The author also avoids a very large elephant in the room: many white spelling bee contenders are home-schooled. A disproportionately large number versus their peers, in fact.
Doesn’t surprise me. While I’m not sure that home-schooling is the only answer, public schools impart a pretty minimal amount of education to their pupils considering the amount of time they have with them. That’s especially so for gifted students, who from what I can tell are largely ignored by the school system with a “they’re smart - they’ll do OK without extra attention” attitude. Schools also spend too much time (IMO) trying to impart detailed information, which will be largely forgotten over time, to younger students, while spending far too much time in the higher grades teaching things that should have been well established much earlier.