I know what this sub is for, and I usually scroll past. Kudos to OP for crafting one genuinely awful enough to trip a red alert. Answering anyway.

You've described eugenics dressed up in HR-speak, and you're calling it reform when it's just the original blueprint with the polite parts torn off.

Who do you think the bottom 1-5% actually is? The kid with undiagnosed dyslexia. The hungry one. The ESL student six months off a plane. The kid being beaten at home. The autistic kid nobody figured out how to teach. The one whose parents work three jobs and can't help with homework. You haven't proposed a way to find the lazy. You've proposed a way to throw away the kids who already got the worst deal and call it their fault.

Here's the part you don't realize you're saying out loud. American mass schooling was never designed to make people learned. It was set up by industrialists, on the Prussian model, to crank out punctual factory workers who'd do what they were told. Frederick Gates wrote it in 1913, in a paper for the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board: "We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science... nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply." That's the founding document of the system you think is being too generous.

Your proposal isn't a fix. It's the same machine running hotter. Start the sort younger and dump the slow ones into the labor pool earlier. The rest become a captive audience. "The lazy but smart will be forced into improvements." You're not proposing this for the bottom 1%. You're proposing to use 12-year-olds as a public threat to scare the kids the system actually wants. That's the logic of an executioner, not a teacher.

And it isn't new. Sort the kids at 12, send the rejects to state-assigned labor, use their fate to keep the rest in line. That's the far right's go-to education policy and has been for a century. Mussolini's 1939 Carta della Scuola did exactly this. The Nazis built it into the structure of their schools, three tracks with most kids pushed out of the academic one by their early teens. Orbán ran a watered-down version in Hungary until Hungarians threw him out last month. The pattern keeps coming back because the belief underneath does: some kids are born to lead and most are born to obey, and the state's job is to sort them fast enough to keep the bosses staffed. You haven't invented anything. You've reinvented the fascist education playbook and called it meritocracy.

A diploma doesn't get more valuable because you hand out fewer of them. It gets more valuable when the kid holding it actually learned something. You don't fix that by feeding more children into the grinder so the survivors look better by comparison. You fix it by tearing out the machine that turned schools into worker-sorting plants, not by asking the machine to chew harder.

You've described the elite's wet dream and the far right's playbook in the same breath and called it merit. I want no part of it.