The "gifted" system in US schools is broken, racist, and completely fixable

[SheilaT]

28. It depends somewhat on the nature of the gifted program.

At one elementary school my sons attended, the kids in the gifted program were taken out and bussed to another school for part of the day, and were of course expected to keep up with everything that went on in the classroom. My older son, a very, very smart kid (he's getting ready to start on a PhD in astrophysics) missed the cutoff to be in that program by maybe a point. Initially I was very disappointed, but once I realized how that program worked, I realized that he would have wound up struggling terribly. Other kids in it did quite well.

My son, as brilliant as he was and still is, has Asperger's, and was never going to be able to manage that kind of a program. He is finally completing his B.S. in physics at the age of 32. Obviously he's not going to set any records for being the youngest anything in physics, but he has finally come into his own.

However, I absolutely agree that all kids should be given the kind of instruction that does NOT involve mindless worksheets. There needs to be a lot of hands-on stuff, and a lot of content, because that's how kids learn.

added on edit: I wound up moving that son to a local secular private school at 7th grade, and his younger brother four months later. The thing I loved best about the private school was how very much they taught them. The day before the last day of class they'd be learning new material.