No teacher is willing to tell a parent that their child is a dullard unless the kid is completely off the bottom of the scale. Parents will try to bully teacher

No teacher is willing to tell a parent that their child is a dullard unless the kid is completely off the bottom of the scale. Parents will try to bully teachers into bumping their child into a higher class. Unfortunately, as with so many things, school placement is more about people management than execution toward quantitative metrics. The other, more complicated issues are around resource allocation. In an ideal world, the children that are not in the high-achieving group are given extra support. Realistically, these groups would probably be neglected as failures. This creates a cycle of poor performance which could impact a child for the rest of his or her life. A good corrollary to this is the idea of high- and low-performing schools. The idea of bussing kids from a low performing school to a high performing one to mix up the classes might not make sense at the outset. If only someone would give better resources to the low-performing school, maybe they could turn it around. Those schools become neglected and mired in teaching techniques designed for high-performing schools, and nothing gets solved. It is a truly complex set of issues.