The Race War Over Giftedness

Steven Pinker says that racial differences in IQ are an "intellectually minor topic," but ignorance of the subject causes no end of incompetence in education.

Steven Pinker asserts in his new new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows that the fact that practically nobody knows about racial differences in average IQ is good because it is an “intellectually minor topic.”

But the value of not being ignorant on this empirical question sure seems to come up all the time when I read a newspaper. For instance, from the New York Times news section:

Why America’s Debate Over Which Children Are ‘Gifted’ Won’t Go Away

Gifted programs could be shutting out millions of high-performing Black and Latino children from low-income families. Can districts fix their advanced education problem?

It’s almost as if we have tests for these questions, and vast amounts of data have been published over the generations.

By Troy Closson

Oct. 27, 2025

In New York City, families sparred over whether a few thousand 4-year-olds should be funneled into gifted education programs.

As I’ve often pointed out, New York City tends to have the most crazily early dividing age, both for private and public schools.

As I wrote for UPI in 2002 about the novel The Nanny Diaries about a Manhattan nanny’s job taking care of 4-year-old Grayer X.:

Later, Mrs. X hires a developmental consultant to evaluate Nanny’s performance. The consultant grills the servant with questions like: “How many bilingual meals are you serving him a week? ... And you are attending the Guggenheim on what basis?”

Shocked to learn that Nanny is letting Grayer do the kind of things 4-year-olds like to do, the consultant concludes, “I have to question whether you’re leveraging your assets to escalate Grayer’s performance.”

The reason that Mrs. X wants Nanny to try to turbocharge her 4-year-old’s IQ is left somewhat vague in the novel. In the rather unreal real world of Manhattan’s elite, to get into any fashionable [private] nursery school in New York City, a toddler must take a 60-75 minute Wechsler IQ test administered by the Educational Records Bureau for $315.

Of course, as every parent on Park Avenue knows (or at least assumes), if you don’t get your child into the right nursery school, he can’t get into the right kindergarten, and thus he’ll be shut out of the right elementary school, prep school, college, and, finally, MBA or law school. In other words, as the title of one Mrs. X’s self-help books on navigating preschool phrases it, age four is “Make it or Break it” time. So, many parents worry that their 4-year-old’s performance on this IQ exam will determine his fate forever.

On the other hand, most places aren’t as insanely competitive as New York, so they tend to wait longer until kids are more measurable for measuring them for gifted programs. Back to the NYT:

In Seattle, teachers disagreed on how to improve the dismal enrollment rates of Black and Latino students in schools for gifted pupils, a problem decades in the making.

Seattle is another city with quite smart whites and Asians.

And in Fairfax County, Va., school leaders wrestled with a thorny question: Should we still label children “gifted”?

Paywall here.