The school district next door to us just shuttered its TAG program citing the academic rigor it provides for all students.
They plan to allow all students currently in the program to finish the year and will allow them to stay at the school they are at but in mainstream classes for next year and beyond.
I feel for those families and hope we can make room for their students at our TAG school.
Unfortunately some have seen this as a growing trend, which may continue to accelerate by closing programs in vast numbers ever more rapidly. Fueling this may be cost factors from demands of excessive identification/qualification testing and need for programs/schools/districts to defend themselves from allegations of bias and threats of lawsuits.
There is often a delicate balance between ability to optimally serve an individual student and optimally serve the student body as a whole. Reasonable compromise on both sides may not occur.
As an analogy or metaphor I offer this article from a Starbucks blog dated Feb 15, 2012 discussing the price and value of a free drink at Starbucks. A customer wanted to maximize what he could receive for free (link-
http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2012/02/does-the-most-expensive-starbucks-drink-cost-2360.html)
... $23.60 drink consisted of:
"one Java Chip Frappuccino in a Trenta cup,
16 shots of espresso,
a shot of soy milk,
caramel flavoring,
banana puree,
strawberry puree,
vanilla beans,
Matcha powder,
protein powder,
and a drizzle of caramel and mocha."
He said it tasted "tolerable but not good."
