take it in 7th grade.

However, because some students failed algebra in middle school, the district decided that no students should be allowed to take algebra in middle school.

In 2014, San Francisco Unified School District eliminated accelerated middle school math, including the option for advanced students to take Algebra I in eighth grade. Every student, regardless of ability or preparation, would take the same math sequence. The goal was to equalize outcomes, reducing disparities in advanced math course-taking and closing achievement gaps.

It didn’t work.

Wealthy families turned to private tutoring, summer courses, private schools, or moved to other school districts. Rather than supporting the stated goal of “equity”, banning middle school algebra turned academic excellence into a luxury available only to the rich.

The assumption that we should slow down students who are ready for more is hard to justify on any theory of what schools are for. Schools exist to help each student learn as much as they can. Equity means equal opportunity, not artificially engineering outcomes by preventing kids from learning.

It took a decade of activism and an overwhelming vote at the ballot box to convince San Francisco to reverse their disastrous policy of anti-excellence. Math proficiency had declined, and officials acknowledged that the racial gap in advanced math hadn’t closed. The experiment had failed, but not before affecting thousands of students who were ready for more challenging coursework and never got the chance.

The Test-Optional Trap

When elite universities began dropping SAT and ACT requirements during the pandemic, it was hailed as a victory for equity. Standardized tests, critics argued, were biased tools that favored wealthy students. Making them optional would level the playing field.

As usual, the meritocracy critics were wrong. The reality has been exactly the opposite.

A National Bureau of Economic Research paper published in January 2025, based on Dartmouth’s admissions data from 2017–2022, found that high-achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds who submitted test scores increased their admissions chances by a factor of 3.6x — from 2.9 percent to 10.2 percent. For first-generation college applicants, submitting scores increased their chances by 2.4x.

But many of these students weren’t submitting their scores. Only about 70 percent of first-generation students who scored 1500 or above submitted, compared to 90 percent of other applicants. These high-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds were being overly conservative, not realizing that their scores would actually be viewed favorably.

Meanwhile, when admissions officers reviewed applications without test scores, they placed greater weight on essays, extracurriculars, and letters of recommendation — precisely the areas where wealthier applicants have the largest advantages.

MIT found that test scores were one of the most effective tools for identifying socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lacked access to advanced coursework, but were ready for rigorous academic work. Yale’s internal research reached similar conclusions.

For all their flaws, standardized tests provide something crucial: an objective benchmark that cuts through the noise of inflated GPAs, variable school quality, and unequal access to extracurriculars. A low-income student who scores a 1500 despite coming from an under-resourced school signals something important about her academic ability that might not be visible anywhere else in her application.

Test-optional policies removed that signal. And in doing so, they made it harder for talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds to demonstrate what they could do.

The Pattern

These three examples share a common structure. In each case, a program or standard that identified and served high-achieving students was dismantled in the name of equity. In each case, the reform failed to achieve its stated goals. And in each case, the students who lost the most were those with the fewest alternatives.

It is damning enough that these policies have failed on their own terms. Even more pernicious, however, is that these policies reflect a vision of education in which excellence is not the goal but a threat. Progressive reformers claim that they want both equity and excellence. But they have consistently dismantled structures of excellence, choosing to artificially equalize outcomes instead. Rather than help every student reach their potential, they would rather ensure that no student has the opportunity to explore excellence.

When a school district eliminates gifted programs, it is saying it does not believe it’s the school’s job to challenge students who are ahead. When a district forces all students into the same math track regardless of readiness, it’s prioritizing the appearance of equity over the reality of learning. When a university drops testing requirements in admissions, it’s removing one of the few tools that allowed students without resources to prove what they could do.

To be serious about both equity and excellence, the path forward requires expanding access to gifted programs rather than eliminating them. Equity means being fair to all students, even high achievers - telling them that they belong, their academic needs matter, and they deserve the opportunity to be challenged every day in school.

It means investing in better identification methods that find talented students wherever they are, including in populations that traditional screening has missed. It means treating giftedness as a spectrum, rather than a binary. It means maintaining rigorous academic pathways in public schools so that students don’t have to leave the system to be challenged. And it means keeping standardized testing as one tool among several, while providing free test prep and support to students who can’t afford to purchase it privately.

Finally, it means recognizing that equity and excellence are not opposing values. A system that refuses to challenge its most capable students is not equitable.

The evidence is increasingly clear. MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton have all reinstated testing requirements. San Francisco reversed its algebra policy after a decade of failure. The debate over gifted programs continues, but the pattern is unmistakable: leveling down doesn’t work, and the students who pay the highest price are those who can least afford it.

Conclusion

The tragedy of these reforms is that they were born from genuine concern about inequality. But good intentions don’t exempt policies from scrutiny, and the actual effects of these reforms have been clear: they have made it harder for talented students to access the challenges and recognition they need to grow.

Equity in education doesn’t mean artificially engineering equal outcomes. It means ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to explore their full potential. For some students, that means additional support to master grade-level content. For others, it means access to advanced opportunities that will challenge them to grow beyond it.

Both matter. Both are part of genuine equity. And both deserve to exist in our public schools.

The choice isn’t between equity and excellence. It’s between reality and ideology, equalizing opportunity or artificially engineering equal outcomes. It’s between a vision of education that respects the diversity of student ability and one that pretends it doesn’t exist. When it comes to our children’s future, we need to support excellence instead of suppressing it.