Gifted and talented classes are viewed as a rubber stamp ticket to easy street. My experience is that GT teachers have much higher expectations. There's no "easy street" in AP classes, and GT classes are the functional equivalent for earlier grades.
I agree that public schools used to be more challenging in some classes, but back then public school wasn't mandatory.
Of my four grandparents, only my dad's side graduated high school. My mother's mother only finished 8th grade, her husband only 4th. Strange because the brains are on my mother's side, but they had to work and it was considered normal not to continue.
Also, I doubt that most public schools back then were teaching calculus, much less matrix algebra or differential equations. Not to mention microeconomics, macroeconomics, anthropology, psychology, astronomy, etc. being taught by Ph.D.'s in the field.
Which is a small fraction of the classes offered at my kids' high school. Every time I read people complaining about public schools, I can't help but wonder what home schooler or private school can offer all this and more. Some very elite private schools do, but not many.
People choose to homeschool and private school their kids because they do not want their daughters to become whores or their sons to become dope headed thugs.
Homeschooling is the only way that parents can guarantee their kids are exposed to calculus. Parents can order complete video taped classes and teachers can be contacted via email. Yes, there are probably gifted and talented teachers who do a better job teaching calculus, but since they are only for the few people the public schools want to educate, it is pointless to bring them up when talking about regular classes.
I liked anthropology in college. When I found out that the gifted and talented classes of the local high school where I lived were using the reading lists of the junior college and the teacher college anthropology classes , I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. Imagine a bunch of sheltered rich kids brainwashed to believe in their own brilliance reading about the tribulations of hunter gatherers. They should have used their precious brain cells to learn foreign tongues.The message the high school was trying to send was that their star students were on par with college students. That may have been true for the advanced math classes ,but it was not true for the anthropology classes. On the junior college level in the anthropology class Nisa was discussed one of the students was midwife/lactation consultant. In the anthropology courses on the teacher college level one of the students was a Vietnam veteran ,another a successful real estate agent. The discussions in those classes reached a depth that even "gifted" teenagers can not fathom.