Based-Class System
Stop confusing seat time with learning. Public schools should serve all students.
Arguing about what IQ “really” measures is practically a cottage industry. Fans call it general cognitive ability: reasoning, abstraction, problem-solving, or “intelligence.” Critics call it a proxy for test familiarity and compliance: comfort with the format, language and cultural fluency, and the ability to perform on demand despite anxiety, hunger, illness, boredom, or sheer disinterest in playing along with contrived and arbitrary puzzles.
Either way, IQ plainly isn’t a universal score for human worth. It doesn’t measure creativity, artistry, charm, empathy, social grace, political instincts, discipline, wisdom, morality, or the ability to avoid lying to yourself. Entire categories of human excellence, and fields of professional achievement, depend on those traits, not pattern-matching under time pressure. Plenty of people with average IQ do extraordinary things; plenty of high-IQ people do nothing with it.
But there are domains where IQ is brutally predictive. High scorers are more likely to earn advanced degrees, out-earn peers even controlling for education, and receive stronger on-the-job performance ratings from supervisors. They are also disproportionately responsible for patented invention. At the country level, Gelade (2008) reports a correlation of about r = 0.51 between national mean IQ and patents per million, rising to roughly r ≈ 0.64 when focusing on the top 5% alone. Whatever IQ is measuring, it maps tightly onto economically consequential output at a national scale.
Externalities
IQ is, in large part, a lottery. There’s a genetic component, for members of the lucky sperm and egg club, expressed like other complex traits: regression to the mean is real, siblings vary, and high-IQ parents can absolutely have average kids and vice versa. But all things considered, IQ does tend to run in the family like height or the size of your chin. Environment matters too—nutrition, toxins, illness, stress, and early development all have an impact. And sometimes it’s just bad luck: injuries, developmental anomalies, random setbacks. Nature is unevenly distributed.
By early adolescence, IQ is fairly stable. We can improve test performance through familiarity, coaching, and reduced anxiety, but the evidence for large, durable shifts in underlying capability is thin. In other words: we can’t count on “teaching IQ upward” at scale.
So the rational goal of public education isn’t to pretend everyone will end up equally capable. It’s to maximize real-world competence across the whole distribution, and to fully develop the high-end tail that produces outsized spillovers. These externalities—growth, invention, tax base, civic stability—are why society pays the bill.
But if that’s our goal, we’re doing a lousy job of it.
Our Education Priorities
America spends an enormous amount on K–12 public education—on the order of a trillion a year. In 2020–21, total US public elementary and secondary school expenditures were about $927B1. But “total spending” is the wrong headline, because the distribution is wildly uneven.
Take special education. Using district finance data from 24 states (covering ~41% of special-needs students), Bellwether found districts spent $38.8B on special education in FY20202. Scale that to the whole country and you’re quickly in the $90–100B neighborhood. And this is not discretionary: federal law (IDEA) requires schools to provide a “free, appropriate public education” to all students with disabilities, whatever the cost. In this case, “whatever the cost” is about $13,127 in dedicated spending per identified student.
Compare that to gifted education—the pipeline for the future engineers, founders, inventors, and scientists that our current social contract depends upon. There is no federal mandate to identify gifted students or serve them consistently; definitions and access vary by state. Worse, exactly zero federal agencies comprehensively track gifted-education expenditures, which itself hints at the lower priority and funding. At the federal level, the sole dedicated program is the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented program—funded at just $16.5 million per year, nationwide. This minuscule amount (roughly 0.02% of the U.S. K‑12 federal education budget) allocates only $2.50–$4.00 for each gifted student in the country. Would you like fries with that?
Major Delay
When most people criticize the out-of-control costs of higher education, they’re focusing on the tuition, the student loan interest, and the depressingly low ROI between the cost of most degrees and the relative impact on career earnings. College is expensive. But the real cost is time.
The average student actually completes their four-year degree in five. That’s five years of forgone earnings. Five years of missed promotions, raises, and job experience. It’s five years of accumulated debt, instead of 401(k) contributions. And the compounding is immense.
They’re not giving up the first five years of income, they’ll still have to go through those. It’s the loss of the last five that they’re sacrificing. The highest paid, most senior, and most experienced years of a career. And since high-IQ students are most likely to obtain advanced degrees, often over as many as 8-12 years of post-secondary education, it’s also our most innovative and economically productive students whose productive years we’re maximally sacrificing at the altar of one-speed schools.
What if our most academically gifted students, the top 5-10%, were offered accelerated classes, instead. Classes whose pace was specifically tuned to their learning rate. If course material was covered at even a 25% faster rate, 1.25 grade levels per year, these students would complete their K-12 education by age 15. They’d complete an undergraduate degree in about the same amount of time as it takes for a traditional high school diploma, all with public funding. And it’s quite likely that the engagement rates would be markedly higher. Believe it or not, it’s painfully boring to sit in a public school classroom and listen to a teacher patiently repeat things that you already know to kids who aren’t interested anyway.
Most importantly, they’d enter their careers years earlier, and with far less debt. This isn’t just a personal boon for the already-privileged. These are the students who are most likely to cure cancer, send space probes to Proxima Centauri, develop breakthroughs in clean energy, in longevity, and in climate management. Whatever Herculean task you see before the human race, there’s a very high likelihood that the people who solve it will come from this particular subset of the population. And, these are the ones disproportionately bearing the tax load and funding the social programs we use to bridge the gap until we solve our biggest societal challenges.
Graduating Class
Education isn’t only an economic machine. Schools socialize kids. They function as childcare for working parents. For many students they’re a reliable source of meals, structure, and stable adult relationships—including mandated reporters when things go wrong at home. All true.
But none of that makes it irrational to differentiate instruction for high-aptitude students. We already accept differentiated schooling as normal when it’s framed as a need: special education, IEPs, individualized accommodations, specialized staffing. The principle is established. The controversy is selective.
In practice, “equity” objections often backfire. The kids who most need school as a ladder—capable students from low-income families—are the ones most likely to be left in a one-speed classroom. Affluent families simply opt out: private schools, tutors, test prep, enriched environments, and the Ivy League conveyor belt. If you want accelerated education to be less elitist, you provide it publicly and at scale.
And it doesn’t require doubling budgets. Most acceleration is pacing and grouping, not exotic content—at least until later in high school. Magnet schools already prove the model works; most states already have gifted programs, just inconsistent, under-resourced, and politically timid. You don’t need a new system. You need permission to take mastery seriously.
The bigger point is macro: we can’t math our way out of debt and entitlement pressure by redistributing a stagnant pie. We need faster growth. That means either more labor input—more hours, higher taxes—or more output per hour via innovation. If public education is justified by its externalities, then starving the cohort most likely to generate those externalities is self-sabotage and malinvestment. And if individualized education is a moral necessity for one tail of the distribution, it’s hard to argue it’s immoral for the other.
Inflation adjusted; Public School Expenditures (National Center for Education Statistics)