What Should the Department of Education Do?

Our plan for a federal pro-excellence education agenda | Model Policy, 01

Editor’s note: This entry is the first in an ongoing series of policy proposals that will develop our pro-excellence framework for education policy at the federal, state, and local levels. Our focus in this first Model Policy is to lay out actionable items and workable frameworks that authorities like the Department of Education could implement tomorrow or next week, given sufficient will and support. We hope both to make it easier for officials and lawmakers focused on excellence to take immediate action and, as we move forward, to paint a broader vision of how to run American education with an eye toward raising the ceiling.

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For too long, the American education system has stubbornly pursued a "one-size-fits-all" model of educating children that conflates sameness with fairness. As a result, too many students remain held back by misguided policy and pedagogical choices that constrain the pace of learning and remove opportunities to excel, while those with money often simply abandon free schools. While robust regulatory, funding, and reporting practices exist to serve other special learning populations — whether under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), or Title VI — virtually no federal support is provided to the Nation’s Gifted and Talented (G&T) students or Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) programs.¹ We cannot wait for national education policy to reform itself, and thus must demand that it prioritize excellence in learning across the spectrum of student ability and need.

Given our prior coverage of education policymaking at the federal level, it made sense to develop our own framework for how the federal government could jump-start a pro-excellence national education agenda. Hence this first Model Policy describes, broadly, the first steps the Department of Education (ED) could take if it were serious about supporting excellence in American K-12 education.

Education policy remains fundamentally state-run and locally controlled in many ways, and federal guidance is a relatively small part of education policy as a whole. The federal level is not often where nuts-and-bolts, granular policies are hammered out, nor should it be. However, it has important roles to play in setting the tone for state and local policymakers and in schools, allocating Congressionally mandated funding in the most effective available ways, and collecting the data that makes clear-eyed analysis of education possible. As such, these levers are our focuses for immediate executive branch action.

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Using executive powers to support a national pro-excellence education agenda

In order to orient American education toward excellence — without new legislation — we recommend the Department of Education make use of the following three levers of federal policymaking:

First, policy clarity: Ability grouping is broadly legal and, despite being rarely optimized, is commonly used. Despite that, a cloud of uncertainty hangs around it based on discouraging guidance and generations of cultural skepticism among policymakers. Legal uncertainty kills innovation. We recommend issuing non-regulatory guidance that emphasizes the existing permissive laws around pedagogically appropriate grouping while providing best practices.

Second, incentives: The overwhelming majority of federal education spending goes toward equity-based goals of raising the performance of struggling students, with little funding or interest towards ways to raise the ceiling. Gifted education programs, for example, receive little more than 1/1000 of the federal funding special education programs receive. We recommend balancing discretionary spending in current federal programs, focusing on programs serious about pushing education upwards.

Third, data collection: There are robust practices for tracking the performance of students in IDEA and English as a Second Language (ESL) programs, but limited visibility into how the needs of gifted and high academic performers are met. Most of the relevant data is simply not collected. Therefore, we recommend requiring that states collect and report comprehensive data on Gifted & Talented student enrollment, services, and identification. This requires zero new legislation and zero new funding — just reallocation of existing resources with an eye toward excellence.

1. Issue Pro-Excellence Regulatory and Civil Rights Guidance

Through sub-agencies like the Office for Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the Department of Education can issue clear guidance (e.g., through a Dear Colleague Letter) affirming the legality and educational value of proven practices including student tracking and acceleration. This guidance should also clarify how existing frameworks like IDEA and Section 504 can support the specific needs of gifted students, and emphasize how persistently disruptive behavior and disrupted classrooms significantly impede student access to a fair and adequate public education (FAPE), especially in GATE environments.

• Endorsement of Best Educational Practices:

  • Tracking and Acceleration: Adoption of neutral educational screening and recommendation tracks, which place greater weight and emphasis on standardized testing and assessment results over personal recommendations for acceleration.

  • Adoption of Routine Re-Assessment: All students should have the opportunity to participate in reassessment through the Annual Accountability Assessments currently mandated by ESSA. By linking re-assessment to ESSA this creates tangible stakes that allow students to be accelerated when they demonstrate exceptional performance relative to their cohort group.²

  • Advanced Learning Cohorts: Reinforce the legality for states to build and fund advanced learning cohorts in core and enrichment subjects as a research-supported best practice, allowing instruction to be tailored to students’ readiness and potential. At the school level, administrators should be encouraged to implement flexible, subject-specific advanced learning cohorts to maximize learning for gifted and high-achieving students; to reinforce acceleration of skill acquisition; and to develop content knowledge across clearly identified learning outcomes.

• Expanded IDEA / 504 Guidance: All accommodations and modifications for students identified as Twice-Exceptional must not only support their disability-related needs but also address their advanced learning abilities. This should include individualized exceptional-achievement goals, ensuring that students’ strengths are nurtured alongside their areas of challenge. Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) and 504 plans should therefore integrate both support services and enrichment opportunities to provide equitable access to their full potential.

• Most Appropriate Cohorts (MACo): Current federal law under IDEA §1412(a)(5) defines the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) as educating children with disabilities alongside non-disabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate. While integration remains important, this standard has often been interpreted to prioritize general classroom placement over individualized academic needs. We propose reframing LRE to formally include Most Appropriate Cohorts (MACo), defined as flexible, cohort-based groupings that maximize each student’s educational growth, achievement, and potential. Students with disabilities may be placed in specialized cohorts when the general classroom does not meet their instructional needs, while on-level and advanced students have expanded opportunities for enrichment, acceleration, or advanced learning cohorts. Placement decisions under MACo would continue to consider peer integration but prioritize academic development, rigor, and cohort-based instruction, with state funding and IEP processes ensuring FAPE and alignment with individualized learning goals.

• Disciplinary Guidance: An individual’s right to classroom access cannot extend to disrupting the learning of peers, as all students deserve a safe, supportive, and focused environment. States should adopt strict, tiered frameworks of disciplinary response with enforceable timelines, procedural safeguards, and consistent application to ensure disruptions are addressed quickly and effectively. Students at all levels deserve the opportunity to learn while they’re required to be in classrooms.

• School Choice Programs: Just as current policy provides specialized funding for schools serving students with disabilities, policy should also support expanded access for GATE students. States should establish cross-district choice programs to ensure eligible students can attend magnet schools or advanced programs beyond their home district boundaries. When families independently pursue enrichment opportunities such as CTY or Early College, districts should accommodate these options and provide clear, transparent processes for transferring credit and coursework.

2. Use Discretionary Funding and Federal Grants to Improve GATE Programs, Innovation, and Access

Gifted education programs and services, as mentioned above, receive little more than 1/1000 of the federal funding special education programs receive. In part this reality reflects the general lack of attention paid to G&T students at the state and national policymaking levels, but federal education authorities could do much more with the tools they have to increase GATE program innovation and access.

ED can strategically direct discretionary funds and use the competitive priorities of existing grant programs to spur innovation, research, and the implementation of evidence-based practices in gifted education.

Future grant competitions funded under programs like those listed below could, for example, award priority preference points to applicants who demonstrate how their proposed project will support schools and districts in serving G&T students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Key Federal Programs for Supporting Gate

• The Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program: As the only federal program specifically for G&T students and GATE education, ED should use it as a centralized body and engine for research and development in gifted education. Its grants should be prioritized to find and scale effective methods for identifying and serving gifted students.

• The Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Program: ED should create a competitive grant priority for EIR projects that develop and expand programs for high-achieving students, building a national pipeline of proven strategies for accelerating and educating gifted students.

• Title I, Part A of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): Title I guidance should be amended to emphasize the importance of investing into GATE programs and G&T students and services in high-poverty schools.

• The U.S. Presidential Scholars Program: Though this is mostly a recognition program and not a source of funding, ED should leverage its ability to direct national attention in the education space and direct new efforts to revitalize this program.

3. Mandate State Data Collection and Reporting on G&T Students and GATE Programs

The Department of Education should mandate states collect and report comprehensive data on GATE program enrollment, services, expenditures, and identification methods. It should also adopt a broad paradigm of data collection that prioritizes accurately reporting and recording student characteristics based on service eligibility (IDEA, ESL, and GATE services).

• EdFacts and NCES: We recommend maintaining the existing EdFacts and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data systems. However, a key change will be requiring states to adopt reporting practices for recipients of GATE services that mirrors the required reporting for special populations, ELL/ESOL, BIE schools, and disabled students. Specifically, ED should mandate the creation of a new subgroup in the EdFacts data initiative to track the “Receipt of Gifted Services.” Make this a requirement for Data Collection by NCES, which includes the data collection for EdFacts, the Education Data Repository.

• SLDS Grants: The executive branch can require states to use existing Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grants to track GATE student achievement separately from existing populations. This task can be streamlined as states already report assessment and civil rights data, making the addition of these columns of data less arduous.

• Targeted Data Points: States must be required to provide specific data points, including:

  • The number of students enrolled in GATE-affiliated programs, in-school services, and per-pupil spending numbers for those programs. This will allow policymakers to evaluate the relative investment in GATE populations compared to students in IDEA and ESL programs.

  • The percentage of schools and districts funding dual enrollment programs.

  • The specific assessment tools schools and districts use to classify and identify giftedness, which will help standardize these (frequently) subjective and varying determinations across states.

  • The number of gifted programs and opportunities available to students within each state, including magnet schools and immersion programs.

  • The number of disciplinary incidents in GATE-affiliated classrooms.

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Revitalizing American Education

The education system in the United States is truly a Leviathan of overlapping and intersecting powers, authorities, systems, and practices. As things stand, though, no single entity rivals the ability of the Department of Education to guide national education policy and priorities. Recently, the major forces shaping its policy have been those aiming to focus it toward equity or those trying to remove it altogether. So our Model Policy begins there, under the conviction that for those who want schools to pursue excellence, no level of policy — especially one of the highest — can be ignored.

Translating values into concrete policies is an essential, challenging task which any successful education reform effort must eventually take on. For the rest of this year and into the next, then, we will be developing our framework for how federal education authorities can promote our values: Test students and teach them where they’re at, make excellence-focused education available to all who want it, and keep no child behind.

Thanks to Thomas Carey and Lillian Tara for their help with this memo.

1. While in an ideal world, policy aimed at meeting students where they are at may not need to define arbitrary cohorts and the false binary of the “gifted” label may finally be retired, immediate-term projects should work with the infrastructure we have. Gifted and talented programs remain among the main ways kids who benefit from acceleration can be made legible to bureaucracies.

2. Many of the best approaches regroup students much more regularly than one year, but curricular best practices should not be mandated at the federal level, only understood and given space.