I have to say, as someone in the national security space, the idea of "fair" in education is a bit disconcerting. I want to maximize the number of crack scientists and engineers, and that includes maximizing the talented teachers and professors. Incentives are how you do that.

I have two children, one is 19 and one 16. My mom is a math professor and oversaw both of their math educations. My 19 year old went through an essentially "gen pop" middle tier of education through high school, really struggled with math and some really unfortunate circumstances (small high school in a remote location) prevented her from taking calculus in high school (they actually started the section, then killed it, and looking around, made her re-take algebra 2, which devastated her confidence). She and is now thriving in college and crushing her logic course, so as long as we don't tell her it's math, she's doing great.

My 16 yo son is so far ahead in high school that he's going to run out of math classes at the local community college before he graduates high school (he's also in debate and plays tennis and writes his own drone swarming programs for fun). But we actually had to homeschool him before the pandemic, where my math prof mom got him through 3 years of math in 1 year. I'm fairly certain that if he didn't have the advanced math opportunities (we now live in the heart of Silicon Valley) he would be setting things on fire and skipping school out of sheer boredom (because that's exactly what my friends and I did in Kansas 30 years ago).

You want the local public schools to be well-funded and attract talented teachers, but presumably the rich would have exercised their connections to defund public schools entirely already, so why hasn't the bottom dropped out everywhere?

There is, fortunately, a balancing effect: private schools tend to be small, so they tend to lack the depth of resources larger public school districts can afford. Yes, the private school performance peak may be right-shifted a bit through selection, but the private schools can't afford the range that the public schools can. You want auto shop, Latin, and SDEs? Good luck getting that at the local parochial high school.

The problem is really in the South, where centuries of racism is baked into every corner of the law. There, the public schools weren't so much defunded as they were never funded, because the blacks couldn't vote back in the day and are now overwhelmingly poor and functionally disenfranchised. The whites send their kids to a subset of private or highly selective high schools which are moderately constrained by size, and the blacks send their kids to a different set of public high schools, where the extreme lack of resources renders school as an essentially poorly attended day care with atrocious graduation rates. Rich white Northerners might be shocked, but I've raised school-age kids in New Orleans and Virginia, and my wife worked in the public schools while our kids went to both private schools. These are not controversial opinions in the South, they are statements of fact.

The Southern states send legislators to Congress to influence national policy, and unshockingly, they fight tooth and nail to send public education dollars to charter schools, church schools, whatever non-public schools their kids went to.

This creates the perception that this is about haves and have-nots. Yes, it is. And in private, the good-ol-boys will tell you that, if they trust you to keep your mouth shut.

But the issue is not solved by doing away with gifted programs. The issue is addressed by defunding private schools and expanding enrollment in public schools. I want the height of the performance curve at the 4th standard deviation of the public school system to be higher than the peak of the private schools.

Also: teachers don't always love private schools. The principals can by tyrants with little supervision, and the pay can be brutally low. But they hope it's a chance to make connections, so they bear it.