I have kids in California public schools.

I have never worked in California, nor New York, and cannot speak for your experience.

Next argument: many of us reading this board, and even being taken in by this post, went through the American public school system ourselves, and by my standards, (I'm 55) many of you went through quite recently. Many of us, I dare say, were in advanced classes. Does the OP fit even vaguely with what you saw with your own eyes? It is miles from my 40 year old experiences.

Really? I myself went through the advanced classes. In my "Calculus AB" class, there were 28 whites, 1 hispanic, and 2 blacks. My school was probably around 30% black, 20% hispanic, 50% white. There are two possibilities. Either whites are 5/3 * 28/2 = 23 times more likely than blacks to be prepared for Calculus, or there is some kind of institutionalized racism going on.

Nobody issues grants to help the academically gifted kids who are already doing well. Most grants come as "dropout prevention grants", or are otherwise targeted at students unlikely to end up on Lesswrong. So I would ask you: in your advanced math classes, were minorities represented as a proportion of the school's population? Or was the ratio of the percentage of minorities in your school's population to the percentage of minorities in your advanced classes higher than 1? Perhaps higher than 2? For me it was 23.

The real question is how long before the trap is sprung and we are told we were naive to believe this at all and we are really no better than birthers and creationists when the story fits our fears. I think it is better than 50% we will get such a message, but we'll see.

Eh. I wish citations were easier to find; it's kind of ridiculous, honestly. Just trying to find math placement criteria for any given school system on the internet is impossible, much less a random assortment of school systems such that my location is anonymous.