Thread by @rising_serpent

When I was in sixth grade my school hit up on a brilliant idea. They would categorize all students into 4 equal class size quartiles based upon scholastic accomplishment.
The top 25th percentile would be class A, the next 25th percentile would be class B and so on, class A to D

Ostensibly the goal was to enable teachers to focus on academically weak students and give them extra attention time and resources.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
(For context, this was an all boy's school)

I was in class C, not the bottom of the barrel, but definitely not on top of the heap either.
Our class was pretty rowdy. And sixth grade was the poorest scholastic performance of my life.
I was constantly distracted by disobedient assholes who I had a natural affinity towards.

I had failing grade in a couple of subjects and my tendency towards distractedness and insolence went into overdrive. Boys in our class were always being sent to the principal.
Midway through the year teachers stopped caring.

Class D was basically the equivalent of 6th grade Mad Max. They didn't stand a chance. It became a free-for-all Lord of the flies dynamic within the first few weeks. Inexplicably somehow they also got the worst teachers. You could hear kids screaming as you passed the class.

The first semester our principal proudly announced that students in class D had made remarkable progress and those previously ranking at the bottom of their class were now placing in the top 20% because of the fantastic innovations these educational geniuses had wrought upon us.

Additional context: my school ranked children based upon exam scores and the scores were posted on a bulletin board outside the principal's office.
All exams were administered by the school, except the one at the end of the year that was administered by the board of education.

A friend of mine sorted to class 6D and an even more terrible student than I ranked to the top of class D in the first semester, much to my astounded surprise and the unbridled pride and joy of his parents.
My mom harangued me about how bad I was and how good he was, for days.

Clearly this was a remarkably successful human experiment and an epoch in the field of education.
The school teachers heaped plaudits upon themselves and the principal preened like a peacock.

However, much to their chagrin, all their hopes dreams and ambitions were dashed in the end of the year board of education centralized examination that graded kids on a bell shaped curve and without regard to class quartile allocation.

My friend who ranked top of class D the previous semester scored lower than the lowest scoring kid in class A.
Everything else was pretty much downhill for class D. They scored lower in year to year comparisons of their own performances between 5th grade and 6th grade.

Although I too performed more poorly than fifth grade, I took solace in my continued mediocrity and wasted no time in amply paying my mom back in the harangue she had bestowed upon me.
I was more pleased that others had crashed and burned than I was that I barely survived.

Needless to say no one at the school took any responsibility. They pointed fingers and claimed nobody could have seen this coming. Some even went so far as to claim that the board of education had higher standards than the school's own testing, a self-defeating narrative.

This unmitigated fiasco and debacle quickly terminated any future plans for scholastic segregation. And everybody pretended as if it never happened.

To me the most interesting aspect of this experiment was the fact that kids cohorted with other poorly performing kids underperformed even themselves, because humans need the ability to look at other high-performing human beings as a template for our own progress.

The quickest way to personal excellence is to surround yourself with people who take their own excellence seriously.
If you work with people that have better mindsets than yours, the initial period of ramping up your own mindset can be occasionally humiliating. But so worth it.

Dumbing down an entire group of children to enforce equity of dumbness is the kind of woke stupidity that socialist hellholes of my childhood tried and failed spectacularly at.
Successful societies level up, devolving societies level down.

It is only an inevitability that parents with the time, energy and resources will still expend them to get their children to higher levels of cognitive functioning. The already disadvantaged children from homes that know no better will only flounder greater than they ever have.

Equity is but a social justice synonym for the constantly spiraling abyss of mediocrity that leads to inevitable societal annihilation and complete devolution.
Do better, not only because you can, but because it's your duty as a functioning member of society.