It is nice that we can have magnet schools in urban areas. What about deeply surban or rural areas?
Well, in a small-to-medium-sized town that can only support one school, you can nonetheless segregate students by ability. A town of eight thousand should have about one hundred students in each year, so you segregate 'em into five classes (alpha through epsilon?) and teach 'em separately, at a pace suitable for each.
The US is actually pretty densely populated, so the number of folks living outside commuting distance of eight thousand other people is pretty low.
The real problem with this is that nobody wants their precious snowflake to be classified as an epsilon, or even a delta or gamma. Bad luck, drones!
Well, in a small-to-medium-sized town that can only support one school, you can nonetheless segregate students by ability. A town of eight thousand should have about one hundred students in each year, so you segregate 'em into five classes (alpha through epsilon?) and teach 'em separately, at a pace suitable for each.
The US is actually pretty densely populated, so the number of folks living outside commuting distance of eight thousand other people is pretty low.
The real problem with this is that nobody wants their precious snowflake to be classified as an epsilon, or even a delta or gamma. Bad luck, drones!