[stan3223]

Australia's public education has this selective high school system. At the end of primary school kids could sit for an exam to enter academically more competitive selective high schools. So higher performing kids are being separated from others. During adolescence you are very much influenced and learn from your peers, so could think of it as resource being taken away from lower performing kids very early on.

[alangou]

We've seen again and again what happens when you destroy academic standard setting with excuses like "oh, the smart students will help bring up their peers". Everyone ends up in one jumbled mass and excellence is dragged down by the average to form undifferentiated mediocrity.

See Communist China before they re-implemented the Gaokao (their college entrance exam), many schools now in California, and once-prominent public schools like Dunbar High in the D.C. area (successful despite the poverty of the area in which it operated-see https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/10/16/dunbar-hig...).