I spoke with a gifted expert recently, and they raised the concern that personalized (computer based) learning, how deep does it go. This is a valid question, and it remains to be seen both how long and how deep automated education can go.

While I would like to see every gifted child given 1:1 tutoring or 8:1 classrooms, I reiterate that my position is one of pragmatism. There are about 50 million school age children in the USA in 2016. (1.) I calculate 1.14 million gifted kids with IQ 130+ in grades 1-12 in the USA. (2.) They are being underserved day in, day out, year in, year out, as we debate. What is the total seat capacity of gifted private schools in the USA? Add then any public school gifted programs, and some home schooled gifted. This is harder to tabulate, but I am confident it is a single digit percent of the 1.14 million 130+ IQ gifted children in the USA.

I further posit that this single digit percentage, of gifted children served by any US schools, has been falling steadily over the past few decades. We are losing because its hard to sell something that serves only 2% of the children, and parents view scarce public education funds as a zero-sum game. Therefore, in terms of realpolitik, personalized education may be the best hope to reach more of the deeply underserved gifted community. While imperfect, it can be sold far more easily as something that serves 100% of the students.



1.


2. Using Python…
import scipy.stats as st
50000000*st.norm.cdf(-2)
1137506.5974089596

3. Using a z-score of -3 tells us that nominally, there are 67,494 students who could qualify for Davidson Young Scholars. Here http://www.davidsongifted.org/About-Us/Annual-Report it is reported that 3,063 (or 4.5%) have been recruited.