Let's ignore good teachers and principals, they aren't an issue.
Bad teachers and admin will do what bad students do when facing a high stakes test - forget that learning is important and just do a crap job gaming the test, and often do worse than if they would focus on just doing the content properly.
A bunch of people here probably don't see the issue - they think that they would do a good job learning or teaching a student when focusing on a specific test. But it's not the good teachers and good students who are the issue. A bad teacher might give students the same past paper every week for a year, and their bad students just memorise the right answers for the multiple choice. This is just an example, there are lots of bad strategies and the bad teachers will find them all (while the good teachers ignore all the noise).
It's the bad teachers and students that the system needs to fix, and too heavy an exam focus will screw it up (as will zero exam focus).
"Well just fire the bad teachers lol" um ... ok ... that's a bold strategy, but you can't axe that many and not massively increase their salaries to find replacements. You want super star individual performers, you gotta pay to attract them. You want a cheap consistent workforce where the bad eggs do less damage, focus on a good process that the weaker ones can follow, not rewards for individual success.
There are two different and contradictory goals here- the current dynamic where every gain for one is a loss for the other creates a ton of bad outcomes across the board.
It's worse because there's been a trend among elite districts to push students to (fraudulently) get a diagnosed disability, so that they can get accommodations on tests and raise their chances to be admitted to an elite university. So, a proposal to partition the school system into a lesser system for students with disabilities would face pushback by the aforementioned elite district parents. While they are participating in a fraud (and so it would perhaps be morally fine for them to face repercussions for it), I imagine it would make implementing any such plan very difficult.
So yeah, I kinda understand why parents get the diagnoses for their kids, but the system is unfair.
Honestly education really feels overthought and micromanaged already the whole setup is unhealthy
What sad place do you come from?
Beyond this, the entire point of higher education is to push those who are able to higher levels, not to drag the 75% along for the ride.
Who do you think produces all the value in the world? It's not the people organizing the labor, it's the goddamn laborers.
> Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No.
What do you think we would be eating if we left the world up to the rich nerds? We would have starved many millennia ago.
Maybe if we actually held kids that can't do the work back, they wouldn't be illiterate. Let social pressure do the work it's meant to. For that matter, let parents do the work they're supposed to.
Oh, so it's about money.
> For that matter, let parents do the work they're supposed to.
So you want it to be about money.
If we left society up to you fucks, this place would look like the antebellum south
The American public education system
Do you have an actual argument? Shaming tactics are ineffective on HN.
Reality check: in most countries, if you made a public demand of effectively depriving the disabled of the proper care they want and deserve, they would regard you as an inhumane monster, and the education ministry would refer you to state prosecution for violating the constitution.
Most struggling students are not special ed. It's a serious mistake to conflate the two. In some ways special ed students are taken better care of than the typical remedial student, since training for special ed happens to focus on effective instructional methods (such as direct instruction) that are actively deplored by most progressive educators as "demeaning" towards their profession.
Top schools aren’t that way merely because of socioeconomics.
Are top schools that way for social and economic reasons? I mean what else is there to blame? Are they that way because of being different in the department of what progressives actually mean by "socioeconomic factors"? No, not really.
Her school did not have adequate resources to handle these students, so they always had multiple students with severe behavioral issues that should have been in a dedicated classroom with a special education trained teacher, but were just in regular teachers' classes. Naturally, the teachers were burnt out from working with too many challenging kids they were not trained to take care of and the other students had worse learning outcomes.
From the austria-hungary time, the primary school (8 years, ~6/7 to 14/15yo, now 9 years, where preschool became year 1) was mandatory, and after that it was your decision what to do next.
You could then go to a "general high school" (gymnasium) for the next 4 years, and some of them were better than others (mostly because of students, but teachers too), and you had to collect enough points from grades and standardized testing in primary school to be accepted there. All the illiterate idiots didn't have enough points to get accepted, so you'd be in a nice class with comparable peers and teachers could teach new stuff instead of repeat the stuff the students should already know. The classes were "general" (math, languages, history, geography, etc.) and the idea was to prepare you for college.
The less-smart students went either to "not that good" gymnasiums or to other highschools, like the one for electricians or construction workers, farmers, etc., where they would get the legally required education to later eg. become an electrician or something after 3 years or 4, without the need for college or extra schooling and with the reduced amount of "general" subjects (only 1 or two years of history instead of 4, etc.).
The system somehow worked and still does.