Our schools have in fact been backing away from serving gifted kids over the past 2 decades. I could understand if this were due to budget constraints, but it seems to be more a willful denial that gifted kids can accomplish much more than what they are teaching at grade level or at least putting their needs behind priorities that I can’t even guess what they might be. For instance, it used to be that our local elementary school would make sure to schedule at least some of the math classes at the same time. So kids who were well ahead could join a higher grade math class and get the instruction they needed. There was the occasional 4th or 5th grader who would go over to the middle school after completing the elementary school math sequence. At some point, and certainly by 5th grade, there were also 4 levels of math offered. Today, there are only 2 levels of math offered, I think only in 5th grade, and I have heard complaints of boredom from many kids as they have to sit through much repetitive explanation that they didn’t need. Today, it’s somehow much too difficult to construct elementary school schedules so that some math classes are taught at the same time. A kid in 3rd grade can’t attend 4th grade math anymore because it meets during English or not even on the same bell schedule–starts halfway through PE. There is also no attempt to coordinate with the middle school and that opportunity has pretty much closed off.