But won't it make it better for everyone else? Not even sure that bottom 5% should be in school. Just train them for a role that they can be competent in or decide that they will be a future ward of the state.
As far as most people are concerned, a kid that is acing everything is going to be fine in life and they don't worry about anything that could be going wrong there.
I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw. Spending 50% of the school budget on these blockheads is not going to rehab them.
What year and what school district did this happen in?
I mean I'm curious because that's violent assault, of the sort that generally makes the local papers.
"I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw."
Citation needed!8-))
Sounds like an urban myth (a good one)! Also, it is unclear that the story is relevant to this discussion. That is, one might say that grinding another's teeth with a shop band saw is quite clever, albeit an extremely unsociable (if not psychopathological) act."
That’s the reasoning anyway. It’s not like teachers are maniacally cackling over this situation - there’s significant turn-over. You remove the testing and suddenly all these problematic incentives go away.
IME the teacher unions are also opposed to advanced learning. It requires teachers to do more work if classes are heterogeneous, since they would need to make up more lesson plans and assignments. And the teacher unions are opposed to tracking because then teachers don’t all have the same mix of students, which leads to member complaints. At least this is what we’ve been told.
First, creating lesson plans/assignments (and grading them) is extremely time consuming. So it's completely reasonable for teachers protest having their workload increased.
Second, things like gifted classes and magnet schools create a "creaming" effect, where the best students are pulled from regular classes and either sent to a separate school or in separate classes with high performers. If you're a math or English teacher that's getting professionally evaluated based on your students' performance on standardized tests, you are strongly incentivized to keep any high performing student in your class - the existence of gifted classes and magnets hurts you.
In the tech world, we sort of had a version of this during the Ballmer era of Microsoft, where engineering managers were sometimes reluctant to grade top performers too highly in fear their best developers will get reallocated. Some managers would give elite team members bad rankings just to keep them captive.
Teachers can simply be evaluated based on how their students do, relative to the students' prior performance. This wasn't a problem before 2014, when CA made GATE optional. Everyone understood that different teachers had different cohorts with different average abilities.
The teachers with lower-performing students weren't dinged because their students scored lower than the students in advanced classes. Instead, teachers could specialize in remedial, typical, or advanced learning.
Slow walking someone through learning a vocation over 2-4 years while sprinkling in some academic outcomes is a good option.