An interesting thing I see here is that no one seems to be discussing the needs of the kids themselves in all this. It's all about races, politics, ideologies.
However, one of the main positive motivations behind gifted/advanced education is that if you put those kids in a class with 30 randomly selected children and force them to move at the pace of the slowest kid in the class, they become so bored they either disengage from education or become problem students.
At the same time, if you took the median student and constantly compared them to one of two of the advanced kids, who will look like they "just know everything (since prior work is invisible to the class), that's just disheartening.
A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system is to continuously provide learning challenges at the optimal difficulty for each student. Since that's far from possible right now, the very least we can do is bracket kids in 3 categories so they don't drive each other insane.
Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).
However, one of the main positive motivations behind gifted/advanced education is that if you put those kids in a class with 30 randomly selected children and force them to move at the pace of the slowest kid in the class, they become so bored they either disengage from education or become problem students.
At the same time, if you took the median student and constantly compared them to one of two of the advanced kids, who will look like they "just know everything (since prior work is invisible to the class), that's just disheartening.
A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system is to continuously provide learning challenges at the optimal difficulty for each student. Since that's far from possible right now, the very least we can do is bracket kids in 3 categories so they don't drive each other insane.
Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).