Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

"educational bureaucrats" includes "state bureaucracy". They're just pocket-lining middlemen. They have no agency. The final "paymasters" would be corporations, small businesses, and their PR agents in the non-profit sector.

Examples:

- textbooks--topics that haven't changed in centuries--better-covered by texts from generations ago. school system still buys sorry books at $100+ a pop because salesgirl wined-and-dined the right batch of bureaucrats. pearson, mc-graw, et al spend a few thousand, then rake in millions.

- job training--local corp wants more welders/java programmers/truckers, drops some cash on school board members (directly or indirectly), then bibbity-bobbity-boo there's a brand new training center attached to a high school for some thing that I would barely even consider to be education. again, leverage to hell-and-back. tens of thousands in bribes, millions in taxpayer $$$ for free worker training & wage reduction.

- educational software--oh my God. have you even seen some of the shit they waste the kids' time with these days. how does it come about? same story as the rest.

- religion--the motive behind most western art and history, be it protagonist or antagonist. can't talk about it though--massive black hole in any sort of humanities education.

- owned teachers--the front-line infantry, who should be able to offer constructive insights into the process are utterly powerless. too poorly paid to accumulate f-you money, and so terrified of getting kicked out before their pensions vest, they must keep their opinions to themselves and quietly tow the line.

- poor accreditation--by the numbers, education programs at colleges have notoriously low standards. verified by personal experience. we had math teachers who couldn't multiply, and english teachers who couldn't diagram a sentence. thank God for the teacher's edition!

I could go on, and on, and on...

There a lot more options than tracked vs non-tracked.

My public school district implemented a combination of pull-out programs, advanced sections, and tracking on a per-subject and sometimes per-previous year's performance basis. A lot of effort was made to keep class cohorts together, while allowing students who excel at a specific subject to engage in a more challenging curriculum for that particular subject. These were all based on independent assessments. There wasn't a notion of "track" because most students were in a hodgepodge of "advanced/ahead" and "regular" courses, depending on the subject, depending on the previous year's performance, or depending on whether they themselves decided to sign up for the class or not.

A high school kid could:

- be a year ahead in English (which would only separate them from classmates for freshman and sophomore year; English curriculum was completely open, like college, after sophomore-level English.)

- be in one of three math cohorts

- be in the honors or regular section of a science course (based on the previous year's science performance). It was always the same science subject (eg, honors bio vs bio).

- take any AP course they met the prereqs for (iirc, pretty much all APs were available to all students within four years, save AP Calc, which would require a summer school catch up for those in the baseline math track).

- have been in the gifted pull-out program in elementary school (no special curriculum for "gifted" students in high school, afaik)

I had a relatively easy high school experience compared to many—almost no physical bullying, very little bullying otherwise, ran with a couple friend groups outside my almost-the-nerdiest-bunch-but-not-quite primary group that had a kind of light-alternative "cool" factor, school was decent and supportive by local standards at least, happened to pick up weight lifting in junior high and stuck with it so got pretty damn cut rather than continuing down the path of lard—but it was still easily the hardest four years of my life so far (now entering middle age, have multiple kids, a job, all that adult stuff).

College was like a vacation afterward. People mostly don't do a bunch of stupid, mean, disruptive bullshit, and if they do you're not expected to just put up with it? 15ish hours in class and you can arrange your schedule for a mix of hard and easy classes to come out way under the ~45-50hrs/wk of in-class and homework/study time of high school, plus you can usually figure a way not to have to get up before the fucking sun at least 2-3 days of the week, if not all of them? If you need to whizz you just... go? If you are sick or just need a mental health day you just send an email or three and rest, and it may mean a little more work later but no-one busts your balls over it as long as you don't do it too much? What is this, paradise?

It was shocking how much less stressful it was. It truly kinda messed me up for a while, just not understanding how to function outside the pressure-cooker of high school. The socialization there had almost nothing to do with how adults relate to one another in the real world, and the constantly high social stress levels, tight and absolute control by adults, and inability to make any reasonable or ordinary effort to get out of that plainly-very-bad situation, were insane compared to most of the "adult" world.

No wonder so many teens are depressed. School is really awful. Like, structurally so. In the best case. The first few months with a newborn, but after you've gone back to work so are trying to do both things, approach but are not quite as stressful, overall, as high school, in the typical case. I'm not kidding.

the best students should never be weighed down to benefit the lower performers. the top percentile people in essentially any pursuit are responsible for a disproportionately large impact. it is far more important for the top performers to achieve their potential than for the middle to do slightly better.

even if everyone could have all their bills paid for them so they could learn all day at any age, it's ludicrous to suggest this would "obsolete" the discussion of how to treat intelligent kids in relation to others.

also fluid intelligence declines over time so it is absolutely in society's interest to identify talent and assist it as early as possible.