[Misfire]

I feel the worst about gifted students today. When I was in elementary school (in the 80s), we had the Academic Resource Center, which was a place whare twice a week they bussed a handful of us that scored in the top 2% on IQ tests. We did all kinds of logic puzzles, creative writing, basic computer programming (as early as 2nd grade) and research papers (first one was about 10 pages with cited sources was in 4th grade). My brother is 11 years younger than I am and was accepted to the same program, but by then the teachers were no longer required to be certified to teach gifted classes and the entire curriculum had been watered-down. It's really sad that all these schools will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to entertain kids with no cognitive abilities, but not work to develop those who are gifted and need more challenging/engaging material. As long as they can get enough [censored] to pass the state exam, who cares about the smart kids.