The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

Most Americans would call that pretty much how things actually happen here, too.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4979

> In a world-historic irony, the main effect of this “solution” will be to drastically limit the number of Asian students, while drastically increasing (!!!) the number of White students. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students is projected to increase a bit but remain small.

Kids should be placed in the gifted/magnet track because of performance, and performance alone. I don't believe that a meritocracy is racist, sexist, or biased in an unfair way. Placing students in classes where they may under perform, and excluding kids who would perform well in an accelerated program are unfair, and a meritocracy mitigates both of these problems.

The article raised a good point about schools that marginalized groups would attend don't have a gifted program, precluding them from even participating. That can be addressed a couple different ways. Either redirect high performers to a school where there is a gifted program present, or mandate the presence of a gifted program in all schools. There will, of course, be differing quality of the program from school to school, which would favor the former course of action.

Having gone through the "gifted program" through elementary and middle school, I can say that the only real differences I felt weren't related to curriculum, we were taught essentially the same things, with slight differences.

1. Smaller class size. In a class of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, there was maybe 25 kids. 2. Less rowdy/troublemaking classmates. Made for less distractions. 3. Less busywork. The routine of getting a packet every night for homework was not something I had to suffer through like many friends I had that weren't in an accelerated program.

I don't believe you will ever truly eradicate inequities within public services, and the cost of private services, especially in education, preclude many from participating. That said, we should strive to mitigate them. My fear is that the steps taken to mitigate inequity will just move the availability of opportunity from one group to another, where the true solution is increasing the availability for all groups, and let performance be the selector of who is admitted to gifted/accelerated programs.

That's not really true. You can look at the per pupil spending in places like Washington, D.C. or Baltimore and they're well above the U.S. average (D.C. is one of the top spenders in the nation). A city's public school system sometimes largely serves lower income students even if it has a number of high earners in its tax base (urban yuppies with no kids, wealthy people who send their kids to private schools, etc. all paying into the system without adding to the load).

If we look at funding levels vs. outcomes, we can see many of the best funded school systems struggling. That's because school is a complex problem that doesn't simply get solved by more funding.