Gifted education is often faulted as compromising the principle of equity and perpetuating social inequalities. This article focuses on making gifted education socially defensible and educationally productive. To accomplish this goal, key values and priorities guiding policy and practice, such as excellence, selectivity, diversity, equity and social equality, and efficiency or educational productivity, must be endorsed. To understand how these issues have been dealt with, several cases and examples that have a bearing on how to negotiate and balance these values and priorities without resorting to radical, dogmatic positions are discussed. Finally, several recommendations for practice that will help resolve the tension between excellence, selectivity, and efficiency on the one hand and diversity, equity, and social equality on the other are made. (Contains 1 note.)