[ewjordan]

From what I remember, it usually means "Scored in the top N% on a standardized test", where N is some small-ish number, roughly proportional to the amount of noise that local parents make when their children don't get labeled as "gifted." In my town parents tended to make a lot of noise, so it was around 15 or 20% of the students, but in some cases people got in directly because of parental bitching, so I don't know what the real cutoff was from the tests (which everyone had to take, at least in my school district).

Some of the dumbest people I've ever had the displeasure to interact with were in the gifted program, and a couple of the smartest ones were not; it's a rough measure, certainly, but that doesn't mean it's altogether meaningless. It probably has a decent but not overwhelming correlation with actual intelligence, whatever way you may wish to define that.

Edit: It's also worth noting that more and more districts don't have gifted programs any more, due to an increased emphasis on getting the lowest scoring students past thresholds for NCLB.

I'd be curious to hear what others here thought of these programs if they were available - the one that I was a part of actually pulled us out of school one full day per week, and let us choose and work on our own projects, so I found it very valuable, far more than the missed schooldays would have been, but I know there's a lot of variability in these things.