In California in the early 80's, I couldn't go to an elementary school a block from my house because there were "too many" whites and Asians there already. So i

In California in the early 80's, I couldn't go to an elementary school a block from my house because there were "too many" whites and Asians there already. So instead, I was bussed 90 minutes each way (3 hours per day) Hilbert curve-style all throughout San Jose in order to fulfill the whims of wishful-thinking, social engineering academics imposing their "great ideas" on public schooling. I had to wake up at 4:45 am because the nearest bus stop was also over a mile away, despite it passing within a block of my house, and the drivers refusing to let me on or off there. That was what also happened with the move to whole language reading away from phonics, which is a tried-and-true system of grapheme-phoneme mapping (and typically followed by word decoding with prefixes, suffixes, and root words), that ruined reading comprehension for several generations; this was also the impetus for the formation of the Challenger private school system. Apparently, the California Department of Education returned to phonics many years later because it was such an utter failure. The problem is these arbitrary experiments are committed-to and continued due to image and political concerns and sunk costs bias, but without any fair and complete validation that they work. What the heck was the goal of shipping talented kids around to inferior schools where more students had emotional problems, broken homes problems, anger issues, and lower performance? It's not like gifted kids are going to do better in a shittier environment. It seems more like punishment or padding metrics at the expense of students.