If you want to vastly improve education, you need to get over the idea that one curriculum/style fits all children, with IQs in one class from 70 to 170, with math skills, say in 4th grade, from can't count to could do college algebra.

You have to get over the paranoia about "tracking" and do some honest to God tracking, or sorting, or call it some better name, but sooner or later you will have to do it..not for all students all day, but for at least some students some of the day.

You have to get realistic about special needs children too and have special teachers and situations for some, and not hold back others for the sake of some who are not just behind, but basically will never ever catch up because they don't have the specific academic potential, although they of course have potential that should be maximized. But a special education for one child, in a hopeless situation (there will be people speaking up that no child is hopeless, but academically, there are some who are), can use up a budget that could have trained 50 in business education or something, who could then work and support the severely impaired ones (I am not talking about mild deficits here, like many with Down Syndrome..but the terribly brain damaged etc.)

You have to not just educate students, but train them, both behaviorally and occupatonally. THis is almost totally left out of any discussion of anything.

You can not confuse occupational education with special education and constrain occupational educators with so many special needs that they can not train the easily trainable. You need occupational education for every student for many reasons I won't get into here, including those going to Harvard etc. Every student graduating from high school should have at least the beginnings of a trade or occupation that will actually pay them. Every student dropping out of school should at least have had some basic job skills and job practices so they could do some cooking, janitorial type jobs.

We can do this or other countries can do this and keep sucking up our jobs. mg