[dorchadas]

For my case, it was very school specific. Basically, our counselors were lazy and didn't want to deal with the scheduling headache of adding accelerated classes for science. We also had a good attached vocational school, which did wonders for a lot of kids; I had some graduate as fully certified welders and go make more money than me right out of high school. But there were still the issues in their other classes, sadly.

But, to answer the question more broadly, it's the 'equality' bit I think. I'm all for giving everyone equal opportunity, and the ability to move into accelerated pathways if you can prove you have the requisite knowledge to do so. But if you stick students with learning disabilities with accelerated students nobody is going to have a good time. It doesn't help either group and just harms them.

And, again, I say this as someone who didn't think California's math updates were all that terrible. Pushing kids to do stats as opposed to just the whole "everyone needs to aim towards calculus" attitude is a great thing and I stand behind that. But if we can differentiate classes, we can serve all groups of kids better and provide better outcomes for all. But the whole class needs to be differentiated; differentiation within a set of 30 kids is nigh impossible, especially when there's such a gap between abilities. For a personal story, the smartest kid I ever taught was in my last year teaching. He worked hard, if there was something he didn't understand he asked for more help and practice problems. The lowest kid I ever taught was in the same class. The kid was a freshman in high school and couldn't add single digit numbers without a calculator. There's no way that should ever be happening.

[musingsole]

> But if you stick students with learning disabilities with accelerated students nobody is going to have a good time. It doesn't help either group and just harms them.

This was explicitly the operating philosophy of my middle school. It was terrible.