Absolutely. My jr/sr high school transitioned from the old-fashioned "tracked" strategy to the current, mixed trend when I was in 8th grade. The result: lots o

Absolutely. My jr/sr high school transitioned from the old-fashioned "tracked" strategy to the current, mixed trend when I was in 8th grade. The result: lots of downtime for me. The idiots continued to be idiots, except that parents complained about "elitist" teachers. In response, the school board dumbed things down. I had to spend most of my time in one class transcribing a team-mate's paper, because he didn't know how to write. The hack that schools introduced to deal with this is AP classes. So you let the top 10% of students (or best connected) get a quality education, while the rest of the proles spend 6 months reading "Where the Red Fern Grows"