> Also, imo, the vast majority of students did not benefit. It's not like they were all brilliant.

I'm not brilliant, but I absolutely did benefit. The magnet school I went to, and the gifted-students programs I attended pushed me, and I'd never really been pushed before; I was just on cruise-control, academically. There was room for potential, and it was not being filled by the educational system until magnets/gifted-programs.

Moreover, I benefited simply because the magnet school system removed me from my zoned school, but the circumstances here are probably unique to my situation. The short of it is that leaving the zoned school was life-altering. The educational pressure I describe above is probably more globally applicable.

College was a huge wake up call of "oh my, the workload is real." If I hadn't had the push I got in the magnet school system to work harder, I would have floundered and likely failed in college.

That's if I had made it to college at all. The trajectory of my life, the path where I didn't get into the magnet system … I can't imagine that path going well.

> They basically passed a standardized test that they spent a few years in prep classes to pass.

Yes, there's a standardized test that you must pass. But no, I spent exactly 0 time in prep classes. It's not needed: the bar is not that high.

> What this measured was whether your parents were tapped into particular social circles

Not really … my mother tapped into her "social circles" — other mothers she met at my preschool — to try and learn what she needed to know about the schools, the school system, and the rules of the bureaucracy she was contending with, in order to effect better outcomes for her children.

I.e., what any good parent would do. The article misses the mark here too:

> Part of the problem was that the original purpose of gifted programs had been lost in parental competition for prestige and advantage. Unlike other special-education categories, the gifted label was coveted by parents.

Yes, the "gifted label was coveted by parents", but not for "parental competition for prestige", but because it was key to me having a future. There were just certain, simple, logical steps in my education that were not possible to take without first getting the "gifted" label, since that's the bureaucratic grease that makes the whole system move for you. The law essentially results in a system that says "is kid gifted? if yes, then provide resources, else tell them to go away". Parents play within the rules of that system when they must.

… five minutes of listening to the parents talk about their children would tell you it's a conversation about "my kid is struggling with X, what can I do?" and not "hey, my kid is gifted, what about yours?" — the notion is preposterous, to me, having lived through it.

The magnet school system in my area suffered similar problems to the one you describe, but IMO that was mostly due to a lack of resources. I mentioned earlier the bar was low: one of the magnet schools that I didn't attend was because it had no seats: it was ~5:1 oversubscribed: for every child attending, there were 5 meeting the criteria, but SOL. I was one of the 5. I had to waitlist, and it took a year before a spot at one of my less preferred options opened up. (But even then, it was a vastly better school than my zoned school.)