I agree with your concerns, but my motivation would be slightly different. The brightest kids. They will be running this country in twenty years. They will be designing bridges, doing surgeries and writing our laws. We want to invest in them.

I strongly believe that a lot of our brightest kids are languishing in bad schools due to poor family circumstances and I think it should be a source of national shame.

I vote both hands for AP programs in poor schools.

I'm just saying that if we can only retain one of "special needs" and "advanced", I'd pick advanced in a blink of an eye due to the reason explained above.

Disclaimer: my kids don't qualify for either.

> I vote both hands for AP programs in poor schools.

Everyone I have ever met who took AP classes in high school treated them as "get college credit without having to actually learn anything." They seem like a joke to me.

Nobody remembers stuff they don't use. It's more like "get college credits without paying". Having a semester out of the way is an instant 12.5% discount. If you go to a school that has asinine requirements with regard to freshman and on-campus housing it could be effectively a much larger discount.

I thought most of the funding comes from local property taxes. That means there are little or no cross subsidies. I image special ed is a huge cost, specially for kids that need to be home schooled. But even that is unlikely to explain the high cost of public schools, and it definitely does not explain the increasing costs.

I'd argue those two things are one and the same