That said, I think logistics of education today can supply almost everyone with a high quality education anyway and the role to connect people moves from universities to other places. So less elite and more broad high quality education wouldn't hold anyone back and is a better approach.
Freedom and equality contradict themselves at some point, but I do think everyone has a right of participation in society and education. Forcing "representative" distributions is a flawed approach for multiple reasons. And we know it cannot even be true at this point, there is far too much contradictory evidence. I don't understand why people still believe it to be desirable. Women in IT is a staunch example.
Elite education lately just sold the correct contacts although the quality of education was indeed high. With todays communication infrastructure it would be a net loss to restrict the audience here.
citation needed. I agree students definition differ in abilities, but by and large you don't have to be super-smart to succeed in K-12.
Yeah, you don't have to be super smart to succeed in a warehouse-mentality K-12 system. In fact, it helps not to be. Wait, I think you just proved the benefit of advanced classes in K-12.
My experience being in a "gifted" program in middle and high school in Florida was that the students in the program had parents who knew enough to get them tested. That alone marks a privileged class. I sincerely believe that if every student had been tested, the makeup of the gifted, honors, and standard classes would have been much different.
(I graduated high school in 1990. Maybe things are much different now. I would have no way to know.)
Strangely enough, there were also a very limited number of G&T programs, including none in many of the poorer areas of the city, so if you lived in, say, the west side of the Bronx (as a friend of mine did) and wanted to send your kids to a G&T school, your best case was a 1.5 hour transit commute to East Harlem. My friend and his spouse could do that because they had work flexibility (including the flexibility for one of them not to work), but poor people don't usually have that either.
Effectively, this works out to socio-economic desegregation masquerading as racial desegregation (because, for various historical and structural reasons, race in NYC is correlated to affluence).
[0]https://ncrc.org/racial-wealth-snapshot-asian-americans-and-...
[1]https://documentedny.com/2018/09/04/language-gap-drives-grow...
The only source I could find with respect to your question is that "Students from the 19 poorest districts, who make up about 31% of kindergarteners citywide, represented about 28% of gifted offers last year" (https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/ny-gifted-adm...), but I do not have the primary data.
Given the overall ethnic representation of the school, it is statistically extremely likely that a large fraction of the 28% are Asian.
I also find no cited evidence in many of the pro-ending-G&T articles that G&T programs cater to wealthy students, and presumably De Blasio and others who have access to the data and want to end the programs would have pushed those facts out there.
Anecdotally, wealthy whites and asians have the opportunity to send their children to private schools without spending a large portion of their young lives testing into G&T programs.
Spoken so authoritatively that I'm sure you have a source?
Especially in later years, segregating the 'smarter' students is a net loss for the under achievers. How could those 'smarter' students be helping tutor the under achievers?
Public school was about helping those in poverty get an education. The middle and upper class has infiltrated the school system for their own purposes. Personally, I'm against public schools in any form, but if they are to exist, we should be trying to ensure all kids have access to the same basic education, not rewarding the ones that already have a higher chance of success.