>The draft rejected the idea of naturally gifted children, recommended against shifting certain students into accelerated courses in middle school and tried to promote high-level math courses that could serve as alternatives to calculus, like data science or statistics.
I do think there could be a benefit to reducing "gifted"/"accelerated" classes before high school, though, which is something that 1. could be framed as either raising or lowering standards and 2. the general public seems to have a visceral reaction to. that's more what I was addressing
there are bound to be truly exceptional students that far outpace everyone else, but in those cases i dont think its entirely fair to expect schools to fully accommodate such outliers. historically such prodigies resort to self-study
So while schools have to keep passing kids that should be failing for reasons outside of their control, I think the next best option is to keep giving those who can advance quicker an option to keep advancing quicker.
In the case of some Californian schools, over half their math faculty may already be Calculus teachers, and in the incoming junior high, over half the students may be on track to take Calculus. We should not think of students with the potential to reach Calculus as outliers.
This sentiment would equally support removing special education programs for students with learning disabilities, yet those are not being called into question.
I had no such thing in school, but being bored had a huge part in school being hell for me. I read about schools for gifted children and dreamed about how cool it would be to be on such a school (not that I would necessarily have qualified, mind you).
I am personally in favor of teachers having high expectations from pupils, that they can rise to meet.
I don't think that any of that is crucial to math education by itself, but having an affinity with numbers (rather, an intuitive sense of magnitude) is very beneficial to understanding the more advanced concepts. The open question (at least to me) is whether that understanding is nurtured best by calculus, geometry or Cartesian graphs.
Pro tip: your life is more important than that.
But jumping ahead in math does not mean you are now part of a gifted & talented program.