[biggermike]

Students need to be clustered according to their abilities and interests. Not doing so is impractical at best and wasteful at worst.

Different subsets of students require different amounts of attention, different specialties, different classes, etc. Go too fast and the bad students fall behind. Go too slow and good students will get bored and act out. One of my top students failed my class for missing too many lectures -- because attendance was written into the student contract to motivate the lower-performing students.

[uniqueid]

Certainly, and, to the extent that it (ie: separating into classes according to aptitude) doesn't railroad disadvantaged students into bad schools, I have no issue with that.