Palo Alto parents recently filed a lawsuit [1] claiming that PAUSD's system for offering advanced math unfairly discriminates against girls (who make up just 35 of the 162 students receiving advanced placement in middle school). Apparently the process involves an objective test and a subjective test, and you have to pass both in order to qualify.
1: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2021/11/04/lawsuit-claim...
probably because a fair chunk of the kids aren't actually gifted, and if you cave to the parent's demands then you end up with a "if everyone is gifted, then no one is gifted" situation.
That doesn't mean that the dilemma you mention wouldn't arise, but presumably there are objective tests that could be used to make determinations. It wouldn't be a panacea, but it would be better than ignoring advanced students like they're doing now.
So if the school’s student body as whole outperforms the national average, then that school’s curriculum is enriched to meet the students where they are. State standards are a floor, not a ceiling.
This is good for the kids but not easily visible to the parents the way that placement in a gifted program is. Unfortunately, for families interested in markers of achievement, sometimes they will be unsatisfied with anything short of that letter that their child has been placed in the gifted program.
see https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/03/cdc-report-youth-suic...
https://nextshark.com/children-of-affluent-parents-in-palo-a...
and
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
Menlo Park and Palo Alto school districts are overrun with parents who want to push their child into advanced classes from the moment they can put sentences together. Having talked to many friends over the years who work in tech with me who grew up in these school districts (I didn't, my experience was very different), their parents constantly applied pressure to school administrators and counselors to push their child into advanced instruction. I know parents that would spend hours a day trying to pressure school administration to push their child along. I can only imagine this form of sandbagging is just to put the brakes on you and every other parent who wants to push their child as much as possible. You're competing against every other wealthy, pushy parent trying to push their children into advanced classes as well.