"Quality", "design", and "beauty" are all very subjective things and the market regularly gives options incorporating all of them. I see no reason why "educational attainment" would be any harder. (Imagine a future in which two schools got into a Mac vs. PC war: "Sure, you could go to Boring Prep. And you'll learn to read and do calculus. Yeah yeah, boring. Come to Trendy Fashionable High, where we nurture your mind holistically... and also have mandatory gym class so you look like this svelte model." Seeing that ad would give me about as much joy as a staunch Boring Prep grad is capable of feeling in his shrunken, blackened heart.)
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Pupils below-but-close-to a grade increment are given more intensive teaching at the expense of those who will attain the relevant grade left to their own devices.
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I could think of worse outcomes than public schools discovering triage. Academic triage, like medical triage, would probably result in more survivors. I mean, we're certainly not effectively educating the highest risk students now: if making that explicit saves education for the average folks who share the same classrooms, well, that is a price I'm willing to pay.
Here's the problem: how do you define student performance? Are we going based on grades? Because that leads to a system that's easily gamed without significant results. I was a B-and-C student in high school because I thought a lot of the stuff I was learning was crap. In the classes I did like, I'd deliberately take risks with what I did and that kept my grade from staying an A+. Is that a failure? The best teachers I had very often didn't give me As, because they were the teachers I'd really strain myself for - and for me, straining was trying to solve answers in a unique way rather than churning out generic A crap.
The other option is that you monitor students for achievement. Again, it's hard. Is that based on money? Personal student happiness? Again, depending on what the metric is, teachers will game it. Go for money and English teachers will start encouraging students to do something more worthwhile than write and study English for a living. If you make it "how many students get a college degree" then you're diluting the college pool further and you're neglecting students who're interested in vocational school and in working on their own rather than continuing education.
The best solution is to remove metric and go by the opinions of experienced people. Good administrators know good teachers when they see them. Good teachers always go by their own formula. If the system effectively removes restriction amongst teachers, then you'll see an increase in student performance, and suddenly paying teachers more is worth it. The problem is that teaching is an act of creativity; it's an art as much as anything is. Formula kills teaching. The minute you make something mandatory it's dead to kids. The problem is, formula feels safer, but it never works.
>> Pupils below-but-close-to a grade increment are given more intensive teaching at the expense of those who will attain the relevant grade left to their own devices. >>
I could think of worse outcomes than public schools discovering triage. Academic triage, like medical triage, would probably result in more survivors. I mean, we're certainly not effectively educating the highest risk students now: if making that explicit saves education for the average folks who share the same classrooms, well, that is a price I'm willing to pay.