If wishes were horses I'd beg them to let parents just chose which classes to put their kids in. If they earn a failing, oh well. They tried. And if they didn't try, oh well. That happens anyway. I don't think too many parents would keep their kid struggling where they don't belong.
The problem with this is that, like you mention at the end of your post, the gifted programming winds up becoming something that doesn't even meet the needs of the "optimally" gifted in instances where it is essentially parental pressure that gets kids in. It seems that, rather than putting things together such that the standards in the accelerated classes remain high and kids who shouldn't be there fail, the standards change when they start getting filled with a different class of students. They are no longer gifted classes b/c the majority of the kids they are serving don't need that. They either become regular ed classes or they become faster/high achiever classes that move through the same curriculum more quickly but don't meet the divergent/different instruction needs of some of the gifted kids.
BTW, I just wanted to mention on a separate topic that I don't know what the "duplicate finder" link in the quote of mine above is in that I didn't put anything like that in my original post.
