Economically, education is a public subsidy that helps private wealth. Taxpayers pay for your worker training for free. In exchange society makes some demands on the educational process, primarily that it spend some amount of time preparing students to be responsible citizens/members of society alongside the office drone prep these gifted programs want to accelerate.

Keeping all the smart kids locked in an ivory tower where they don't have to deal with humanity or ever get any context into how society actually works is how you get Ayn Rand afficionados well past the age-appropriate teenage years, and nobody wants that.

Edit: Parent was missing a comma. Punctuation is important.

I think they forgot a comma. "Economically, gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact"

If there's a sensible read of someone's comment it's preferable to use that interpretation. "Economically gifted" makes no sense in the context of the discussion.

The OP was saying your tax dollars are likely to get a good return by fostering the progress of gifted students.

Seeing as a lot of people are pointing out the omission of a comma, what would you say to a person who wasn't economically fortunate but ended up in a GT program? Would that justify the tax expense?

I think there's a comma missing there. Plenty of gifted students in my son's school qualify for the free lunch program.

Or you can realize that GP left out a comma, or with a slight rephrasing:

  Economically speaking, gifted students ...

I think Retric meant Economically, gifted students...

> Economically gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact

If you do that, you basically just dumped a bunch of money into kids that are immediatley leaving for somewhere else. It's like global warming; why cut emissions for someone else's benefit compared to your own?

We fund schools because on the whole it all works out; if San Francisco teaches a kid who moves to New York, well, New York taught a kid that moved to Portland and Portland taught a kid that moved to a Kansas farm and Kansas taught a kid that moved to Texas, and in the end everybody wins pretty well.

Can you please elaborate or share some kind of story on why you think this would happen? Where are they leaving to, and why?

jerf, the problem is that there is nothing to keep Alabama from defecting, except for the fact that educated people like to live around places with good education systems and tend to vote in favor of education.