The Unseen Work of Raising Gifted Learners

What families often do behind the scenes to create access for gifted learners

At 6:45 on a fairly ordinary school morning, my husband leaves our house with our oldest daughter so he can get her to high school before her school begins. Then he drives back home because our youngest daughter needs to get to her bus stop. Her school is about 30 minutes from our house. We chose it because its gifted programming was a better fit for her, but because she is enrolled outside our home district, the bus does not come to our house. We drive her to the closest point on its route, and from there she spends an hour on the bus.

At nearly the same time, I am driving in the opposite direction. Our middle daughter is taking college music courses at a nearby university while also attending junior high. Her college classes begin first thing in the morning, and when they end, we make the drive back to her regular school so she can get to her 3rd period class on time and I can get home and start my own workday. For a few hours.

By midafternoon, the route starts again. School pickup for the older girls. Another school pickup for my youngest. Drive to the Conservatory. College prep meetings. Ballet. Swim team. On other days, there might be Girl Scouts, religious education, volunteering, rehearsals, competitions, or appointments. None of this feels particularly extraordinary while we are doing it. It is simply Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or Thursday. But recently I found myself wondering: What is the actual cost of creating opportunity for a gifted child?

The Cost We Rarely Count

When schools and families talk about educational opportunity, we usually talk about programs.

Gifted services. Advanced classes. Dual enrollment. Acceleration. Arts opportunities. Specialized schools. Competitions. Enrichment.

We talk much less about everything required to get a child through the door.

There is the obvious financial cost of tuition, lessons, equipment, fees, gas, camps, instruments, uniforms, and programs. But there is another currency families spend every day: time, flexibility, attention, coordination, and labor.

It is the hour on the bus because the appropriate program is across town. It is the parent answering emails from a parking lot. It is leaving work early for one pickup and finishing it after another. It is knowing which classes exist, which forms need to be submitted, which teacher needs to be contacted, when registration opens, whether an exception can be made, and who to ask when the conventional pathway does not quite fit your child. It is what I have come to think of as the hidden cost of opportunity.

Research outside gifted education has long demonstrated that parenting itself represents a substantial investment of time, including educational, recreational, and travel-related care. Guryan, Hurst, and Kearney (2008), for example, found significant differences in the amount of time families can devote to children, even while accounting for parents' employment. That matters when educational opportunities require not only a capable child, but also an adult with the time and flexibility to make the opportunity possible.

Gifted Education Can Require Families to Build the Bridge

This is particularly significant in gifted education because the appropriate learning experience is not always located where the child happens to be. A student may need subject acceleration, a different school, dual enrollment, advanced coursework, mentorship, or enrichment beyond the traditional school day. Decades of research support acceleration as an effective response when curriculum is matched to a student's readiness, pace, and level of challenge (Assouline et al., 2015). The National Association for Gifted Children similarly describes acceleration as matching the level and complexity of curriculum to student readiness and motivation.

The problem is not that these opportunities exist. We need them, and we should continue expanding them. The problem is what happens when access to them depends on a family being able to build the bridge between the child and the opportunity.

Research on parents of gifted learners suggests that advocacy is often part of that bridge. Duquette and colleagues (2011) found parents advocating for identification, appropriate programming, placement, and accommodations. More recently, Mun, Ezzani, and Yeung (2021) found that the majority of parents in their study of culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse gifted learners had advocated for their children, while families also reported inconsistent school strategies for parent engagement.

Advocacy itself takes resources. Families need to know that something different might be possible before they can ask for it. They need to know whom to contact, have time to research, attend meetings, complete applications, arrange transportation, or continue asking questions when the first answer is no. And that is where this becomes more than a parenting story. It becomes an educational equity question.

What Happens When Opportunity Requires Capacity?

One of the most compelling examples comes from research on gifted identification. Card and Giuliano (2016) examined what happened when a large district replaced a system heavily dependent on teacher and parent referral with universal screening. Identification increased substantially among students from groups that had previously been underrepresented, including economically disadvantaged students, Black and Hispanic students, English learners, and girls.

The students had been there all along, but the system had not been finding all of them. These findings should make us ask a broader question: How many educational opportunities depend upon a parent knowing how to find them and having the resources to make them work?

My family has privileges in this regard. We have two parents who can divide responsibilities. We have reliable transportation. I have enough control over much of my work schedule to sometimes work between drives. We understand educational systems well enough to know what questions to ask. When one of our children needs something outside the typical pathway, we generally know how to begin looking for it.

And even with all of those advantages, it is exhausting.

That realization does not make me want fewer opportunities for my children. It’s actually quite the opposite. It makes me wonder about the child whose family cannot do this. The child who could thrive in the advanced class across town but has no transportation. The student capable of college coursework whose parent cannot leave work at 9:00 every morning to shuttle between campuses. The talented musician whose family cannot manage weekly lessons. The gifted learner whose parent does not know that acceleration is even something a school might consider.

Potential is not distributed according to a family's calendar, ZIP code, income, work flexibility, or knowledge of the education system, but opportunity often is.

Making Opportunity Truly Accessible

There is an important distinction between making an opportunity available and making it accessible. A school might offer an advanced course, but if it requires transportation to another building during the school day, who can realistically participate? A district might allow acceleration, but if families must independently discover that possibility and initiate the process, how many students will be considered? An enrichment program might be free, but what happens when participation requires a parent to provide transportation during working hours?

These are not reasons to stop creating opportunities. They are reasons to think more carefully about how those opportunities reach students.

For educators, administrators, and organizations advocating for gifted learners, this creates an important question about how we define access. It is not enough to know that an opportunity exists. We also need to understand what a student and family must do to participate.

Can advanced coursework happen within the school day? Can transportation be provided? Are families clearly informed about acceleration, enrichment, and other available options? Are opportunities communicated widely, or primarily discovered by parents who already know where to look? Are application processes unnecessarily complicated? Are there ways to identify student readiness and provide appropriate instruction without requiring families to initiate every conversation?

None of this means schools can eliminate every barrier, and it certainly does not mean educators are unaware of the challenges families face. Schools are working within their own limitations of staffing, scheduling, transportation, funding, and competing needs. But recognizing those limitations should be part of the conversation about access, rather than the end of it.

Making the Invisible Visible

I do not resent driving and giving access to opportunities for my children, and most parents I know who are doing versions of this would probably say the same thing. We do because our children have found something that makes them light up. We rearrange schedules because the advanced class finally makes school interesting. We sit in parking lots because there is a teacher, coach, professor, program, or group of peers on the other side of that drive who sees something in our child that needs somewhere to grow.

Many families do this gladly, but it does not make the labor invisible. And perhaps that is one of the things we can become more intentional about recognizing in gifted education advocacy. When we celebrate the opportunities available to advanced learners, we should also consider what it takes for students to reach them, and who might be missing because those requirements are simply too great.

Behind the gifted child sitting in the college class, performing in the concert, attending the specialized program, boarding the early bus, or finally receiving instruction at an appropriate level, there may be an entire invisible infrastructure holding that opportunity in place.

Calendars. Cars. Emails. Forms. Work rearranged. Miles driven. Questions asked. Siblings coordinated. Dinner delayed. Plans changed. A tremendous amount of ordinary family life organized around one deceptively simple goal: giving a child access to the learning they need.

And so, when we talk about expanding opportunity for gifted learners, perhaps we should ask not only what opportunities we are providing, but also what it takes to access them, and who might be left out.

After all, a child's potential should never be limited by the opportunities their family can afford, arrange, or advocate for. 

🌿 Laura

References

• Assouline, S. G., Colangelo, N., VanTassel-Baska, J., & Lupkowski-Shoplik, A. (Eds.). (2015). A nation empowered: Evidence trumps the excuses holding back America's brightest students (Vols. 1–2). Belin-Blank Center, University of Iowa.

• Card, D., & Giuliano, L. (2016). Universal screening increases the representation of low-income and minority students in gifted education. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(48), 13678–13683.

• Duquette, C., Orders, S., Fullarton, S., & Robertson-Grewal, K. (2011). Fighting for their rights: Advocacy experiences of parents of children identified with intellectual giftedness. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 34(3).

• Guryan, J., Hurst, E., & Kearney, M. (2008). Parental education and parental time with children. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22(3), 23–46.

• Mun, R. U., Ezzani, M. D., & Yeung, G. (2021). Parent engagement in identifying and serving diverse gifted students: What is the role of leadership? Journal of Advanced Academics, 32(4).

• National Association for Gifted Children. (n.d.). Acceleration.

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