Putting Human Flourishing First: The Task Force on Child Potential and Educational Integrity

Executive Order →

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For generations, programs labeled gifted, advanced, or accelerated have promised opportunity. For many students, those programs opened doors to deeper learning and enrichment. But for too many others, they have also reinforced narrow definitions of ability, sorted children before they fully developed, and created quiet barriers that follow students for years. The new Executive Order establishing the Presidential Task Force on Child Potential, Educational Integrity, and Human Flourishing confronts those realities directly.

This Task Force exists to ask the hard questions that families and educators have raised for decades. Are we cultivating curiosity—or chasing test scores? Are we helping children explore their gifts—or boxing them into tracks that limit discovery? Do these systems protect late bloomers, neurodivergent learners, and children from underserved communities? The Order recognizes that achievement metrics alone cannot define the full potential of a human being.

The review will be comprehensive and public. It will bring together teachers, parents, students, researchers, civil rights advocates, and specialists in ethics and child development. It will examine everything from GATE and magnet programs to the testing and screening mechanisms that decide a child’s future before they can fully shape it. It will also scrutinize the funding structures that quietly incentivize tracking and separation.

Just as important, this Task Force is built on transparency. Families deserve full information about the benefits, risks, and long-term implications of any program that labels or tracks a child. Students deserve to be more than inputs into institutional outcomes. And communities deserve a system that treats every child’s mind as expansive, not predetermined.

This Executive Order does not assume every accelerated or selective program is harmful. Instead, it demands proof that these programs serve human development—not institutional convenience. It prioritizes ethical reasoning, emotional well-being, and independent thought alongside academics. The goal is simple: an education system that helps every child flourish as a whole person.

The Task Force will deliver a public report with recommendations for reform, replacement, or elimination of programs that fail to meet that standard. It will also propose new frameworks centered on agency, choice, and the full spectrum of human potential. Education should never be a corridor that narrows; it should be a horizon that expands.