A battle over gifted education is brewing in America

STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL is considered the crown jewel of the public schools in New York City. The magnet school is one of America’s biggest feeders to Harvard; a list of alumni includes four Nobel laureates. It is also one of New York’s most competitive schools, admitting pupils on the basis of a single, high-stakes exam and little else. To some, that seems the meritocratic ideal. To others, it yields alarming results. Of the 895 places available last year, only seven (or 0.8%) were offered to black pupils (in a district where 25% of pupils are black). Asian-Americans do far better in the entrance exam and are 73% of the school population—or four times their share of the pupil population in the district.

“You have to believe either that there are only seven black kids capable of doing the work of Stuyvesant or that there is something horribly wrong,” says Richard Buery, a graduate of Stuyvesant who is now chief of policy and public affairs for KIPP, a network of charter schools.

The debate over whether education of gifted children segregates them on the basis of pre-existing privilege rather than cognitive ability is neither new nor uniquely American. The number of selective, state-run grammar schools in Britain reached its zenith in 1965, before the Labour government of Harold Wilson embarked on a largely...