I think fundamentally the problem is we are trying to fit everything into an industrial, and authoritarian, model of schooling. Students can't be trusted to self learn so we put them into a room, atomize them, strip away almost all of their freedom and force them to learn at the pace of the slowest learner in the group. It's little wonder that acting out is a constant problem.

Gifted programs, while perhaps chipping away at some of the problem don't generally do much about the structural problems in schools and clearly amplify some of their existing biases.

I do not have children but I have given a lot of thought to how terrible our schooling is. I would never want to subject my children to 20 years of what I went through. But the presence or absence of traditional gifted programs is nowhere near the top of my concerns.

I was a gifted program kid who was part of a new style of unstructured, learn at your own pace, self-learn program called the "informal" program. This was back in the early 1980s (the program itself had started in the 1970s).

The net result was that the highest achieving gifted kids did really well and the slacker gifted kids (myself included) did abysmally. Turns out some of us needed a level of structure and rigor enforced on us to nurture whatever gifted talents we had. Some kids learned it at home, for some it seemed to be innate and for others we did not have it anywhere in our lives and needed to be instructed in how to study, what to do, when to do it and at what pace.

Within a couple years it'll be possible to provide kids with AI personal tutors that are better than the vast majority of public school teachers. Parents smart enough to capitalise on this are going to reap huge benefits, while kids trapped in the public school system will fall further and further behind.