[nullhack]

"Brooklyn school-board leader NeQuan McLean says gifted programs have caused division and segregation in his district, and should be abolished because they take resources away from needy students."

So, Special Needs programs segregate kids, and use resources for Needy kids. Seems self-evident.

[colechristensen]

As a "gifted" student I was a needy kid. Being inappropriately educated when I was young meant years of overcoming the conditioning that everything I'm asked to do should be trivially easy with almost no effort. Boredom, isolation from my peers, and everything being so easy made interacting with the world quite difficult afterwards. Anxiety and frustration when something requires any amount of effort is a damn hard thing to get past, and reprogramming the low level responses to such things which were burned in in grade school is very hard as an adult.

I lost a lot of quality of life as a result.

[morcheeba]

I've always seen GT programs as a special-needs for bright kids who would be bored to tears in a traditional school.