I have two kids going through the US education system at the moment and I think about this stuff a lot, having gone through a different system myself. One of t

I have two kids going through the US education system at the moment and I think about this stuff a lot, having gone through a different system myself. One of the challenges in the US is the lack of a proper examination system that tests what you've learned. There may be problems with O-levels/GCSEs and A-levels in the UK or their equivalents in other European countries, but proper exams - not just multiple choice tests that are little more than proxies for IQ testing - are a good starting point for understanding who has learned what and when. Regrouping kids year by year to ensure that they're getting the best support for learning at the pace they're ready for is a lot easier when you have some standards. A key problem is that pretty much ANY change is resisted. If it's a change that emulates another country that does better than the US at education the knee jerk reaction is to explain why the American system is so much superior. Yet we continue to fail to educate our kids, churning them out with little knowledge of the world, woeful critical thinking skills, and often lacking the curiosity necessary to seek out self-improvement on either front. Edit: One more thought that strikes me is the terrible state of tertiary education. Colleges have byzantine admissions systems that favor nepotism and subjective criteria (partially no doubt a factor of no real exam system at 18 that you can base entry on). Many of the top colleges have become - to steal someone else's rather nice phrase - hedge funds with schools attached for tax reasons. They've taken all the money off the table - in that your lifetime expected earnings increase is now approximately equal to the fully costed amount you'll spend gaining the degree, in many cases. That absolutely trickles down a negative impact on the younger levels of education - when things other than what you learn at elementary and high school level have the greatest impact your ability to gain benefit from the college cycle. tl;dr I agree we should have ability streaming so long as there is a mechanism to rejig the streaming every year to make up for those surging ahead and help those falling behind where they were placed the year before