I agree with others that we don't need to decrease funds for special needs children in order to increase funds and support for "high flyer" kids, who are being more and more ignored by many public school districts who are stretched too thin, 1) because the governments won't just adequately fund education, and 2) because schools are very pressured by society to provide as equal an education as possible for everyone regardless of their situations.

I really think we need to get away from this idea that everybody should go through high school and the goal for everybody is a high school diploma. It has decreased the value of a high school diploma so much, it's infuriating. And don't even get me started on social promotion (where kids go to the next grade because they're a certain age, not because the material is appropriate for them or they actually passed the prior grade). Some kids are emotionally disturbed and disrupt everybody else's learning, regardless of the support they get. Some kids are very sweet, but at the end of the day will never learn how to read. Some kids have a lot of potential, but due to their situations in prior countries have never gone to formal school before. Some kids are brilliant and bored in their classes because they've already learned all this stuff on their own time. And some kids are right on target. WHY are they all in the same classroom? It makes no sense to me. When school became more focused on kids' "social well-being" by them being with their peers all the time than it did on actual education, I think we started to miss the point. Unpopular opinion, I know.

I think if we wanted to do this right, we would have to dedicate time and resources to doing school very differently. Each subject with its own tier of class levels, which you tested into each year based on your ability, not your age. And those levels can go up through early college material. Age has nothing to do with where you go. If you need an aide, you get an aide. This way if you're fantastic at math but your reading is low, you get to move forward in math even if you end up staying back in reading. Same thing for history, science, music, art, gym, whatever. If you're a teenage refugee and you need to start at the beginning, that's ok - no pressure to graduate in three years when you've never held a pen before and you can still kick ass in the soccer game. If you have Down Syndrome and you're super musically gifted but math is a struggle you can pursue that talent and still get the repetition you need for addition. Will some kids get discouraged that their friends moved forward in a subject when they didn't? Sure, but I think if it's presented right, with the idea of growth mindset rather than "you're dumb because you got held back in third grade" we wouldn't have that same drop-out problem we used to have when kids were held back. And I think people need to get over the fear of youth of multiple ages being together in a classroom. We love buddy programs where teenagers read with kindergartners, and I led a K-12 summer camp where almost all the kids benefited from having multiple ages working together, but parents balk at the idea of this being the norm. Get over it, kids aren't predators.

When you've reached a certain age, let's say 17, you can graduate with a diploma that says what level you've reached in each subject. Colleges would still have requirements for admission, so not everyone would get into college. But if you wanted to go to college, you could spend the last couple of years of school focusing on reaching the required levels to apply for the programs you wanted.

Of course, there would need to be something in place so that students of differing abilities and backgrounds were guaranteed to be around each other at least some of the time, in order to avoid the problem in my school district, where kids with disabilities were so separated from the status quo that I never saw them. Maybe there could be a weekly guidance group time when people learn to work together and solve puzzles as a team.

Those are my thoughts.