I’ve always thought yours was the right way. There are some students which will do the minimal but will manage if challenged. Seems the equitable way leaves them behind.
And it is clear, if all conditions are equal, still people are not born equal. Some kids are just smarter than others, and some are just dummies, or don't care about school. Since everyone was the same ethnicity, you can't blame 'systematic x'. It was all equal. A doctor and a nurse probably lived in the same apartment, and had similar wages. (think Cuba, or North Korea today. Albania was like the North Korea of Europe).
Grades/marks were 2 - 10, 2-4 was failing, 5 was passing, 10 was excellent (and hard to get).
Grades were given in the basis of
1. homework,
2. blackboard interrogation (you had to solve and explain everything in front of the class, similar to a whiteboard coding interview),
3. Exams, flash quizzes or pre-announced.
You had three types of students:
1. Great students, and are aiming for the 10s (and usually get a 9 or a 10).
2. People that struggle to do the basic, and just want to pass the class and are aiming for a 5 or a 6.
3. Everybody else that got a 7-8.
Every exam or homework, was done with this in mind. You usually had 3 type of questions:
1. Super basic, <- If you were in class, you could do it
2. Medium, <- Some thinking is required
3. Advanced <- Usually only the really good students got these
The teachers knew, that some students would struggle, and they will let them pass if they just did the basic effort. If a student failed even that, they would have to go to 'summer class' and take additional classes and exams to pass. If you failed a class, you failed the whole year and had to repeat every other class as well.
Also, the school over time divided the students by grades. Each cohort-year, might have 4-5 classes (of 30 students). Your class was the people that you studied with, and did everything. The top students usually were placed together, and spread in the class A, and B. The rest were put on the other classes.
So, the top classes had only excellent students, or average students, but not of the failing one. The idea was that failing students will just drag down all the top students and not let them excel. A top student can make an average student better, but there was little chance to do anything with a failing one. If you were initially a failing student but started doing better, you could move up to the better classes. This is similar to the soccer relegation techniques of most soccer leagues in Europe. But: Every class, had the same subjects, and the same load. Even the failing students had to do pre-calc. But the teachers would just be much more lenient on them. Eg. do the very basic, and they will let you pass. But if you wanted a good grade, 8 or higher, you had to work your butt off.
This is totally politically incorrect in today's environment, but even communist Albania knew better. Some people are just not smart at all, and it is better to let them just do the bare minimum and pass, meanwhile let the smarter kids do more advanced work.
Edit: Switzerland has a different approach where children are segregated by their ability starting from 7th school year. So you go to Gymnasium, A level, B level, C level.
Usually it was kids that had some discipline problems. Perhaps ADHD, etc... but at the time, no-one cared about those aspects as school psychologist were not a thing at all.
If you failed more than one year in a row, then the teachers will just give up on you and let you just slide the next year as long as you just showed up.
Both of them looking back thought that repeating a year was a good thing for them, they went from being struggling average/below average students to top of their class and regained their confidence.
I think it really depends, in a place and time where repeating classes is more common, it maybe doesn't really destroy confidence as much whereas in areas where it's rare, then the psychological impact is much worse.
Also, one thing to note, both of them, in their experience with education, saw much better results when children were separated by level than when classes were mixed together for exactly the reason the OP mentioned. A top student can help bring an average student up but when there are both top students and very below average students, the teacher has to make the choice to either focus on the below average student or the top students and neither of those choices are good.
In France, we've had a push toward lowering the overall level and removing any elitism at schools. This has increased the amount of kids who graduate from high school with the Baccalauréat which is needed for university but has lowered the level of kids actually going to university (especially at engineering schools and elite institutions) and reduced the value of a university degree. It's a bit similar to what's happening in the US in STEM and I think it's a bad calculation for the long term competitiveness of the country.
Come on, of course it hasn't. Entry requierements haven't changed.
The highschools providing the largest contingents of students to these elite institutions respect neither the national curriculum nor the ban of sorting students by ability without any consequences. Unsurprisingly the two most famous of these highschools are also exempt from the French purely geographical students draft and the places most politician children attend. As usual in France, the rule for all is not the rule for the elite.
In effect, the dumbing down of the national curriculum has just made a system which was already one of the most unequal in Europe even more unequal. But everything is fine. The French system only uses entrance exams and entrance exams are always fair, aren't they?
All countries use entrance exams, it's not something that specific to France and of course there's an inherent unfairness to them, kids from better educated families are always going to get better results. In fact if we were talking about fairness then the disappearance of boarding schools (internats) have actually increased inequality. There was a time when a lot of kids spent the week in boarding schools, for kids from families with less focus on education (like my grandmother who kept telling my mum that she should stop reading because it'd cause her headaches), it removed them from non-optimal environment and put them in situation where they had better access to education. But I'm not sure that's desirable or optimal :)
But usually it did not happen that often. When it did happen, it usually meant someone will change schools to a less demanding one (if in high school). So for example you may leave a gymnasium and go to a school for mechanics.
In elementary school it did not happen except for serious disciplinary problems. People with mental problems were able to have special programmes that tailored to their needs, so this did not result in repeating a year.
Teachers did not really like the idea of having someone repeat a year, so if you had a decent attitude you could get a passing grade but you had to put in the effort. This "effort" part is what is in my opinion biggest different, Eastern Europe schooling required you to put in a lot of work, if you were talented you didn't need to use so much time, but if you weren't natural at math, you had to put in plenty of hours to get decent grades. Problems usually were not of the sort that can't be learned through "brute force".
I've done some teaching on the side and when I was teaching a guy in a "US" school for children of diplomats, difference was that their problems were usually much more freeform and required deeper understanding but once understood, used primitive math or physics methods. Our normal schooling was different, it used advanced math or physics but the problems were often times many variants of the same problem (which allowed for brute force learning). Honestly I think that it would be the best to have both, as many of my fellow students did not really understand the material we studied but they could brute force it.
I was in class that had an even mix, some really smart kids, some not so much, and some comparable to the worst of the D-class. Like third of the of my classmates went for the sports-focused high-school, because they were decent at basketball and bad at almost everything else. But nobody was failing.
Like, A-class should have been the top students, B and C middling, and D poor. In reality, A was ordinary, B and C contained the best and the average and D was a failure.
Even more anecdotal thing, in my class there were more people doing extra-curicural contests, like Math-Olympiad and the like. We were even encouraged by teahers, along the lines of "No, try it even if you don't have top grades, that is the sort of thing where you need to understand what you are doing, not just ave all the right answers on the test." :D
Last hypothesis of mine is, that because we had a mix of sudents, the smarter(?) of us spend some time explaining to others (mix of goodnes of heart, being bullied and even having like a pay-for-homework manufacture?) ... and as they say, you learn best, when you explain?
But I could be completely wrong, rose-tinted glasses and long forgotten traumas and all that :D
This is certainly an advantage that Albania had over Alabama. There are still people alive who remember the school system having to be desegregated under armed guard. The struggle continues: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/1...
Equality of conditions is a good thing to ask for, equality of outcome is stupid, as even in a murderous communist regime, was impossible to achieve as it goes against basic human nature.
That's why event though I am liberal/democrat, I don't like the today's 'progressives', as they seem completely ignorant of human nature, and have no knowledge of the history of countries that went through socialism/communism, and yet want to repeat the same destructive mistakes by trying to achieve 'equality of outcome', which is impossible.
Material conditions being equal don't mean that everything is equal. Some people have parents who value certain things and push their kids. Other people have some anxieties to get over before they can perform. Some people like being ahead of the class and put in effort to stay there.
Some people are naturally stronger and some are weaker. But if you train, you will be stronger than you were, regardless.
You might not become world champion with weak genes, but you'll be stronger than everyone who doesn't train.
DNA