Google is your friend. Essentially, in a counterfactual universe where they never existed, the world would be better off. If you have more negative externalities than positive externalities, your society is draining wealth, and will eventually disappear.

> Punishment doesn't work. Deterrence is a myth, and recidivism rates are off the charts.

We've already gone over this. Go rehabilitate, I don't care. Just rehabilitate people in a way so they aren't actively commiting crimes against education.

> Your argument relies on the prospect of these super students increasing GDP so much we offset the cost of shunting tons of students into the School-to-Prison pipeline. Not only is there no evidence for this, it's a deeply immoral system. I refuse to even continue considering it.

You are trying to coerce one group into sacrifcing enormously for another group, and you say my system is immoral? If sacrifices have to be made (they don't), why do you get to choose who bleeds on the altar?

Also, there is plenty evidence that super students do offset the cost. For example, North Korea's system puts disproportionally more money into their top students, and they usually rank higher on the International Mathematics Olympiad than every European country except Russia. The benefit is mostly for their defense: they really needed nuclear weapons, and they couldn't get them without investing in their best students. They might not even exist as a country today if they didn't do so. What could be more beneficial to their society?

Look, everyone acknowledges Europe has a stagnation problem, America is better for startups, and the USD being the principal reserve currency makes Americans richer. You cannot directly compare countries like that. I know you're smart enough to recognize that, so I'm astonished you wrote this down.

Ideally, you could just randomly assign two policies, and see which works better. But in the real world, pretty much all studies in education are surveys, and it's hard to account for differences in space (countries/culture/socioeconomic status). Even differences in time (when new policies are introduced) have confounders, but less so. If you look at those studies, you'll find that new policies that throw money at smaller class sizes or higher-quality teachers lead to better educational outcomes. It's uncontroversial to say that better educational outcomes lead to better salaries, and higher wealth generation. (BTW, I'm not using wealth to mean USD, I mean quality-of-life. The USD is just a convenient proxy. Not sure if that was clear earlier.)

Tracking is more controversial. However, the one study that did just randomly assign tracking to 120 first grade classes found it benefited everyone:

https://www.educationnext.org/tracking-improve-learning/

Most other studies use standardized exams (e.g. the PISA), and let me remind you, those are not difficult enough to see improvement for the upper percentiles! You flippantly dismissed it, but it's a huge deal. If your national assessment were the AMC 10/12 the bottom 50% would all score zero points (really 37.5, but that's irrelevant), and tracking would look like a resounding success if the top few thousand showed improvement.

This upsets me. Have you, this whole time, only been arguing for your in-group? Every time you said, "what is best for society," did you really just mean what is best for the people you care about? I, too, want what is best for my in-group, but I've tried to talk about how ranking/expulsions/etc. would increase wealth generation, and improve everyone's quality of life.

Quite frankly, your in-group needs my in-group, not the other way around. If we really are just trying to capture value for our in-groups, people in mine could just give up on public schools and go home-school their kids. I don't think this is optimal for either of our in-groups, but you have to acknowledge that if you want certain people to go to public school, you can't be defecting against those very people! If we really do have a conflict between two in-groups, why do you feel entitled to anything from the other side?

You've mentioned the school->prison pipeline, and how a lack of education brings out the pitchforks and torches. This is entirely true on the other side as well. As you saw in the comment section, a lot of smart people literally feel like school was prison to them. They were bullied, abused, had no freedom, etc. We've both acknowledged that bad students may become disaffected with school and society (if we don't rehabilitate properly), but only I've seemed to recognize that good students will too. Perhaps the difference is, disaffected bad students become violent, while disaffected good students become quantitative traders. Well, guess what? If your entitlement comes through a threat of violence, the correct response is to eliminate that threat.

Maybe you are alright with threatening violence, but I'd rather we not fight. And we don't have to. Society holds itself together through mutually beneficial deals (and a plethora of convenient lies). The minimum I'm asking for is for public schools to be mutually beneficial. This is why, although I think it is best for society to put extra resources into their top stuents, I am okay spending only equal resources.