There were 49,400,000+ million children in public schools in 2020. There were 529 NBA players.

Whether the NBA is unacceptably racially biased is a problem so tiny that it is not worth spending any societal attention solving. That is not true of public schools.

That is a bad analogy because the NBA is not the only accessible path to a stable middle class life while school, for many people, is.

Not even close to true. Going into a trade is a great way to get into a comfortable middle class life. And in those trades, you'll commonly find people who did horrible in school, and thought they were idiots because of it.

Yes, some trades pay way more, have more available jobs, and have better working conditions (work hours, etc) than PhDs in a variety of sciences.

Not everyone is cut out to be a plumber or an electrician.

The ultimate goal should be to provide better education for everyone so that all students have as many available options by the time they're ready to pick a career path.

Also, I hate these comments from white collar folks about blue collar jobs being the answer to everything. Yes we need them, but we also need to be honest that the average plumber is going to have a harder time working until 65 than an office worker.

I never said blue collar trade was the answer to everything. I said that the school system is not the answer to everything.

So you have to be in gifted to have a successful life?

IQ correlates extremely heavily with having a successful life by western civilization standards, yes.

So we should accept that 98 0+% of people can or gave a successful life, yet should support the gifted <10% in their journey to extract the world's wealth?

I don't want to spend my tax money educating future bankers.

If you're talking about the top 10% of kids, you're obviously not talking about [just] the hyper-elite future bank executives (who are probably what, the top 0.0001%?) The top 10% of students is quite large would include all manner of engineers, doctors, etc. People who play vital roles in keeping our civilization going, not just parasitically leeching off interest rates or whatever it is banking executives do.

Most of those future executives are probably in private schools right now anyway.

So you can't have a high IQ and not be in gifted?

any time you feel your hands touch your hips, and your sentence begins to start with the word "so", just stop what youre doing and go have a snickers.

At least my post is relevant to the topic, not just critiquing someone for being hangry

how are your hands both simultaneously on your hips and the keyboard at the same time?

Zing! keep em coming!

What?

You changed the subject from being in gifted to being gifted. You can exist outside of gifted and still have a high IQ and be a successful person. So, no.

That helps a lot but not necessarily required. If you require/aspire for radical social mobility being gifted is extreme help. If you're looking to have a modest life with family outside of expensive cities being gifted isn't much of a help.

As well, by definition, to be gifted you need to be an outlier. Most people get by and live a decent, if stressful, life.

In our present economy? Yes.

One need not be in a gifted program in school in order to achieve a stable middle class life. In fact, the vast majority of those with stable middle class lives didn't participate in gifted programs.

School is, gifted programs are not.

You used 'many' in your second part, which is the same 'not only'.

Qualitatively yes, but not quantitatively.

To me, "not only" can mean any quantity other than only. I have never heard it used any other way, though I fully admit you may have.

So to me, many and not only equate.

>Unacceptably white is still a horrible way to phrase this. Is the NBA unacceptably black?

This statement is a textbook syllogistic fallacy.

It ignores the qualification context for being gifted vs. being in the NBA. There are a number of historically exclusive systems, prejudiced on socioeconomic and racial standards, that are required prerequisites for being in a gifted school, which do not exist for being in the NBA.

Put in simpler terms: open basketball courts != gatekeeping gifted schools

EDIT: Nobody here is calling you a racist. Your edit above reads like, "I'm not a racist, but..."

No. It is not unacceptable when white children have opportunities. It is unacceptable when black children do not.

There’s two ways to equity.

1. Make sure everyone has access to opportunities.

2. Get rid of all opportunities

People are going for the second one despite the fact that it doesn’t actually improve anyone’s life. Its like solving homelessness by burning down all houses.

False dichotomy.

It's like countering homelessness by enforcing that a portion of housing is accessible, affordable low-income housing. People sitting in high-income housing then make frivolous statements about all the houses being burnt down, or how we should also remove public basketball courts because of the NBA.

No, you’re talking about option #1, which I also agree is better. That’s not what’s happening here.

If you see a program that doesn’t have equal access, and instead of doing the hard work to get to equal access, you just get rid of the program… that’s the #2 option, the one I’m referring to, which is worse for everyone.

Nobody is saying "actively remove white children from gifted programs" they're saying, "when more people qualify for gifted programs than can fit in the program, consider including those who have fewer overall opportunities."

Those white kids will get other opportunities to be successful, and the non-white kids will get fewer of those opportunities, because society is racist as hell. Therefore, when you have a chance to give a non-white kid a shot at excellence, and they're qualified, give it to them.

My experience suggests that "when more people qualify for gifted programs than can fit in the program, consider slightly raising the qualification level, so you get exactly the class size you're targeting and no one who qualifies was excluded" is the likely path to be chosen.

That presumes some quantifiable, precisely and accurately measurable metric, which does not exist in any context.

For example, there is no test in existence that accurately measures "giftedness" in children.

How is qualification already being done today, such that the set of people qualified is larger than the available seats?

Is there no adjustment whatsoever possible to that process? If the people running that process had had a slightly tighter set of criteria, would the outward appearance be dramatically different than the path they took to get to the "slightly too many qualified" condition?

There is no adjustment whatsoever possible that will accurately further qualify/disqualify students from a gifted program, that is correct.

Simply "tightening" the existing fuzzy criteria will only further arbitrarily limit qualified students.

That's exactly my point. There's a system today that has some amount of arbitrariness to it. Tweaking that system slightly is almost surely arbitrariness-preserving, likely not increasing or decreasing it significantly.

My point is that it's increasing the arbitrariness by further constricting the qualified students pool.

Instead, accept they're all qualified insofar as they would maximally benefit from advanced lessons, and favor students for whom this may be their only opportunity to get ahead.

That would work better if things were more continuous. Having gifted classes imposes several practical barriers:

- Resource constraints (e.g. can only afford to teach sixty students)

- "catching up"; entering an existing gifted class stream after missing the first few years

- You'd want to select early in the school year. Joining a gifted class in the last few weeks of the year is pointless

- Kids in gifted streams want or are pressured to remain there

Modifications of the current distribution outside of the source and those factors above can result in zero sum outcomes. It's rhetorically useful to wave this off but still a practical concern.