My personal observation: It’s not gifted programs, it’s the environment. I work on a pretty good science campus in a smallish university town, lots of smart people and so on. There are a few products of gifted programs, but most people just meandered in.

What stands out though is that almost everybody has a story of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool. The chess club, post soviet backyard hacker pad, Berlin maker space … I think what would help much more than school run gifted programs, would be more opportunities for interested kids to mingle an push each other forward.

I grew up going through a gifted program (in the 80s) and it was the gifted program that was the subculture i fell into that really pushed me.

Before that I was isolated and flunking out. Maybe I would eventually have found my people, but at least for me the gifted program found me, and got me on the right path at an early enough age to matter.

Btw, this was in a region where intellectual capability and success was not as celebrated as it is in the Bay area.

The right peer group makes all the difference.

I currently live in a rural environment with tiny schools and wonder how I would’ve turned out if that’s where I did high school. I think you need a critical mass of other gifted kids to really set the bar and drive some aspirational goals. If your class has a single gifted kid, they’ll just see that they exceed their peers and coast; if there’s a whole group they’ll push each other once they know more about where the ceiling is.

This surely has a good amount of truth. Students won't engage with striving for excellence if they are socially/environmentally discouraged from it. How do parents/teachers/peers/school react to a student being very good at something?

"almost everybody has a story (from previously) of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool"