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Nonsense. Of course there is a right answer, which is to not do these things. It's not like this is the first time it's ever been tried. Schemes like this have been tried over and over and over for 50 years or more. It always results in ruin and devastation for the school system. Even the stated goal of "Well, kids that need more individual attention learn more when you have classes of smart kids that need less individual attention because there is more individual attention freed up for them" fails to materialize. Because these policies are rarely pursued in isolation. And "equity first" batch of policies, in addition to scrapping achievement, usually also scraps discipline. If parents of achieving kids were frustrated that their kids no longer had access to higher maths or proper AP classes, they become terrified at how increasingly violent the schools become. Seemingly just daycares for felons in training.
Sure, not all the parents will pull their kids out. But I can promise you families that care about their kids will stop moving there. Then things really start going south as the tax base for schools begins to decrease. Now you have schools full of dumb, violent, out of control kids, and no money to deal with the problem.
On a side note, needs individual attention is the best euphemism for fetal alcohol syndrome I've ever heard. I look back on my public school days, with a mix of well off suburbs and trailer parks funneling into the same school district, and the need to keep those groups separate was paramount. Woe betide you if you were a kid who wanted to learn, and were stuck in a class with even 2 or 3 kids who would spring from their desk every 3 minutes and begin smacking people or singing loudly and off key or jumping on their desk. You could go an entire year and not learn one single thing over the teacher's ineffectual shouting. Getting away from them was the singular reason I worked hard in school. Because otherwise I could give a shit about memorizing dates in history, or doing sentence diagrams until my hands cramped.
At least back then, everybody was white, so nobody cared.
You are not really addressing my argument, as is evidenced by this:
Leaving aside that that is absolutely wrong -- you have clearly never taught high school economics -- if a school indeed has students with fetal alcohol syndrome, it has to figure out how to serve their needs, and how to balance serving their needs with serving the needs of other students, because there are always tradeoffs. As I said, it really doesn't matter what the cause of low ability is.
I did address you argument in literally the entire rest of my post. But you do you.
Let me tell you how this went in a rather high profile case near me. A kid with obvious special needs was constantly violent. Problem was, the parents refused to agree to any program the school suggested. They insisted he stay in regular class. It got so bad, the school told the parents they needed to accompany the child in school 100% of the time. I'm under the impression the school did not actually have the authority to request this, and the parents didn't bother.
Anyways, eventually this 6 year old kid gets ahold of his mother's gun and shoots his teacher. After the school was warned 4 times that day that people had seen the kid with the gun, the kid had said he'd shoot his teacher, etc. The administrators just wanted to wait it out and hope nothing happened. Their hands were practically tied because of policies getting rid of the "school to prison pipeline".
That is the terminal destination of these policies.
Is this actually true? What specific policies were there stopping them? What policies preventing them notifying Children's Protective Services? or the police? Is this a policy issue or an issue where people didn't believe a six year old would have a gun and threaten someone with it (for example) or laziness or complacency? and therefore didn't follow the policies they should have? The indication seems to have been that by policy they should have notified the police when they received the tip rather than simply just searching the kids backpack and then dropping the matter.
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For anyone interested, @WhiningCoil is presumably referring to the shooting of Abby Zwerner in Virginia.
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No, you actually didn't. You addressed a different issue. You did not address at all the argument that there are tradeoffs between what is best for high skills students and what is best for low skills students.
Again, what does that have to do with the issue? Leaving aside that 6-yr-olds shooting teachers is not exactly a central example of the issue, the fact that this particular school made the wrong decision in this particular case does not mean that the tradeoffs that I identified do not exist.
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