[PebblesRox]

I realized recently that some people have a view of education that is much more competition-oriented than my default worldview. E.g. the set of parents who want to make sure their kids do well relative to all the other kids in order to have a higher chance of success in the competitions later on in life (college, jobs, social status, wealth).

Fairness (in the sense of trying to create a level playing field and make sure nobody has unfair advantages) is important to the extent that something is a competition.

This means people who see education as competition will care about fairness - either they will want things to be truly fair or they will want any unfairness to be in their favor.

So from this point of view, special classes for kids who are already doing better can be seen as an unfair advantage (especially because there's plenty of real bias involved in determining which kids actually end up on those classes).

I think we need to fix the biased selection process and make it more possible for more kids to benefit from advanced learning opportunities, especially kids whose parents don't have the resources to take them out of public school to do something more individualized.

[simplestats]

If you put slower kids into (legitimately) accelerated programs they just get left behind and do even worse. When you separate children into classes that proceed at different rates based on how fast they learn, everyone is actually getting their own "special classes".

Meanwhile if you try to handicap parents who care, to bring their children to the level of parents who don't care, they just take their children out of the system and put them in private schools. Except of course for the poor gifted kids stuck in public school, ironically, who you wanted to help.