If you don't have time to read through the whole thing, here's what I think is the most important piece: > This debate will come as no surprise to anyone who e

If you don't have time to read through the whole thing, here's what I think is the most important piece: > This debate will come as no surprise to anyone who even casually follows American education policy. “Gifted and talented” programs are a constant flashpoint for controvery; just recently, after a bitter and protracted debate that broke down over similar lines, New York City decided to replace its admissions for gifted and talented programs with a combination of teacher recommendations and a random lottery. > The problem with this debate is that both sides are misguided. The opponents of gifted education are generally focused on the wrong kinds of equity, while the supporters of gifted education are generally too focused on education as talent screening. > People who think that gifted education, accelerated math classes, etc. are engines of inequity are only partially right. Yes, it’s possible for selective schools to become pipelines to success that leave others behind, but plenty of research and many policy experiments have shown that school choice is not very effective at improving grades. And the practice of shunting kids into accelerated math classes based on test scores hasn’t been shown to have a long-lasting effect (though interestingly it does seem to modestly decrease racial and gender gaps in access to accelerated classes). > Forcing kids to take all the same classes is just focusing on the wrong kind of equity. What ultimately matters are economic outcomes, and those can (and should) be made more equitable through taxes, spending, and other economy-wide measures. We shouldn’t stop kids from taking hard STEM classes just because we’re worried that they’ll have a better chance of becoming rich STEMlords; instead, we should just tax the STEMlords more (in fact, the STEMlords themselves tend to support this). In fact, we don’t need an economically unequal society in order to incentivize people to run the fabs — those TSMC engineers working dawn to dusk aren’t even making big bucks. > So while U.S. STEM education languishes, the debate over how to improve it seems locked in a pointless struggle over whether or not to enforce equity along unimportant dimensions or go hunting for natural talent to celebrate and reward. In fact, neither of these things should be the focus of a good STEM education system. We should be laser-focused on the question of how to educate and motivate a broad-based skilled workforce capable of sustaining the knowledge industries that are America’s main hope for continued economic relevance in the world, and how to structure the rest of our economic system to equitably redistribute the prosperity those industries create.