Did people read the article? There's actually some interesting points about how gifted/advanced curriculum isn't always the solution. I'd have to agree. I went to a magnet school, so already presumably for "gifted" students, that in turn had advanced courses like honors or AP. And while there were students who genuinely benefited, myself included, it also became a game of getting into the most advanced course so you could have it on your college applications.

Also, imo, the vast majority of students did not benefit. It's not like they were all brilliant. They basically passed a standardized test that they spent a few years in prep classes to pass. What this measured was whether your parents were tapped into particular social circles and knew to put you in prep. Once you were in the school, if you wanted good teachers, you had to take honors. I had a fantastic history teacher who talked about how he loved teaching regular history, but he was constantly pressured by administration to only teach AP. So for a lot of students who didn't have the grades to do honors, they got stuck with the mediocre teachers. Not to mention, psychologically, it sucks being in the bottom 50%. There were so many kids who thought they were dumb or underachievers, but were really just in the wrong environment. When they went to college, they blossomed from not being in such a rat race.

I'm not saying the solution is to eliminate gifted programs, but let's not pretend that they're universally great for kids. They're often much more status games than actual educational fulfillment.

I had a very different (and much more positive) experience with G&T. I went to my local public school in rural Pennsylvania. In PA schools are required to write an IEP for "gifted" students. There are a couple of metrics, but the main one is anyone who tests > 130 on an IQ test. I remember taking a test in 2nd or 3rd grade (I was terrified of authority figures as a kid, so I have no idea how they accurately give these assessments, but at least in my case it was).

Having an IEP meant I got special attention in elementary school, which really boiled down to a) some extra math worksheets and b) getting pulled out of class once a week to go with the other IEP kids to a special "gifted" class. The content of that class was probably less important than getting us out of the regular classrooms. This gave the teachers the chance to repeat material without boring us (and the behavior problems that come from that).

Now I'm the dad of a talented 10 year old boy who doesn't have this experience and is bored constantly. He is basically forgotten about as he's never going to test below grade level even if he's completely ignored, and there's no incentive or requirement that he stays engaged.

I agree with you, and wish this perspective had informed many of the comments nearby.

I'm commenting because my own kid went through the LAUSD highly gifted (HG) magnet program -- which is a subset of the "gifted" program -- his high school was: https://www.highlygiftedmagnet.org.

(Without belaboring the point, it's a very high-achieving bunch. Multiple Harvard, MIT, and Stanford admissions in his rather small graduating class of ~70.)

There are good things and bad things about the LAUSD HG program. One good thing is that most admissions are done just by testing. There are 2 layers of tests, one for gifted and one (later) for highly gifted. If you test 99.5%+, you can be admitted to the HG program. The tests are done relatively early (4th grade for my kid) so they aren't as easy to game, although I'm sure it is done.

Every LAUSD student gets the first test, so that's pretty egalitarian. You have to ask for the second test. That's the good part.

One thing the article discusses is the other paths to admission at some schools -- paths that are much more subject to gaming, esp. by parents. Things like outside evaluations and private testing to substitute for the LAUSD-administered test. That has been a source of controversy, rightfully IMHO, because these parents can be bulldogs. The possibility of gaming the system is the bad part.

One other thing to re-inforce in the above comment. The HG program did tend to favor "high-achieving" rather than "gifted" students. So there was a high proportion of boring grindset students, weighted towards STEM, and the result was that the actually creative types were in a minority.

My conclusion is that these programs can benefit the special needs of HG kids, but the devil is in the implementation details and the parents and status game will tend to mess it up. Also, we should have no illusions that their existence is in part a reaction to racial/social inequities, and that they tend to reproduce the problems of the outside society.

> a magnet school, so already presumably for "gifted" students, that in turn had advanced courses like honors or AP.

I too attended a magnet school, but the point of magnet schools were not actually for 'gifted' students. While many did offer advanced classes or programs, the goal was to influence racial desegregation by offering programs to encourage white students to attend black majority schools.

> Also, imo, the vast majority of students did not benefit. It's not like they were all brilliant.

I'm not brilliant, but I absolutely did benefit. The magnet school I went to, and the gifted-students programs I attended pushed me, and I'd never really been pushed before; I was just on cruise-control, academically. There was room for potential, and it was not being filled by the educational system until magnets/gifted-programs.

Moreover, I benefited simply because the magnet school system removed me from my zoned school, but the circumstances here are probably unique to my situation. The short of it is that leaving the zoned school was life-altering. The educational pressure I describe above is probably more globally applicable.

College was a huge wake up call of "oh my, the workload is real." If I hadn't had the push I got in the magnet school system to work harder, I would have floundered and likely failed in college.

That's if I had made it to college at all. The trajectory of my life, the path where I didn't get into the magnet system … I can't imagine that path going well.

> They basically passed a standardized test that they spent a few years in prep classes to pass.

Yes, there's a standardized test that you must pass. But no, I spent exactly 0 time in prep classes. It's not needed: the bar is not that high.

> What this measured was whether your parents were tapped into particular social circles

Not really … my mother tapped into her "social circles" — other mothers she met at my preschool — to try and learn what she needed to know about the schools, the school system, and the rules of the bureaucracy she was contending with, in order to effect better outcomes for her children.

I.e., what any good parent would do. The article misses the mark here too:

> Part of the problem was that the original purpose of gifted programs had been lost in parental competition for prestige and advantage. Unlike other special-education categories, the gifted label was coveted by parents.

Yes, the "gifted label was coveted by parents", but not for "parental competition for prestige", but because it was key to me having a future. There were just certain, simple, logical steps in my education that were not possible to take without first getting the "gifted" label, since that's the bureaucratic grease that makes the whole system move for you. The law essentially results in a system that says "is kid gifted? if yes, then provide resources, else tell them to go away". Parents play within the rules of that system when they must.

… five minutes of listening to the parents talk about their children would tell you it's a conversation about "my kid is struggling with X, what can I do?" and not "hey, my kid is gifted, what about yours?" — the notion is preposterous, to me, having lived through it.

The magnet school system in my area suffered similar problems to the one you describe, but IMO that was mostly due to a lack of resources. I mentioned earlier the bar was low: one of the magnet schools that I didn't attend was because it had no seats: it was ~5:1 oversubscribed: for every child attending, there were 5 meeting the criteria, but SOL. I was one of the 5. I had to waitlist, and it took a year before a spot at one of my less preferred options opened up. (But even then, it was a vastly better school than my zoned school.)