[caddemon]

If you define "natural talent" in such an unconventional way sure I guess. But the existence of innate potential does not imply that abilities cannot be improved. Derek Jeter has natural talent. Derek Jeter worked his ass off to cultivate those skills. There is nothing at all mutually exclusive about these things.

Schools spend a lot of time reviewing things over the course of the academic year, including things from prior years - I disagree that it is not possible for students to move tracks with a well thought out curriculum plan. But regardless the proposed curriculum eliminates material that would be covered in upper track courses, and explicitly states it does not aim to have students prepared to take calculus during high school. This is like putting all students on the lower track, which is a hell of a solution to the problem of students getting stuck on the lower track.

Japan's model is much more like putting every student in the high track, it is not comparable to what is being proposed here. Japanese high schoolers are able to take intro analysis in 11th grade, here is a translated textbook that would be extremely rare to see a US 11th grader cover the same material (even with standard tracks you'd be lucky to cover it all in 12th): https://bookstore.ams.org/mawrld-11

Putting everyone together in the high track has its own obvious issues. ~70% of students go to "cram school" after school in Japan to be able to handle the curriculum: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-japan...

I'm not familiar with math education in those other countries mentioned, but I imagine it is more similar to Japan than the US. Hilariously there have been some recent pushes in Japan to be more like the US education system as far as flexibility is concerned, in order to take some of the pressure off of students.