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How about a Montessori-like system, where students progress through classes at their own speed (instead of age)? They would still interact with similarly-aged students in social activities like meals, except disruptive students who are bothering others would be a separate group (who would be assigned some form of therapy).
Self contained social education classes are often like that in some respects, though they need. lot of help still with things like bothering each other and toileting.
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It pains me to sound like a midwit, but it's the question of legibility to the state. The state considers education its business, and it can't deal with complexity at scale.
For a less James Scott-pilled take, you can totally do this with charter schools, but they suffer from self-selection bias.
Maybe they can with online resources like Khan Academy. They’ve gotten much better very recently (the latest improvement being one-on-one LLM tutors), so schools haven’t yet adapted.
Then, teachers only must ensure students follow the rules and answer rare questions, strictly less than they do now.
Someone who can follow Khan Academy is probably at least 10th percentile in public education, and would be fine in a regular remedial class. They might have an IEP, but it'll just say things like they should sit near the teacher and have extra time on tests. Perhaps an extra study hall and interventionist time.
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I am skeptical of the whole "encouraging children's natural interests instead of formal education" part, but I do like the idea of segregating students into different groups based on their abilities or how they act in the classroom. I am biased due to being the kind of kid who would have greatly benefitted from the bottom half of the class being shifted into different grades though. I think it would still be a hard pill to swallow for broader society.
At the end of the day, this system will benefit the best students the most, and it seems likely that the students would form cliques based on whether they are in the good or the bad class. The best students are usually from good socioeconomic backgrounds, so this will easily be spun as discrimination and enforcement of the existing social order. Limiting social mobility, putting disadvantaged groups further behind, etc.
On the other hand, the new system only needs to be better than what we currently have. Having the school environment be destroyed by a handful of kids that obviously have no business being there, seems overall worse than excluding said students from normal teaching.
The students would still be required to take core subjects, just at different speeds. Although I also think there should be more electives, by having one teacher administering multiple (with the help of online resources).
Sure, although I imagine there will be some exceptions. Partly because the less academic students may be more “cool”.
Unfortunately yes, even though it’s supposed to be exclusively based on merit.
However, if a non-disruptive student or their parent really wants to be in a class above their level, I think it should happen. If they struggle, some of their assignments should be replaced with those from their actual level and between, to try to prevent them from falling behind, but if they continue to insist they can stay. That may slightly alleviate complaints, because the students in the lower sections are there partly by choice (albeit partly by encouraged default).
I also support allocating extra resources to students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, especially those in upper-level classes.
Merit is just very limited when it comes to kids. They don't have as much agency as adults, so their abilities are often a reflection of how involved their parents are. If my parents help me with my homework and feed me healthy meals, I will obviously have a natural advantage over kids for whom this isn't the case. It seems really hard to solve this with extra funding. Sure you can provide free meals and expertly educated teachers to level the playing field. But good parents is not something that you reasonably buy with money.
So I think any kind of merit based education will run into complains about it favoring kids from good socioeconomic backgrounds. Overall, these children are just going to do better, so granting merit-based benefits will in a way always be a "rich get richer" policy.
Not that this is necessarily disqualifying though. I personally believe that society should encourage skills and hard work in children more than it currently does, so to some extent I am very much in favor of incentives to support these values.
Substitute “merit” with “ability”.
It’s arguably unfair, but I can’t imagine a solid argument that it’s unjust that doesn’t also justify Harrison Bergeron.
I’m also sure some students would be over and under placed due to conscious and subconscious bias (because not all assignments can be graded on objective criteria, and everybody is biased), which is one reason I leave open the opportunity for a student to manually enroll in a higher class.
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