Where Does Gifted Education Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

For anyone who puts pen to paper, there can be no greater compliment than when someone reads your work, except when that person then takes the time to think about it and respond. As part of this special issue, almost 50 people took the time to engage on the topic of equity in gifted education and respond to the ideas I offered (see Peters, 2022). It was a gift that left me humbled. Because of the number of commentaries and range of ideas offered, my goal in this final paper was not to respond or react to them individually. Instead, I printed them all out, spread them across the floor of my office, and tried to find areas of agreement that might help the field move forward. As many gifted education scholars and practitioners have long lamented, the existence of disproportional representation within gifted and talented programs has gone on for too long and the time has come for bold, collective action. Although they covered a range of topics, in reading through the commentaries, there appeared to be two broad areas in which most of authors agree: