If rich people knew the only way to get good schooling for their kids is to make schooling better entirely, then we'd have better schools.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-am...
What about this, why not have __every__ school provide personalized education to each person? Do we not have the money for that? Because we are __the richest country__.
I think you have a misunderstanding about what a gifted program is.
I went through a gifted program as a child and I can assure you that my parents paid no money for it, considering our income was so low that we qualified for free lunches in school.
You have special education for students with needs that prevent them from being able to learn in a "normal" classroom, why not for gifted students as well?
Right "any student" - so please explain to me what causes the huge disproportionate racial gap in these schools?
There's really two arguments here:
- Biological
- Non biological
If anyone thinks its the first one, I'm not having this discussion with you.
If you think it's the second one, are taxes going to gifted schools actually...helping society?
I'll answer that question myself: no, it does not. Detroit Public Schools receives more funding per student than the average school district in Michigan, yet it is one of the worst performing school districts in the nation.
You cannot simply throw money at bad schools to make them better, so why punish gifted students by removing their ability to learn at a level that's more appropriate for them?
Measure height in 10 different ways on 10 different days, and you'll get the same value. Measure IQ 10 different ways on 10 different days and you'll get 10 different values. Do I have the same IQ at 3am after I haven't eaten all day, as I do at noon on a full stomach and a good night's sleep? I guarantee you my score will be different in both scenarios, so does that mean I have two IQs? Sleepy IQ vs. Alert IQ? When measuring IQ, is sleepiness vs. alertness controlled for? Is hunger?
Somehow I took a test in 3rd grade that changed the trajectory of my life. What if I didn't eat that morning? No one checked, and the only one to feed me was my mother. What if she didn't feed me? Would my IQ have dropped 10 points on that test and caused my entire life to change? Very possibly, I was on the threshold. I'm quite sure that some people in the room taking the test with me didn't eat that day, maybe not since lunch time the day before, since the test was at 8am. Would it surprise you to know that of the people in my class who were hungry while taking that test that day, most of them were children of color?
How do you think the IQ results turn out when a majority of children of color are hungry while taking it, and the majority of white kids are well-fed. At my school it meant that a majority of "gifted" students were white. Actually, come to think of it, all of them were. Not a single minority, despite minorities being represented at a proportionate rate at my school.
What's scary to me is that the unstated opinion in some of my social circles is that this situation is the result of whites simply having a higher IQ. As your post seems to imply here.
Edit: To the dead comment below me:
> IQ is very well defined - it's the grade you get in an IQ test
That's called a tautology, so what you're saying is that the tests are not measuring anything except themselves. The rest I will leave dead because it's subjective, so no need to resurrect it, but the way you defined IQ here is a verifiable logical flaw in your argument.
It's weird that on one hand you suggest IQ may be a poor, simplistic measure of whether a student is 'gifted', but then on the other hand reduce basketball skill/ability to a simplistic measure such as height.
It also seems you are making a number of claims or hypotheses here that I'm personally interested in knowing if there is any data/evidence to support:
1. Taking a test on multiple days produces high enough variance in results, that the test results are not predictive of any sort of ability or future outcomes
2. The majority of 'children of color' are hungry when taking IQ tests ('of color' in popular usage means non-white)
3. The majority of white children are well-fed when taking IQ tests
Reading between the lines, it seems you are hinting at the idea that all humans who approach the IQ test are equal in ability that the IQ test is testing for. If there are any disparities in results amongst any groups, it must be the result of other factors like being hungry/tired/etc. Is that a fair characterization?
For example, would you say hunger/tiredness is the core reason white children don't all have the same exact scores?
What I'm saying here is that hunger and sleep are two confounding factors always present in any testing situation, at least in my experience as an educator. I have seen it personally in my students, especially when comparing my 8am section performance with my 12pm section's performance for the same class on the same tests and material. The 8am section consistently performs worse (sometimes by half a letter grade or more) on their tests compared to their 12pm peers, and this has been true across my career. What's interesting is I can compare these students across semesters, since they take multiple classes with me. I can see how they perform at 8am one semester vs 12pm another. But this is just my own little experience with college-age students, I'm not familiar with recent literature.
Anyway, the point is if I'm seeing these things in my students there is no reason to thing we wouldn't see these performance drops on 3rd graders doing an IQ test as well. So the question is: why aren't they controlling for these things? Or are they, and I don't know. Because they didn't control them for my cohort when I was tested.
> 2. The majority of 'children of color' are hungry when taking IQ tests ('of color' in popular usage means non-white) 3. The majority of white children are well-fed when taking IQ tests
I wasn't making a generalization here, I was specifically talking about my school.
> Reading between the lines, it seems you are hinting at the idea that all humans who approach the IQ test are equal in ability that the IQ test is testing for. If there are any disparities in results amongst any groups, it must be the result of other factors like being hungry/tired/etc. Is that a fair characterization?
Don't read between the lines here too much, I was making a concrete argument: If we want to measure something like IQ, we should do so rigorously and with purpose, because otherwise what are we even doing?
Even if we just assume IQ is defined as the result of the IQ test, we know that test result can vary based on testing conditions and the emotional state of the tester during the test. With regular testing this is not so bad because the effects average out over time, unless the problem is chronic. With IQ test though, the presence of these confounding factors is especially vexatious, because there is a general perception that IQ is a fixed, immutable quantity, so the score you get on the test cannot be improved.
In the context of gifted programs it means these tests are usually administered once and early during the normal course of a child's 12 year education, and these program really only exist in elementary school; by the time children get to middle and high school there are other mechanisms for sorting children (standard, honors, ap, electives, votech etc.). With something so consequential, we need to do it right, rather than just do a thing because it sounds right and hope that it works out for the best for everyone. If the consequences weren't so monumental than the slapdash approach I experienced (and again, this was a long time ago but at the same time not so long ago. Maybe it's different now, but this is how it was for me maybe things have changed drastically).
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor...
> Traditional explanations for the black-white test score gap have not stood up well to the test of time. During the 1960s, most liberals blamed the gap on some combination of black poverty, racial segregation, and inadequate funding of black schools. Since then, the number of affluent black families has grown dramatically, but their children’s test scores still lag far behind those of white children from equally affluent families. School desegregation may have played some role in reducing the black-white test score gap in the South, but school desegregation also seems to have costs for blacks, and when we compare initially similar students in today’s schools, those who attend desegregated schools learn only slightly more than those in segregated schools.
Automatically blaming any discrepancy on outcomes between different racial groups on racism isn't helping anyone. It also doesn't really feel like you're looking to discuss or learn anything here, rather just to scold people for being racist. This is a tough question that doesn't have a solid answer yet.
Where did I scold people, or call people racist?
I said I'm not interested in the discussion if you think there is a _biological reason_ behind it.
Of course those taxes are helping society. There are gifted students living in poor school districts who wouldn't be getting the resources that let them excel if it weren't for the tax dollars funding those resources for them.
To put this in clearer language: If I have a bunch of 100-sided dice: 90 blue dice in one bucket, and 10 red dice in another, and I roll them all and select the top 10 numbers rolled, I'll have a greater proportion than 90% of blue dice, because there are more total dice rolls in that group.
It just seems really odd to me: It seems like because you get 9x the number of dice rolls for one group you would end up with a final distribution that favors the majority group, but that is obviously not the case. I need to wrap my brain around that one.
If I toss 9 quarters and a nickel and count the fraction of tails that rolled on the nickel then it will be equal to 1/10 of all the tails only if all coins roll tails or all roll heads i.e. in 2 outcomes out of 1024. In half of the other cases nickel tails will be overrepresented and in in the other half - underrepresented. It's because you cannot roll a fraction of a tail.
This is a dramatic oversimplification, to the point of being entirely misleading. Money =/= better schooling. Parental involvement, cultural attitudes about education, and not using a one-size-fits-all approach is what makes schooling improve. Is the implication is that if we forced rich people to send their kids to public schools, they'd use their rich person influence to raise taxes on themselves in order to get more funding?
Wealth is a clumsy proxy. A single-income home, with a parent deeply invested and active in the child's education (rather than how to get food on the table next week), implies a lot of unmeasured but real resources. Resources that are more readily invested in "communities with means." Leaving the communities without those same means deprived, deprived of resources that are not easily tracked by "how much money does the school get."
Of course wealth can play a role too. Consider a poor neighborhood where some of the money from the school goes to paying for school lunches, where in the wealthier neighborhood students are typically sent with their own lunchbox. It's not just about the money. It's about the people that have the money.
It's not something you can easily policy away, imho, because it's a systemic cultural issue, with a lot of messy tangles.
The kids are (often? Usually?) better at reading and writing in the new language, than their parents
https://factsmaps.com/pisa-2018-worldwide-ranking-average-sc...
The idea behind banning gifted/special programs is to treat all students equally with equal opportunity and the same curriculum. Individualized grading by the teacher completely violates this idea.
So I am still unsure what point you are trying make. Based on my research Finland clearly rejects that notion of teaching and grading everyone the same.
Private tutors...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...
But see, we aren't.
"Billionaires shouldn't exist" is one manifestation.
As an example, try this: ask someone who doesn't believe that billionaires should exist if they could snap their fingers and make all billionaires vanish, but nobody would become any wealthier, would they? I've seen that answered yes way too many times. That tells me that some people just don't want to know that someone is doing better than them, regardless of if it actually impacts them or not.
Though to be even more fair, if the political class didn't prostitute their influence, there would be nothing for the wealthy to buy, so making billionaires vanish does not address that problem.
Probably because it's impossible for a person to make a billion dollar in value without stealing from others.
Name me a single example that has made it up there without
- labor violations
- stealing profits from workers
- causing damage to the people who have worked for them
Note I’m pretty sympathetic to the argument that extreme wealth inequality (billionaires) are are symptom of a poorly configured economic system and should be minimised, but your hyperbole is off-putting. And it’s probably hindering rather than helping you make your point.
Nothing like this to show you're open to healthy discussion.
But the comment you replied to had a subtantitive point about the linked article, and you replied to a tertiary part of that post with a political message (no billionares exist without theft/etc) that had nothing to do with the thrust of the conversation.
That led me to believe you were being a troll. You engaged in a way that seemed straight forward so maybe you are just somebody who feels very strongly about a political view.
First-a, he deserves what he has (as far as you can make such a statement in a complex society). He provided some value, got paid for it, he now takes a risk helping others do the same. The only difference between him and me consuming X, providing X+Y value, and using the Y to buy tiny parts of public companies to have some claim on their profits is scale.
First-b, and yes, if someone came and took away my Y for "fairness", I would start working less to just make what I consume. And I mostly /like/ my job, unlike most people.
Second-a, after critically thinking about it, I actually believe it's better for people like him to allocate capital, instead of either some "democratic process", or even worse some semi-elected bureaucrats. I wish we could have people like Bezos, Buffett, Graham, etc. run MANY MORE things (generally speaking, not attached to a particular implementation). We have all of history to indicate who does things better. Second-a-a, even if we were to say "free market is bad in this area, no free market is allowed [e.g. healthcare or housing]" (to be clear, I disagree with that, but let's say we did) I would prefer to install a conventionally-defined-self-made billionaire from another industry to run said area, instead of a govt bureaucracy like we do now.
Third, as others have mentioned you don't have to take his money, you can bootstrap (and then get rich and loan money just like him).
Second-b, combining second-a and third in a more narrow scope, do you think either voters or bureaucrats would fund startups (and, do it better than the likes of VCs)? It has happened, but rarely and almost always in response to an existential threat. Viaweb FAQ says they were financed by angels to the tune of $2m 90ies-dollars. What are the alternative sources of funding you envision in the "fairer" allocation structure for such startups, be it Tesla, Google, or Viaweb, given their success rate?
Communism is an outright religion - there is no experimentalism, outcomes are preordained, and no results may change the assumptions. The only thinking is telological. If anybody pays X for a product and sells it for X + Y where Y is greater than zero it is automatically exploitation by their conveniently loaded definitions.
1. The idea that loaning it out isn't providing any value in itself is objectively wrong. If it provides no value is ridiculous in even a preindustrial economy - let alone an industrialized one where economies of scale and large capex are why markets wind up dominated by big players.
2. The idea that it is a small monopoly is also objectively wrong - money is fungible and it doesn't matter if you get one million in a loan from one entity or ten thousand ones. Even if we accept the standards of morality "if it is a good thing" is irrelevant a question as asking if it is a good thing that vehicles use electricity or break down fuels to move. Those are the mechanisms by which it works - we don't have an option of movement without expending energy. Similarly if you ask for all loans to be free to avoid "exploitation" there is no reason to lock up the money in delays and put it at risk.
Your response is typical of psudo-intellectuals called out on their bullshit. It's a lot easier to say "I'm right regardless of the facts" instead of directly addressing the points raised.
Provide a rebuttal or stop with your nonsense.
2. "Communism is an outright religion - there is no experimentalism, outcomes are preordained" is a case of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong. I don't even know what I'm supposed to say to this other than "pick up a book".
3. "If anybody pays X for a product and sells it for X + Y where Y is greater than zero it is automatically exploitation by their conveniently loaded definitions." Again, this is the idea of "communizm" I had when I was 12 or 13. As you can imagine, either everyone who is a socialist or anarchist or left-libertarian or whatever is a complety drooling idiot, or this is a stupid straw-man designed to fool people with zero critical thinking skills.
4. "If it provides no value is ridiculous in even a preindustrial economy - let alone an industrialized one where economies of scale and large capex are why markets wind up dominated by big players." Again, this is circular reasoning: in the current system providing capital is a valuable service, therefore the system is good since in the system the system is good... do you see what I mean? You cannot justify a thing by reasons internal to the thing itself.
5. "Those are the mechanisms by which it works" See above. I'll also add: capitalism (and specifically our current flavour thereof) is not a Law of Nature: it is the result of a very specific course that history took over the past 300 years. Alternatives are possible. Criticism is legitimate. Ambition to improve is a good thing.
Shall I go on? I learned it's not useful to talk with people who are not in good faith from the get go. Why bother?
1 is obviously a value judgement. 2 contributes nothing to the discussion.
I have a $1m MMR startup that I founded without any external funding - but mostly because I was naive to such structures existing at all. I would have saved years of struggling if I had an initial cash infusion of a few hundred thousand.
Idk about you, but I would trade 10% of my $1m MMR company for more free time during my early 20s.
Yes. But again, not a lot of options to avoid it as you said.
Like for example just build something and start selling it and make money.
That's what I did. Millions others have too. You are on Hacker News, you are probably a hacker, you can just create assets out of thin air!
> "Warren Buffett has made his money using ... land ownership and exclusivity ... a human construct"
Well, sheesh... if your starting frame of reference is that "capitalism is stealing by definition", then there's really no further discussion to be had.
Why not? Is Capitalism the universal truth or something that we can't touch or change?
I'm a founder. I can tell you, external funding is as generous now as it's ever been, and in my network there are YC alumns (and 2-time alums) that would disagree with your take.
Also, we are in a golden age of bootstrapping, you don't need to raise to get a company up and running.
All this to say: Maybe just possibly capitalism isn't so bad? My dad is the manager of a gas station, and I am the founder of a startup with financial security. Anything really is possible when you work for it.
Ironically, you know who else thought the exact same thing, lavishing praise on capitalism? Karl Marx. Maybe educate yourself and open your horizons to something outside your narrow views. I have no problem with people being ignorant (nobody knows everything), but it's grating when somebody is proud of it.
> Anything really is possible when you work for it.
Actually nevermind, such naivete is mind-boggling.
That's the best part, it isn't for a chunk of people. It destroys life for another chunk of people.
So yeah, maybe, to you, it's not bad. To others? It's fucked.
2. Do you consider all the supply chain related deaths, all the prison related deaths, all the civilians killed in America going after oil part of "people killed under capitalism?"
Okay, let me try. I'll go with Jerry Seinfeld.
What labor violations did he do? Who did he steal from and what damage did he cause to the people who worked for him?
All the staff that made his shows possible. All the workers that made his ability to make tons of profit possible, and they saw essentially no real amount of it.
She made something appealing to hundreds of millions of people, and they willing gave her money for it. The horror.
And her books sold well enough before the movies and merch.
There are ~500mm Harry Potter books in print (all years, all languages). Author royalties are between 6 and 15 percent of the cover price. She would definitely have been wealthy, but not billionaire.
What's your actual "you've provided too much value to willing participants" amount? If she negotiated royalties of 20% she would have been a bad person? If she put her money in an index fund and it doubled every 10 years, she'd become immoral later?
Maybe we should put a limit on charity giving? Or do you have an official list of Authorized Ways to spend money?
The actual problem is people can use wealth to corrupt others, e.g., buy political influence. But instead of railing on that, you can't see that you're fighting against value generation itself.
You and that other guy clearly have a bone to pick.
Punishment, for writing such addictive tales of wizardry!
In my opinion the Labor Theory of Value is a tautology.
not all billionaire are good, and not all are bad.
Minecraft became what it is because of the third-party developer community. They saw nothing of it.
> j.k. rowling
Has already been explained. But also, her editors, and the fact that copyright/intellectual property is still a govt backed monopoly.
> George Lucas
Same deal as J.K.
critically, they did so voluntarily and for the compensation of entertainment, passion, and helping themselves.
rowling and lucas didn’t harm workers nor did they violate labor laws. complying with IP laws was not in the criteria, nor should it be.
So you mean they're paper billionaires by "owning the means of production" Yeah. I know. :)
I don't know how you could misread this badly. A paper billionaire means that they don't have billions in the bank; it's just the sale price of the last share that was traded in their company multiplied by the number of shares they own. It's not real, and any attempt to confiscate shares will not result in real money being given to anyone else. Shares are only worth real money when they're sold, and no one will buy shares in a confiscation world.
Can you explain? If they have options, and they probably do, then it will go up. What is your question based on?
People act like we don't understand how "value" and "equity" works.
We do. We don't want money. The idea is to own the means of production. Amazon is nothing without its workers. No company is anything without its workers. The workers deserve to be represented in that huge equity.
Every time you say things like "we" and "people" you discredit yourself. It's a pointless statement. You can have equity; start a company, or join a company (such as Amazon) that awards share options.
That becomes the crux of this. "Billionaires are bad" is a discussion about the system that actually allows them to exist, rather than the people themselves.
Warren Buffett has made a ton of his money using state-backed monopolies like real-estate. Land ownership and exclusivity, even when the land use is unproductive, is a human construct after-all.
The nasty-but-necessary aspect of capitalism is that you need a few rich people at the top and many more beneath agreeing to those rules that put them there on the offchance they'll make it up to those lofty heights themselves.
The problem is that Asian New Yorkers, on average, have higher IQs then everyone else. So they end up in the G&T (Gifted and Talented) programs.
African New Yorkers, on average, have lower IQs then everyone else. So the G&T programs have only a smattering of darker-skinned students.
This is called "systemic racism."
“The move to get rid of G&T is long overdue,” said Rachel Griffiths of Brooklyn. “You can tell at a glance in my sons’ school which class is G&T and which class isn’t — the racial divide is that stark. What does that say to all the kids about who is gifted and who isn’t? In addition to learning reading and writing, the kids get an ugly real-life lesson in systemic racism.” [1]
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/10/08/parents-rip-de-blasio-for-plan...
Sounds like it is, actually. Fast-and-loose claims of "systemic racism", absent any kind of constructive proposal aimed at actually addressing perceived prejudicial attitudes, are just the politics of envy writ large.
That is a cultural divide problem. Asian cultures value education so much more than North American culture so families have a large focus on ensuring their children are well educated (in spite of our education system) as they view that as their ticket to success.
If we in Western countries continue to eschew improvements to our education system, and even reduce the ability for students to access programs that provide them a proper education, then we will continue to fall further and further behind Asian countries in innovation and productivity. Instead we look at the few programs for students that thrive in spite of the system and kill them because it is cheaper than investing in bringing other students up to that level.
What you just stated was actual racism, that other populations are unable to achieve what the Asian students have accomplished, so the program gives them an unfair advantage
Four-year olds are experiencing systematic racism?
Asians kids do better then whites. Racism against whites? Is that because we live in an Asian-centered society where white folk are marginalized? Asians keeping the white man down? Do we need affirmative action for white people? I think that is what Harvard is doing!
It looks like the next NYC mayor will be a black man, so he might be able to keep the "G&T" program going without being accused of racism.
>whites* Oh boy, looks like I struck a nerve there. If any student isn't testing well enough to enter then that's how it is. Good someone else has that chance. I wouldn't have a problem if there were no white people in it as long as everyone is testing against the same criteria.
>It looks like the next NYC mayor will be a black man, so he might be able to keep the "G&T" program going without being accused of racism. I accused you of racist commentary and logic, not the mayor. And if he said what you did, it would be racist as well, regardless of their color, which is not a qualifier on the capability of being racist.
It's astonishing to me. I'm handicapped, but I would never want to drag people down to my level. Occasionally, it becomes useful to remind people that "no, that isn't an option for me," but this just seems to be an urge to make everyone equally miserable if we can't all have it wonderful.
More so the top percentile have the ability, and in my opinion, the moral responsibility to push the entire standard of education up for everyone, rather than their own kin.
I mean other than the fact that this is extremely dismissive, again, Finland is the example that did get rid of all this crap and is doing pretty well for itself.
Yup, world leader in startups, inventions, science, etc...
oh wait...
It's not the top percentile who have the ability. We have to all do it for each other.
Sure. And part of that is making sure that wealth is being distributed with the health of society in mind, rather than individual happiness at the top :)
The top being higher doesn't lower the base. There is more money today than a decade ago.
Merely taking money from the wealthy does nothing to improve the standard of living.
> There is more money today than a decade ago.
Where is it then?
https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a...
The answer to where the money has gone is sort of everywhere. Everything from social security payments to military budgets has increased. Everyone makes more and things cost more too.
Making sure it will happen will kill it. You have to have the right mechanisms in place to encourage it, and it may happen.
To suggest that there's equally distributed chance, ability and responsibility is perverse; it flies in the face of reality.
I didn't suggest that. And if I did, it wouldn't be perverse.
She created a gifted program with me, and ended up sending more kids outside with a guide on how much we should get through.
I was always a distracted kid otherwise, and this got me really excited about a subject that I may not have engaged with otherwise.
So, you had a teacher spend one-on-one time with you. That's the whole point of what I'm getting at. That's what EVERY kid needs.
Imagine now, we actually did fund education to this goal. Where would we be in a few decades?
In Finnish, does “self-directed” imply more time with a teacher? In American English, it almost always means less… sometimes zero.
Source: Me. I was a self-directed learner through quite a few math subjects in junior high school and high school. Total teacher one-on-one time was typically 30 minutes or less per year.
I encourage you to try to be a slightly more sympathetic reader in this thread. You seem to be ignoring and/or twisting things many people have said.
I honestly definitely can see how it comes off that way. And thank you for giving me a chance to see this doubly so.
However, my comments are thinking a bit beyond the system at hand, and a lot more __critically__ about the things we hold universally true, or important, or moral.
This is mainly why my comments are going to sound outrageous or outright "trolly" because it's breaking a LOT of basic assumptions people have about the way the world is setup.
Apologies for coming off this way.
Maybe this isn’t the right part of the thread to ask, but I wonder if the difference in Finland versus the US is that the concept of what a “good education” looks like is largely shared in Finland while there are very divergent and often times conflicting views of what “good education” looks like in different US communities.
Oh 100%, there are cultural differences here that are significant. And America is a far more diverse country than, essentially anywhere else in the world.
With that being said, I think a lot of our problems stem from the extreme segregation that is still with us today.
In reality, segregation legally ended, but we really didn't take efforts to "undo" the damages done by segregation and have kinda...let it become a compounding failure.
Our economic system, has an amazing marketing team. Low regulations, government steps out and only comes in to protect your property & your rights. But in reality it ignores that:
1. Society health depends on *everyone in society*. Society health is important. People suffering in your country is not something that anyone likes.
2. Okay, so people are suffering. We have a system where they can... well, try to better their lives. But is that actually the case?
3. Okay, fine, it's not actually the case. What *is* fundamentally broken then? What CAN we do to actually live up to the American dream?
These questions have really lead me down into the path of "I...don't think Capitalism is optimized for social health, but focused on individual health. And I think that's bad"
I hate that this is my natural take too. I really want to believe that most people arent like this, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to hold this position.
No, its done based on research showing that tracked gifted/mainstream bifurcated programs are:
(1) worse compared to known practical same-classroom alternatives for the students identified as gifted,
(2) worse compared to the same alternatives for the students not identified as gifted,
(3) as implemented in practice, based on criteria that heavily bias for out-of-school environments rather than purely assessing intellectual ability.
“Gifted programs” were a top of the line social technology of the 1980s, and the two track industrial system they embody was better than the one-track industrial system. But we know how to do better than either, now.
Multidimensional/multilevel tracking of the type used in secondary schools seems to be, if not essential, at least useful to that goal.
Unidimensional two-track gifted/mainstream tracking has show itself to be suboptimal, especially for gifted students, who tend to be all over the map in their performance levels in different skill areas. The same techniques of providing assignments that engage at multiple levels and individualized enrichment needed to deal with that within gifted classrooms turns out to also be better for non-gifted classrooms, and to render the whole gifted/non-gifted segregation a pointless exercise that only causes unnecessary harm, stigma, and division.
What is the shiny new alternative?
Not exactly. The optimal strategy is to make every kid do their best. That means giving some resources to every kid in proportion to how much better it'll make them.
We don't only excel because of our average performance. We also excel, as a society, because of the outlier contributions of some of our most gifted students.
It's a lot easier to destroy than it is to create.
This is just people taking the easy way out, without thinking about second order effects.