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Comment by matchbok3 | Hacker News Reader

Quite amazing how progressives continue to try to dismantle public education in the name of "equity". This will just push more to private schools, further harming public education.

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The economies of scale will still allow specialized classes for those qualified in the public system. A special program to tell people they are special is probably not the investment needed at this time.

Tell people they are special? Are you joking or just uninformed?

These programs provide challenging material to kids who are more capable while leaving room for teachers to create more appropriate coursework for everyone. Do you think those kids should just nap all day?

Your preferred system seems to be to lower the standards instead of raising everyone up. Interesting, I wonder why.

You are factually wrong. According to actual studies which follow these things, high IQ students do not increase their scores when in gifted programs compared to being in general education. It's a wash. The ones who benefit most are disadvantaged kids. I know, you hate the idea of equity. But universal screening showed that Hispanic kids participation rate in gifted programs increased by over 100% when all kids were screened for access to gifted programs instead of relying on teacher + parent recommendation. For black children, they increased by around 75%. *Those* children were the only ones to actually see improved scores from gifted programs.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w20453

I have no issues w public schools offering advanced engineering, calculus, Latin, and other uncommon languages the many thousand students in the school system will give them an opportunity to have these classes for highly advanced students. I do not think blowing smoke up kids asses by telling them they are so special is the best way to go. In many areas, these kids may not be so special but their inflated ego may not pick up on it. My anecdotal observations of my youth was too many of my mentally gifted minor friends became potheads and sadly wasted the great opportunity they had.

Public schools generally don't receive enough funding to provide the bare-minimum. If the gifted/talented coursework was preventing normal students from graduation, why should they keep it?

Public schools generally don't receive enough funding to provide the bare-minimum.

This is commonly repeated and basically false. Inflation-adjusted funding per student continues to increase: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d25/tables/dt25_236.55.a...

Mostly the is down to conservatives being completely incurious to the science of education and actual data around it. Especially because of the news sources they use. For example Seattle wasn't ending gifted programs. They were redistributing them so that students could go to the school they lived closest to instead of being bussed across the city. The article doesn't mention that the decision was reversed in 2025 and they are going to operate a hybrid model where the cohort schools still exist and parents can opt into either model. But go off on a deliberately misleading headline from an obviously biased source. It's the conservative thing to do.

Looks like they did reverse course a bit, aka a "delay". My comment is still valid. Progressives around the country view these programs as bad.

Please avoid personal attacks, do better.

I'm progressive. I don't view them as bad. So you're wrong again. Where I do think they are problematic is when they are introduced incredibly early. No kindergartner needs to be segregated into a gifted program. Especially gifted programs which don't have universal screening which allows teacher bias to influence class demographics.

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