The difference in outcome with this strategy is made obvious by contrasting Clarence Thomas with Ketanji Jackson. I agree with others in this thread that real reform must be via improving K-12 education for all students.

I think a great start would be for all schools to receive the same $ per student. There are still infinite questions about attracting excellent teachers, additional ways to ensure that rural schools can compete with urban schools, and that "inner-city" schools get good staff. Obviously there are tons and tons of pitfalls for a comprehensive education improvement effort, but at least starting with sharing funding among all students equally seems like it would have a large effect.

I do think each student should be educated to their individual capacity, although social mixing can also help. There are infinite philosophical and practical discussion that can be had about American education. Perhaps truly accepting or rejecting that its purpose is to do a lot of the child-raising could yield interesting system proposals. Kids spend more waking hours with teachers than they do with parents.

Bill Gates allegorically told Saudi Arabia[0] when asked whether the country could realistically become "one of the world's most competitive economies.":

> "I said, 'Well, if you're not fully utilizing half the talent in the country, you're not going to get too close to the top,'" said Bill Gates.

I wonder how much of our talent/population we are completely failing to utilize. Even without the extreme degree of sexism that Saudi Arabia suffers, I bet we're wasting far, far more than 50% of the USA's talent and "human resource" capacity.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”[1] I am sure that a massive number of USA's current Einsteins are stuck working at restaurants, amazon warehouse/fulfillment, supermarkets, and gas stations. These are not just black people, but indeed anyone not born into privilege, and also many who fell out of their privilege and cannot get back to work near their real potential economic value.

We may not be able to help the mathematical geniuses who could have been who are now serving tables at a restaurant, but as a society we can extract more value from their children by educating everyone much better than we do.

I personally believe there's little that's more "pro-business" than supplying a massive labor pool of top talent at deep, deep subsidies. It amazes me that the largest corporate tycoons don't wildly clamor for massive improvements in education.

From a national security standpoint, if we captured more value of 3x or 10x as many moderately competent and completely brilliant minds, no other country would ever be able to compete with us economically.

The only loss would be to _undistinguished_ authoritarians, who might lose power if the populace was well-educated. But effective authoritarians certainly could still thrive. This should be a widely supported strategic policy by people of most political ideologies.

0: https://www.salon.com/2007/01/29/gates_22/

1: Steven Jay Gould in The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History