You don’t need to make that trade off.
I also don’t think a world where 10 geniuses go untapped in any context is a positive. The reason so many people can read in the first place is that a small number of geniuses created the prerequisite understanding to shape the modern world. Everyone put in massive amounts of work to achieve all we have achieved, but the key ingredients were a small number of people spearheading foundational ideas. People underestimate the impact of a very small number of people on the massive quality of life benefits we enjoy.
You can’t create genius. The most you can do is create the optimal conditions for the geniuses to take advantage of/manifest and push themselves to that level. Highly intelligent and creative people that make breakthroughs often come from unpredictable backgrounds. In order for them to thrive, you need to provide as many open doors where competency and demonstrable ability is the only prerequisite for entry.
This idea that spending on students correlates with performance is I think entirely wrong and a consequence of the limited metrics we have and attempts to raise money for education.
Education could be WAY cheaper and WAY more effective if we had the proper cultural understanding of what it should provide, and were wise enough to differentiate the needs of different areas. Many areas where reading comprehension is garbage are really in need of like a secondary non-dysfunctional family and job opportunities that are relatively high status/relatively high paying even if you aren’t that smart and just work hard/learn basic skills. If people were sorted into groups based on what their needs were, you could create and advertise doors the smart kids would walk through, and keep it open to anyone who puts in the work regardless of where they’re at, while also serving the needs of people who don’t care about school and are cheaper to bring to baseline if you do it right and don’t force people struggling for basic reading comprehension to be educated by people with a masters degree.
Things are currently falling apart because we’re not willing to admit that people have different needs and abilities and have created extravagantly expensive metrics and interventions to pretend we can equalize all outcome with enough resources. We can’t.
I think we can in fact create better outcomes for everyone, but we have to admit that everyone is different. You can’t have a one size fits all pipeline. Especially if you don’t want to demoralize like 90% of the people in the country that can’t get to the top of that particular giant leaderboard. The internet exacerbates this, and has destroyed borders in which someone who might have otherwise had relatively high status in a particular easily achievable niche accessible to them is now seeing all the people miles beyond them.
The way in which the upper classes currently pity people who don’t have high academic achievement and want to equalize experience in the same pipeline they benefitted from sounds good superficially, but it’s really toxic when you think about it. It assumes people need to have the kind of success that those who’ve done well in that academic pipeline have had in order to be treated with respect.
I think all of this could be fixed with one relatively simple guiding principle: keep metrics in a voluntary, competitive school system for those who have the aptitude and desire to pursue advanced study. Remove most metrics and bureaucracy from a base, mandatory public education much more about civics, basic skills, and introducing people to career paths relevant to their particular local area. I think that principle would ultimately lead to MORE people getting benefits from a traditional pipeline than do currently, free teachers to let the needs of the students actually direct how class time gets spent, and require way less administrative overhead.
EDIT: I rambled way too much here. The current state of education in the US drives me crazy.