>According to transcripts, France's son passed only three classes in his four years of high school, earning a 0.13 grade point average. What's worse is that her son's GPA puts him near the top half of this class. He was also late or absent to school 359 days.
https://www.willitsnews.com/2013/01/26/firing-a-tenured-teac...
And kids at the very bottom have better and more support available now. It is not perfect, it often sux and is not available to everybody. I definitely don't mean to say it is somehow super great. But the kids at the bottom with cognitively issues or impulsive control issues have better chance to learn more then used to be normal.
But that also was seen as discriminatory I think because it wasn't that easy to move out of basic etc once you were there so I think they stopped this as well - I think system was called tracking.
If the kids failed either way, it's cheaper to make them fail in 12 years than 13 or 14.
This does make things harder and disrupts learning for others.