Article 018: The GATE Program, Gifted Children, Unusual Tests, and The Rh-Negative Question

For generations of American schoolchildren, being pulled out of a regular classroom and placed into a gifted program could be an unusual experience. Depending on the state and school district, these programs carried names such as Gifted and Talented Education, gifted education, academically talented programs, or simply GATE.

Today, an interesting conversation has developed among adults who remember participating in these programs. Former students compare memories of intelligence tests, pattern-recognition exercises, hearing tests, special classrooms, unusual puzzles and being separated from their classmates. In some online communities, another question repeatedly appears: Why do some former GATE students say they are Rh-negative?

For a website devoted to blood groups, genetics and unusual historical questions, it is worth investigating but it is equally important to separate what can be documented from what remains anecdotal.

What Was GATE?

GATE generally stood for Gifted and Talented Education. It was not one single secret national program with one standardized testing procedure. Gifted education developed through state and local education systems, and identification procedures differed substantially between districts.

California provides a particularly well-documented example.

In 1961, California established the Mentally Gifted Minor Program, initially identifying students who scored at or above the 98th percentile on standardized measures of intellectual ability. By 1980, approximately 160,000 students across 454 California school districts participated.

That year, California established the broader Gifted and Talented Education or GATE program. The definition expanded beyond traditional IQ performance to recognize abilities in areas including specific academic subjects, creativity, leadership, and visual and performing arts.

This distinction matters because there was never one universal profile of a "GATE kid."

A child could be identified because of extraordinary mathematical ability while another might demonstrate unusually advanced language skills, creativity or reasoning.

How Were Children Chosen?

This is where many people's childhood memories begin to make sense.

Identification could involve standardized achievement tests, intelligence or ability testing, teacher observations, classroom performance, parent recommendations and other assessments.

The California Department of Education currently describes the use of multiple measures as a best practice. Possible factors include IQ and ability scores, academic achievement, motivation, teacher and parent recommendations, classroom observations and portfolios of student work.

Historically, intelligence testing often played a particularly prominent role.

That created problems of its own. Researchers and educators eventually recognized that traditional identification procedures could disproportionately identify students from certain socioeconomic, linguistic and cultural backgrounds while overlooking other gifted children.

An older educational resource concerning California GATE programs specifically discussed the underrepresentation of minority and limited English proficient students and the need to use broader forms of identification.

That issue remains important today. The federal Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program specifically emphasizes finding gifted students from groups traditionally underrepresented in gifted education, including economically disadvantaged students, English learners and students with disabilities.

What Were They Looking For?

At its core, gifted identification was attempting to find children whose abilities or potential appeared substantially advanced compared with other children of similar age and experience.

That doesn't necessarily mean "the smartest kids in school."

Giftedness can appear in different forms.

Some children have exceptional verbal reasoning. Others recognize mathematical relationships extremely quickly. Some have remarkable memories. Others excel at spatial reasoning, abstract patterns, creativity or problem solving.

A child could even perform poorly in ordinary schoolwork while demonstrating exceptional ability in another area. Educational literature has long recognized that gifted students do not necessarily receive excellent grades.

That helps explain why some former students remember being surprised when they were selected.

Why Do Former GATE Students Sometimes Remember Strange Testing?

This is one of the most interesting parts of the modern GATE discussion.

Adults comparing childhood experiences online sometimes describe headphones, hearing examinations, visual puzzles, pattern recognition, timed exercises, cards, abstract images and one on one testing with adults they did not normally see in their classrooms.

Some of those memories sound mysterious decades later, but many have ordinary educational or psychological explanations.

Cognitive assessments commonly test several different abilities rather than simply asking factual questions. Tests can evaluate verbal comprehension, working memory, processing speed, spatial reasoning and the ability to recognize relationships between unfamiliar shapes or symbols.

Schools could also conduct unrelated hearing, vision, speech or developmental screenings during roughly the same period of a child's education.

Memory introduces another complication: a person remembering several testing sessions thirty or forty years later may understandably combine events that originally belonged to separate school programs.

That doesn't mean people's memories should simply be dismissed. It means that identifying the actual test requires documentation whenever possible.

Old school records, district GATE manuals and archived state education documents are much stronger evidence than trying to reconstruct a childhood assessment solely from memory.

Was GATE a Secret Government Experiment?

There is currently no credible evidence that the ordinary American GATE system was secretly designed as an intelligence agency experiment or biological screening program.

Gifted education itself is extensively documented in state legislation, education budgets, district policies and academic research.

California, for example, openly funded GATE for decades. State records document its funding, eligibility framework and eventual transition away from a separately funded categorical program.

That doesn't make every former student's unusual experience impossible or meaningless. Individual districts experimented with educational methods, universities conducted research in schools, and psychological testing changed considerably over the decades.

But extraordinary claims about a hidden national program require evidence beyond similarities in people's memories.

And Then There Is the Rh-Negative Question

This brings us to the question particularly relevant to our community.

Some former gifted program participants have reported being Rh-negative, leading to speculation that Rh-negative children were disproportionately represented in GATE programs.

At present, we have found no reliable government document, GATE identification manual, peer reviewed study or large dataset demonstrating that Rh-negative children were deliberately selected for GATE programs or were statistically overrepresented in them.

That distinction is extremely important.

Personal reports can generate a research question, but they cannot establish the answer.

If twenty people in an Rh-negative community say they were GATE students, that may sound impressive. But the group already contains an unusually high concentration of Rh-negative people. Without an appropriate comparison population, we cannot determine whether the apparent connection occurs more frequently than chance would predict.

A real investigation would need the blood types of a large sample of former GATE participants and a carefully matched control group.

As far as we can determine, that study has never been performed.

But Has RhD Ever Been Connected to Cognitive Performance?

Interestingly, yes but not in the simple way often claimed online.

Researchers have investigated whether RhD phenotype interacts with biological and environmental factors affecting reaction time, personality and cognitive performance.

A 2013 study examined 502 male soldiers, including 87 RhD-negative participants, using verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests. Researchers were primarily studying the interaction between RhD phenotype and latent infection with Toxoplasma gondii.

They found a complicated interaction: among their participants, Toxoplasma-infected RhD-negative subjects scored higher on the intelligence measures than uninfected RhD-negative subjects, while the relationship went in the opposite direction among RhD-positive participants.

That does not demonstrate that Rh-negative people are inherently more intelligent.

In fact, the researchers explicitly discussed possible confounding variables and acknowledged that the biological mechanism was unknown. The results concerned an interaction between RhD status and another variable not proof of a universal Rh-negative intelligence advantage.

Another study involving roughly 3,800 Czech military recruits investigated RhD status alongside age, smoking, intelligence, psychomotor performance, personality and health. It again reported interactions involving RhD phenotype, although the relationships were complicated rather than a simple "Rh-negative equals higher intelligence" effect.

Earlier research also reported that among Toxoplasma-free subjects, RhD-negative men had faster reaction times than RhD-positive subjects in the population studied. Researchers proposed evolutionary explanations involving the persistence of RhD polymorphism, although these remain scientific hypotheses rather than settled explanations.

Later work has continued investigating whether different RhD genotypes might respond differently to environmental and biological pressures.

So there is a legitimate scientific subject here.

But it is very different from claiming that schools knew Rh-negative children possessed special cognitive characteristics and secretly selected them.

We have found no evidence for that.

Did Schools Even Know the Children's Blood Types?

This creates perhaps the biggest problem with the theory.

Ordinary GATE identification procedures did not require blood typing.

The documented criteria center on intellectual ability, academic achievement, creativity, classroom observations, recommendations and related educational measures not ABO or Rh blood groups.

For schools to systematically select Rh-negative children, someone would first have needed reliable access to each child's blood type.

We would then expect to find some evidence of blood type being recorded, requested, transferred or incorporated into eligibility decisions.

So far, we haven't found it.

That doesn't prevent individual former students from being both Rh-negative and gifted. It simply means that the two characteristics should not be assumed to have been deliberately connected by the program.

A More Interesting Question We Can Actually Test

Instead of beginning with the conclusion that GATE selected Rh-negative children, we can ask a much better question:

Were Rh-negative people actually overrepresented among students identified as gifted?

That is scientifically testable. 

Imagine collecting information from several thousand adults who attended American schools during the peak GATE years.

Researchers could record whether each participant was GATE identified, their ABO blood group, RhD status, approximate year of identification, state, school district, type of gifted testing received and when available their original test scores or school records.

The RhD distribution among former GATE participants could then be compared with appropriately matched populations.

If the proportion were essentially the same, the apparent connection would probably be explained by selection bias and coincidence.

If Rh-negative participants appeared significantly more frequently even after controlling for ancestry, geography, socioeconomic factors and other variables then we would have discovered something genuinely worth investigating.

Either result would be interesting.

Why So Many GATE Kids Still Remember It

There is another reason these conversations continue decades later.

Being identified as unusually capable at seven, eight or nine years old can become part of someone's identity.

Many former gifted students describe being extremely curious children who questioned adults, became obsessed with particular subjects, recognized patterns quickly or felt disconnected from classmates their own age.

Those characteristics can make memories of GATE unusually powerful.

Then, decades later, the internet allows thousands of former students who never knew one another to compare experiences.

Some similarities will have straightforward explanations because schools used similar educational practices. Others may expose genuinely interesting regional programs or forgotten testing methods.

The challenge is determining which is which.

The True Blood Group Position

At True Blood Group, we think unusual questions deserve investigation but investigation works best when the answer isn't decided beforehand.

There is documented scientific research examining relationships between RhD phenotype and certain aspects of psychomotor performance, health, personality and cognition.

There is extensive documentation showing that GATE programs attempted to identify children with unusually advanced cognitive, academic, creative or other abilities.

And there are Rh-negative adults who report having participated in gifted programs.

What we do not currently have is evidence connecting those three observations into one system.

No evidence we found shows that GATE officials tested children for Rh factor, intentionally recruited Rh-negative students, or even knew the blood types of the children they selected.

But there is a fascinating unanswered question hiding underneath the speculation:

Are Rh-negative people statistically overrepresented among adults who were identified as gifted children?

We don't know.

And "we don't know" is not the end of an investigation.

Sometimes it is where the interesting part begins.

Sources and Further Reading

California Department of Education — Gifted & Talented Education program history and identification guidance.

U.S. Department of Education — Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program.

National Association for Gifted Children — research and guidance concerning identification of gifted learners.

Flegr J., Preiss M., & Klose J. (2013). Toxoplasmosis-Associated Difference in Intelligence and Personality in Men Depends on Their Rhesus Blood Group but Not ABO Blood Group. PLOS ONE.

Flegr J. et al. (2012). Rhesus factor modulation of effects of smoking and age on psychomotor performance, intelligence, personality profile, and health in Czech soldiers.

Flegr J. et al. (2008). Toxoplasma and reaction time: role of toxoplasmosis in the origin, preservation and geographical distribution of Rh blood group polymorphism.