As someone who struggled with schooling for quite a while, this story strikes somewhat close to home. Even the "advanced" courses had little to offer, I either already knew it, or it was trivially easy for me to deduce or learn.

I did, however, have one lucky point that many of these stories seem to be missing: a large number of my teachers didn't care what I did, as long as I was able to keep up in my classes. This meant that all through middle school and most of high school, rather than pay attention in class I would read some place in the realm of 1000-2000 pages a week, usually of various types of fantasy or science fiction books. I also had a handful of teachers who encouraged me to work on any problem I found particularly interesting, suggesting that I keep working on it well past the point required by the course.

I personally believe that is the way that any sort of gifted student should be taught. The current remedial->"regular"->advanced set of curriculum seems to work fairly well for those that fall into those categories, and by encouraging those above the advanced level to work on their own, above and beyond the classwork, on what they find interesting, you manage to meet their educational needs too. I am strongly against home-schooling and private schools, at least for those on the highest end of the intellectual scale. Any sort of educational situation where your entire peer group is of the same intellectual capacity leads to later problems. You develop the mindset that everyone is exactly like you, and that they have the same abilities and capabilities of yourself. Anyone who does not share your abilities becomes inferior, and you are able to de-humanize them.

Its mostly anecdotal, but with few exceptions ever single I have met who was home schooled, went to a private "gifted" school, or was in the IB program (which, at least in our area, segregates a public school into regular students and the IB students, and the IB students rarely, if ever, encounter the other students through the course of a day) has had a negative view of anyone with other skills and abilites, or at least those that have abilities that were not present in the peer group they were schooled with. A schooling method that teaches advanced students more advanced subjects, but also encourages slurs for "normal students" and the concept that the students are, by nature, better than everyone else, is not at all a good thing.