[Alex3917]

"I really don't know what you would cut out of schools to make it better."

First, there is a lot of administrative overhead that has nothing to do with instruction. Second, the Gary Plan is inherently very wasteful. Under the current system when kids fall behind (or if they're gifted) then you need to do 'pullouts'. This is enormously expensive. On the other hand, if you were to do something akin to open systems instruction then a kid would stay in the same 'class' only until they finished the unit, and then move on to a new teacher for the next unit. This means you wouldn't have to do pullouts, because the kids who were having trouble would just spend more time in that section. Then each school just has one or two people who monitor the pupil's time per unit compared to their expected time to complete that unit, which is based on their past performance in the subject compared to the standard performance on that unit. The other benefit of this is that now you have accountability for each student throughout the system as a whole, whereas currently troubled students are just shuffled from class to class without anyone caring enough to fix the problem.