> first generation Asian kids who didn’t grow up rich

If those are the kids in a specific school/school system that happen to be the most academically gifted, then they should be the ones attending the gifted and talented programs. I don't see how them attending precludes anyone else from also qualifying though? That the demographics happen to skew this way in some number of school districts is interesting at best. Rewarding strong parenting sounds like a win for society to me. Second generation immigrant children doing better than their first generation parents sounds like the American Dream working as-intended to me!

> you’d consider “moving society forward”

I likely have a much looser definition than you do, perhaps. This can simply mean being a functional member of society that participates within their community. Making the jump from poor to middle class is a huge generational achievement on it's own. If I was tossed into the "general classes" in middle school I likely would have simply been working in a factory or retail like most of my peers who stayed within that track ended up doing. The folks in the accelerated programs statistically have gone into more lucrative careers - even those who did not attend college.

It all comes down to helping those who want to help themselves, and recognizing you can't help those that don't want it. Spend the resources on the former, and give the latter the opportunity to change their ways - but don't tear down those trying to better themselves in the name of equity.

> Second generation immigrant children from first generation parents sounds like the American Dream working as-intended to me!

If your definition of the American dream is the tiny fraction of poor Asian kids that get into Stanford you have a screwed up definition of the American dream, which is built on people that go to Cal State LA and never had G&T programs.

> This can simply mean being a functional member of society that participates within their community.

People that work in factories and retail are also functional members of society and your sentence does not seem to imply that when you drew a contrast there.

I'm not following your hyper focus on first gen Asian kids or the implication that gifted programs are only for Stanford-bound students. My ancestors have been in North America since the 16-1800s, I went to public K12 and university, and I've benefited quite a bit from having parts of my education that weren't a complete joke (I've done much better economically than my parents, for example).

Teaching high-aptitude kids at their level also does not require taking away from the other kids assuming you have enough of them to fill a classroom.

The thread is discussing the people in G&T programs as the people that "move society forward" and the rest as people that hold society back. While OP seems to think that there's an expansive group that "move society forward", I'm skeptical that this is actually what they mean, because the people that are used as positive examples for these conversations are exclusively poor Asian kids that get into top schools, not ordinary people like me that are considered failures by this class of people.

There are literally multiple people in this thread (including myself and the above poster) saying they are talking about (relatively) normal people like themselves. We are outliers (someone taking AP calc BC in high school might be in the 95+ percentile in math aptitude), but not profoundly extreme outliers, and the 95th percentile is still millions of people. You seem to be the only person saying that it's a small group of elite kids under discussion.