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.