Especially bad because it's not even gifted kids, it was literally just one class for the kids who wanted to be there with the rest of the classes being for the kids who didnt. Yet people want to act like it's discriminatory to just put effort in. Plenty of bad students in the gifted program, but they were there because the teachers saw them trying.

There was this NPR piece talking about Texas letting anyone graduating top of their high school to get college tuition. It didn’t matter how good the school itself is, compared to other schools.

It turned out that the kids who want to do well within their high school had a better chance of doing well in college, even if they had to take catch-up courses or get peer tutoring.

When my oldest went to the local middle school, there were 4 classes from one elementary and 3 each from 2 more making 250 or so kids. It seemed like there would be advanced English, regular English, and remedial English. Maybe 15-20% on each side and 60% or so in the middle.

Absolutely not, because being put in the remedial class was "tracking" so there could be no separating kids by ability. My daughter was sent to the library about every other day because she got her work done the first day and it was supposed to take two or three.

I am sympathetic to the idea that when a student is a little behind at one point doesn't mean that they always will be. Maybe things are going on at home, maybe they don't have a home, etc.

But our local school system insists on treating them all the same, regardless of their abilities.

My advice to my kids was to take any AP class that you could. It would be harder but you'd be in a class where the other students wanted to learn and almost always the teacher wanted to teach.