In High School, I went to a magnet school where you had to be in the top 5% of your middle school class to be accepted. We took in students from something like 10 school districts. Freshman year was insane because the quality of student was all over the place. There were segments of students who couldn't read.

There are absolutely socioeconomic factors that played into this, and "letting bad schools fail" is only going to hurt the students that are already hurting.

I struggle a lot when it comes to education because "teaching to a test" is the bane of teachers everywhere, but if we don't set a standard, how will we measure success?