Why not try it for the "best" children? Those who have a real desire and ability to learn, but don't necessarily fit in in a regular school.
Provide classes, and let the child decide which to go to.
Give exams, but don't record the grade - just give it to the child so they know how they are doing.
Also, home schooling is growing in popularity in many progressive countries, largely to cater to child-led learning.
I have great memories from a Montessori School I went to as a kid. Spent most of my childhood education there. It was a big house, each room was dedicated to a subject and students would change rooms, big shared tables and very few students per room. I also don't remember grades or at least no focus on it.
When I got to a normal school it was one big room packed with tiny individual chairs, all classes happened in that room, everything was easy, suddenly I was a "top student" and grades were a carrot to chase after. I didn't turned out exactly a Noam Chomsky but I find it funny he had this same experience while going from an alternative education to a traditional one.
I think he talks about it in this interview: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20130326.htm
A bright kid with a decent social support system may not find a place in the schools, but will make a place forthemselves outside that system. A kid who is struggling to read at grade level, who comes from an impoverished and/or abusive social network - this kid may have two strikes against them before they show up at all, and warrants the extra effort to try and help lift themselves out of there circumstances.
Not that I necessarily endorse the approach either, but it comes from a social welfare perspective, nothing to do with raising averages. More to do with raising citizens, as it were.
Have you seen the dog whisperer in witch Cesar Millan takes "bad"(behavior) dogs and make the good ones?
Well, with people it is the same. My mother was teacher an volunteered to help poor children in her spare time.
She made lots of bad children become "good" ones, even becoming brilliant engineers, doctors or teachers. Basically she become their mother and gave them lots of love and care(and time, lots of time).
It is personally very rewarding but also incredible extenuating.
Our family experience tells us the main reason a kid behaves bad is because she does not care.
Imagine that your parents are drugs addicts. There is no money on the house even for the basics because for a drug addict the only important thing is getting drugs. Your parents don't care about you. You know they don't love you, drugs really fuck your brain.
Imagine your mother is a whore that loves to sleep with lots of men. You have a new dad every two weeks.
Imagine you are sexually abused by your uncle, or your father comes drunk every day and hits you.
This happens a lot. The people that suffers this couldn't care less about math or the rivers in the world.
In the US they simply put this people in jail, where they learn from other prisoners and become more and more dangerous.US has the biggest(absolute and relative) incarceration rate in the world by far.
The first thing you have to do is create a "safe net" for those kids before they are interested in anything else.
My class was 70 students. Although being in Arlington meant "solidly middle class", among some notables (modestly achieved, not super-famous) from my graduating class (1999) include: Stephen Ridley, who is CEO of xipiter, the company making USB condoms which have been featured here. Fabian Bouthillette, former assistant to Gore Vidal and author of "Gore Vidal's last stand" (http://www.amazon.com/Gore-Vidals-Last-Stand-Initiation-eboo...), Adam Berninger founder of a advertisement and design firm, and Naomi Uyama, world champion swing dancer and band-leader.
Steven and Naomi got to where they were without finishing (or in Naomi's case ever going to) college, which is funny since H-B always was proud of its college matriculation rate.
5 entrepreneurs out of 70 isn't that bad, I think! (I'm 90% of the way to being "modestly achieved")
England has about 17,000 primary schools and about 4,000,000 primary school children. (ages 4 to 11). This group would be amazing for randomised controlled studies of teaching methods. But teachers hate being told how to teach[1]; parents would not like the idea that their child is getting the placaebo teaching method[2]; and governments are not brave enough to try it.
There's much to learn from non-school based education but I doubt most of it can be applied with the financial constraints we have [in the UK].
[I'm guessing you missed some links there.]
The studies are often small sample sizes of children who are often opted-in by their parents and the teaching is done by better than average teachers with lots of support and involvement from the institution who designed the study or otherwise stands to gain from its successful outcome.
All that is generally revealed is that children whose parents are engaged in their education being taught by good teachers and that are aware they are in a 'special' group do better than average. Unsurprisingly the methods don't scale very well.
And, not to sound too cynical about it, the parents of the "best" children tend to be very involved in their children's education, and might resist an experiment.
A lot of academically minded children would have been very poorly served by those schools. People getting to university would have been the children of upper and middle class parents who had money to afford private schooling or tuition or coaching to get into good grammar schools.
Now we have small children, and they're obsessed with reading/writing, numbers, and creative play just like we were as kids -- so they're far ahead of their age group, generally -- but we've kept them out of school so far. We're trying to figure out a path for them through the available educational options, and we're strongly inclined towards more experimental approaches.
It was completely different from her educational experience before that (not unstructured, but still... much more open-minded about education, and smart about guiding students to think about their place in the world) and the experience had a huge positive effect on her life; we are in touch (and in some cases, close friends) with a startling high percentage of her classmates there, and we've met up with (and often been hosted by) UWC classmates in Austria, Netherlands, India, Australia, France, Malaysia, and various parts of the US (and probably some other places I'm forgetting at the moment...). And despite being quite a diverse group, they're generally pretty interesting people to talk to.
I didn't even know such options existed when I was in HS; and probably would have thought it wasn't for me, at that age. But looking back now, I wish I'd gone as well.
And, to be frank, much of what I learned, at least half, while attending public school I learned on my own, independent of classes. But again, I was fortunate. Fortunate to still have faith in the system. Fortunate to have gone to a very high quality high school where I actually could get a decent education and where most of the teachers and faculty put education as their top priority (this is not necessarily the norm). Fortunate to have a home life that encouraged and facilitated reading and learning, as well as acquisition of reading materials. Fortunate that I had acquired maturity ahead of most folks at that age at a time when it was critical. Fortunate that I had not fallen in with "the wrong crowd" of people and ended up dropping out of school or getting into drugs or petty crime or what-have-you.
A lot of kids, smart kids, are not as lucky as I was. And if anything the system is even worse today. Teenagers' lives are more regimented, there's more busywork, there's less trust, the academic bureaucracy is more onerous, it's harder to escape peer pressure due to the ubiquity of social media, and so on.