My school at least tried, we had separate programs for "gifted" students separate from kids who were just there for the babysitting. Kind of dystopian, but I was never mocked for wanting to learn something even though my school was in a bad area.
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.
I did my last year of high school in a public US high school.
I took some AP classes and some regular classes. The AP classes were probably better or at least on par with my private school Mexican high school.
The regular classes were a grim perspective into the US education system.
It felt mostly like a daycare for young adults. The way they treated us was closer to how you treat infants than 17 year olds. There was little to no hope for learning from the teachers, and no expectation from the students. Cheating was rampant.
When I told my English teacher I had been admitted to UT Austin, his reaction was "no you weren't".
The US takes good care of university bound students, but does a pretend job for for those that are not on that track.
I had the same experience. They separated us "gifted" kids very early on.
I had no negative experiences other than being a bit out of touch with the culture of my area, which isn't necessarily a bad thing either.
I had mostly ok teachers and no problems learning or making friends. I recall there actually being a lot of free time to just study whatever we wanted most days. We never struggled on the mandatory standardized tests, so the system left us alone. It was very uneventful and boring.
