Is This the End of Gifted America?
In Palo Alto and beyond, South Asian students are seeing honors tracks vanish — along with the vision of excellence they were raised to believe in.
Two years ago, when Gopala Varadarajan was a senior at Palo Alto High School, quiet controversy began to brew. “They were talking about getting rid of any type of laning,” he told The Juggernaut. Laning is when schools group students by academic ability. Varadarajan, now 19, wasn’t too concerned. After all, any changes would apply only after his graduation. By that point, he would be at college, 132 miles away at UC Davis. “But my friends thought it was annoying,” he recalled. “We don’t want to have to take classes that go too slow.”
That debate has returned. In January, the Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) voted to merge honors biology with regular biology for first-year high school students, starting from fall 2025. In response, U.S. Congressperson Ro Khanna took to X: “They call it delaning. I call it an assault on excellence.” For many South Asians who didn’t grow up with trust funds or Ivy League legacies, the move is worrying. Gifted programs have been one of the few ways immigrant families could secure a spot into elite colleges and climb the socioeconomic ladder. Does delaning mean kids are no longer allowed to be excellent?