> This is a very unpopular idea in the current culture.
Let's be clear.
When I went to a gifted program in the 90s, it was only offered in the nicer part of town. My mother had to repeatedly threaten and read the district's own rules to them to eventually force them to send a taxi cab to pick me up in my poor neighborhood and take me up to the rich neighborhood so I could attend the gifted program.
The school district had since ended such services, and now requires parents transport their own children, something that working class families will be unable to do.
Even at the time, funding was tight (it is worse now), and teachers did not have enough resources to run classrooms. It was well into the 90s before I learned the soviet union had fallen, as all of our history books and atlases still had the USSR on them[1].
The district is now going to shut down all their gifted programs, but honestly I feel that is due to the district not having enough teachers, money, or any other sorts of resources. There are schools with lead in the pipes where students shouldn't drink the water, managing a gifted program may just be beyond the district's capabilities at this time.
To return to my overall point, the gifted program here was designed around racism and classism. Poor students and minority students, even if they tested in, had barriers put in place so they could not attend.
The unpopular idea in the current culture is that rich white people should get a better education than everyone else.[2] (One can argue that a counter force is rich white people who think their kids are gifted even if their kids are not at all gifted...)
Of course the closure of the gifted programs means all the parents who give a shit about their kid's education are either moving out of the city, or going into private schools. When I was in school, I saw parents move their kids out of private schools to go to the public school's gifted program!
[1] At one point we got new math textbooks that were so bad our teacher gave us extra credit for going through the book and finding math errors in it. It was incredibly easy for a bunch of 12 year olds to find errors on seemingly every page. Another time we got corporate sponsored history books where all historical events had been sugarcoated to hell and back. Slavery, banana republics, revolutions, nothing bad had ever happened in human history according to that text book! And yes it did have the corporate sponsor's name all over the back cover.
[2] Gifted programs also largely self select for families who care deeply about education, and who are therefor more involved with their child's education. This is reflected in the behavior of the children who themselves actually care about being at school. The single largest difference in the gifted classes I attended vs the mainstream classes was the attitude of the students. Students in the gifted program listened to the teacher and were actively involved in the classroom, in lessons, and in all aspects of learning, they wanted to be at school and to learn. I am 99.9% sure that a large percent of students would move at least a bit to the right on the bell curve if everyone had that same attitude about education.