> Second generation immigrant children from first generation parents sounds like the American Dream working as-intended to me!

If your definition of the American dream is the tiny fraction of poor Asian kids that get into Stanford you have a screwed up definition of the American dream, which is built on people that go to Cal State LA and never had G&T programs.

> This can simply mean being a functional member of society that participates within their community.

People that work in factories and retail are also functional members of society and your sentence does not seem to imply that when you drew a contrast there.

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ndriscoll 7 months ago | parent [-]

I'm not following your hyper focus on first gen Asian kids or the implication that gifted programs are only for Stanford-bound students. My ancestors have been in North America since the 16-1800s, I went to public K12 and university, and I've benefited quite a bit from having parts of my education that weren't a complete joke (I've done much better economically than my parents, for example).

Teaching high-aptitude kids at their level also does not require taking away from the other kids assuming you have enough of them to fill a classroom.

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laidoffamazon 7 months ago | parent [-]

The thread is discussing the people in G&T programs as the people that "move society forward" and the rest as people that hold society back. While OP seems to think that there's an expansive group that "move society forward", I'm skeptical that this is actually what they mean, because the people that are used as positive examples for these conversations are exclusively poor Asian kids that get into top schools, not ordinary people like me that are considered failures by this class of people.

	▲	ndriscoll 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		There are literally multiple people in this thread (including myself and the above poster) saying they are talking about (relatively) normal people like themselves. We are outliers (someone taking AP calc BC in high school might be in the 95+ percentile in math aptitude), but not profoundly extreme outliers, and the 95th percentile is still millions of people. You seem to be the only person saying that it's a small group of elite kids under discussion.