Yeah, kids don't fail grades anymore but are just passed ever upward, and many schools have incompetent admin (of all the things I was wrong about as a kid, tur

Yeah, kids don't fail grades anymore but are just passed ever upward, and many schools have incompetent admin (of all the things I was wrong about as a kid, turns out school administrators are, on average, even dumber than I thought they were back then—it's shocking, really) who insist on completely worthless discipline schemes, among other bad ideas. Can confirm all that's true. So then you're a teacher with a bunch of 6th graders, say, 2/3 of whom are one or more grade levels behind on at least one subject, but that material's not what will be on the test that'll be used to evaluate your performance. The right thing to do is to go back and fill in the gaps for those kids, but you don't have the time, and showing them enough of this year's material that they might at least get a few answers on the standardized test correct is safer for your career anyway. It sucks.