Since the end of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Department of Education has made efforts to provide services for the nation’s most academically advanced students (Colangelo et al., 1999). In the 1930s, the U.S. federal government stopped pushing educational advances to challenge academically advanced students because of the financial strain of the Great Depression (Colangelo et al., 1999). However, during World War II, there was a shortage of educated men in the country, which worked to the advantage of high ability students because universities offered early entrance programs for academically advanced students. These programs continued to the Korean War (Colangelo et al., 1999). Thus, when the former Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, the United States realized it needed to do more to challenge and educate America’s most capable and brilliant youth (VanTassel-Baska, 2018) and tried to identify and educate the country’s brightest students (Colangelo et al., 1999). Since its implementation, educators have met gifted education with great enthusiasm and criticism (Ford, 2011). Keywords: middle school; gifted education; critical race theory; theory of multiple intelligence; rural education; African Americans;