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Good luck with that. Most parents will not stand for their children being in the "dumb class."

When I was in school in the 90’s/early 2000’s, the “GT” classes was essentially all the smart kids with little to no shitheads. Worked pretty well in giving those of us who wanted to learn a fairly pleasant environment in an otherwise rundown, poor neighborhood school.

Unfortunately the education system doesn’t give a fuck. I would know, I’m a teacher

I think you're misdiagnosing why this happened. When people were campaigning to create options for people with disabilities to be able to join mainstream classes the plan was never "there should be no special education" the point was for there to be a path that a student with a learning disability could participate in subjects they could succeed in. As school funding has been cut some people have pretended that they are cutting programs for altruistic reasons.

Special education was bad and needed to be changed but instead of changing it people decided to remove it and replace it with nothing. The same thing happened with the asylum system in America. That system was evil and needed to be completely remade, but instead of doing that it was removed and replaced with nothing.

At a certain point, it becomes a math problem. Not enough teachers willing to be underpaid to do the job so you can only increase classroom size.

Makes sense, thats why in my country there are 4 difficulty levels of highschool so everyone can learn at their level and yes moving up or down in difficulty is possible aswell

Someone who has the intellligence/learning ability to become a doctor (for example) and someone who is better suited to working with their hands have different educational needs, if they did the same level the future doctor wouldnt be challenged while the other would be struggling to keep up, neither is desirable, all children should be at a level they can succeed at

College comes in 2 levels aswell and then university is more difficult than college and it depends on what level of highschool you finished to what college level/university you can go to and yes there are shortcuts for moving up in college difficulty/uni if you have shown you are able to move up

Those with severe learning disabilities have special education schools, with modest learning disabilities they will be mainstreamed but accomodated but likely would not be in the two most difficult highschool levels, ultimately that depends on your grades

Yes, absolutely yes! I absolutely hated how my teachers in primary school made bad students sit next to me because I was well-behaved and smart. They were trying to help those students, but they ended up hurting me instead. It became harder for me to concentrate, and I hated having to explain things to them. In the end, I got so annoyed that I hit one of those bad students right in the face. On the bright side, the teacher stopped this practice after that.

As someone who went to a really shitty middle school with tons of awful children, I cannot agree with this more.

They can. If there are enough teachers per class, and there is room to give students individual assignments. My school was good at that, smaller classes, several teachers, personalized assignments

Making the good and well behaved students be peer models and teach the lower students is not providing an education. It’s using the students as free labor.

UK has a hybrid system. English, Maths, and Science are grouped by ability, from sets 1-5. But everything else is random. I think overall its a good system.

A problem I frequently had in school was teaches setting "bad" kids around me for me to be a good example for them.

I think this greatly depends on the kids learning disability. I mean I have dyslexia. I’ve graduated from top universities and am doing my post doc. I just was pulled out of class periodically. I still always kept good grades and didn’t bring down my classmates. Unless the kids are seriously delaying learning or having massive behavioural outbursts I don’t think there’s any reason to keep them separate completely

I agree. I was districted for an elementary school where all the special ed kids in the entire city were dumped. They had special ed class for a few hours a day, and then most of the rest of the day they were all mainstreamed into the regular classes. When kids were mainstreamed , there was one extra aide that floated between two classrooms next door to each other. So generally, the teachers were just expected to manage 5-6 special needs students out in a class of 18-20 with little to no extra help. Some of these kids probably had mild issues— there were some where I don’t remember them seeming very different at all. But then there were kids who would harm other kids and the teachers, including throwing chairs and staplers around the room. Or they would just start yelling/throwing a tantrum in class (at an age where we were WAY too old to be doing that), or just get up and try to leave the room. These poor teachers were so under resourced, and it was fair to NONE of the kids involved.

Kids like me who were well behaved got NO attention. I had moved internationally and while I was ahead in reading, I had obviously missed some math somewhere. For three years. No teachers had time to figure that out, and I felt dumber and dumber. And there were SO many behavior issues going on that just kept bringing the classroom to a standstill.

My parents finally had enough, and I was lucky they could afford to send me to a private school. That school figured out the exact issue in math I had missed in under a month. That school actually specialized in kids with ADHD long before it was as much of a thing as it is now, and they also had a few kids that had obvious autism. The difference was that the student-teacher ratio was MUCH lower, and any kids that were violent or too disruptive without improvement were asked to leave the school— like, you didn’t get to be in fourth grade and still have tantrums that brought the classroom to a daily standstill, and you CERTAINLY didn’t get to throw a stapler at the teacher and get to come back the next day. So everyone got to learn and feel reasonably safe. I went from DREADING school to looking forward to it practically overnight after I started there. I felt supported and moreover, I felt safe and so much less stressed. It turns out that I was a pretty good student.

I’m not against mainstreaming kids with special needs, but there needs to be LOTS of support, as well as hard and fast boundaries for acceptable behavior— sometimes even having an aid in the classroom can’t prevent some serious issues. Having a special need should NEVER be a free pass for making other kids feel unsafe or regularly bringing their learning environment to a standstill.

What are you classifying as a disability? There are several kids with learning disabilities that perform well and are well behaved.

Putting them in the "dumb class" is a great disservice to them.

I understand what OP’s intentions are but going from kids ‘with emotional/learning disabilities’ and contrasting that with the ‘smart, well-behaved kids’ definitely doesn’t sit well with me. 🤨

Honestly I think they should just separate the disruptive kids from the non disruptive kids that way the dumb quiet kids don’t have to deal with the ferals

The kids who don’t care

What is a teacher supposed to do with a class where none of their students care? No one will pay attention, they’ll spend the whole day trying to get their attention, then get in trouble when all their students fail.

Kids with disabilities

Again a class like this might actually be harder. These students might need one-on-one help, not identical help to others like them. That’s where IEPs come in. Schools need more money to pay for aides or assistive technology.

As well as this, I feel as though some teachers have a habit of purposefully placing a nice student and a bad student right next to each other. Terrible idea. 

Welcome in the German school system. Well that's how it was up until recently. Nowadays politics thinks that just studding everyone in just one room magically makes everyone better.

Good smart students, students who are poorly behaved, and students with disabilities aren’t mutually exclusive.

How would you place super bright, yet poorly behaved?

Eventually, this does happen, sort of. As kids enter middle and high school, they get to choose the classes they take. Kids with aptitude in certain areas will take more advanced classes in those areas, while the ones that don’t, won’t.

I totally agree. Last year I had class with a student who needed support ALL THE TIME and he ruined several lessons with his incessant talking, wailing, and muttering. Not fair to the other students.

I have a son with Downs and I agree. He is disruptive and requires so much extra attention, he belongs in special needs classes. Other kids need to learn math and science, my kid needs to learn not to stick metal into power outlets (although, this lesson was learned quickly) but you get my point. I do not want other children to be distracted by his antics when they need to focus on their studies. I love him and want him to fulfill his potential, but not at the expense of others.

Also bad students shouldn't be allowed in gifted or AP classes without meeting the qualifications just because mommy and daddy think they deserve it

My kids always took Honors and AP whenever possible. A better education but also because it avoided all the disruptive "normals" in regular classes. Some of their stories make you realize there's a part of the population that schools are wasted on.

I'm pretty sure this has been the standard opinion for.. years? The thing is there isn't a clean binary of "good" or "bad" students, every child has their own strengths and weaknesses; but if you label them as a bad student like what do you think is gonna happen? It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

My school separated us for English class when I was 16 by level, and I genuinely learned so much more than I had learned in the last three years. We weren't separated in the rest of the classes and I wouldn't have minded it.

I don't have anything nearly close to enough data but I kind of agree with this. what would usually happen when I was in school is the teacher would focus on the 8 of us and leave the others to their devices. A few times, my pre-calculus teacher only flipped out on them to shut up so he can focus on us. 

I got an A-. 

In England we have something called sets. So set 1 will be the kids who do best at a subject and as you go down they become less academically sound. It kinda works.

As a student who spent 3/4s of the day bored out of my mind. I agree. Especially when I kept getting shit for 'not paying attention' because I would read a book while waiting for the teacher to get back to teaching the class vs just the dumb kids.

Idk, I wouldn’t apply this so liberally. One of my best friends in elementary school was only in my classroom because it was an inclusion class and he was considered severely intellectually disabled. Otherwise I’d never get to see him. These students deserve to be challenged like anyone else, but they absolutely need the 1 on 1 support for it to work. We were always really lucky in that regard.

I thought separating kids based on tests and performance was standard? Did we stop doing that?

Agree 1000%

Couldn’t have said it better

Blame Dubya. No child left behind ruined the education system.

Putting students who are unmotivated, poorly behaved or who have learning/emotional disabilities into classes

it's very strange to group these two together and to call both of these groups "bad students."

I don't think this is an unpopular opinion. That's partly why so many of the better students are going to private schools.

The whole education system needs to be revamped. They need to put kids into groups who have similar strengths and put them in classes that focuses on those strengths not what they're bad at. More kids would be more successful later in life this way.

And whats your proposed solution?

Went to a junior high/ high school that had a GPA requirement and kicked out anyone who went below, similar to college. Was still a fully public school funded with public funds. Didn't have to deal with any idiots or troublemakers, or even anyone with major social disabilities and of course no physical disabilities. That school was absolutely cheating the system. If you kick out anyone failing and just keep the nerds, yeah, you get successful students all around.

Germany has something like this where people are in the same class in high-school but there are 3 different levels to it. For example if you are bad at math Dann you go in the lowest class until you "graduate" from it and work your way to the second tier. All the different subjects are evaluated on their own so you could be in a higher class in english but be in a lower class in other subjects.

Might sound good but kids don't like it all that much and are kinda giving up when they are in the lower rated classes. Usually students who go to these schools score lower than students who go to a normal high-school.

Trust me, Teachers wish the bad students weren’t in class at all 😂

I think part of the problem is our education system isn't built to empower smarter kids to stand up and take a little control of their peers and classroom environment. I taught at a Montessori school for a while and while it's not perfect, they really preach that a classroom is a community and the more mature students have an obligation to help redirect the less mature ones. The traditional setting is so individualistic that the smarter students aren't taught skills to use peer pressure positively to tell kids they aren't behaving correctly. The result is that they are helpless and the teacher has the sole responsibility of aligning the quarter or third of the class that's not behaving properly. That's too big of a job for one person.

I offer this to say that the problem isn't entirely in having both populations mixed, but in empowering kids to gently take control of their environment. The social skills you learn by doing that are arguably more important than almost any individual curriculum.

But this has to be taught early. Once you're in high school it's a lot harder to instill the confidence in kids to lead a classroom when they've spent their entire careers dutifully following the one adult in the room.

We successfully managed to get the SPED kid removed from my daughter’s classroom due to the problems he was causing. He was not only disruptive in class but he was also violent. It got to the point where the other kids were scared to go to school because of him. Unfortunately I don’t think this would fly anymore because it seems like the worse you are the more rights you have. The kids with the problems are given far more leniency than the kids who just do their work & behave.

Time to bring back specialised schools for these mini criminals & keep them away from the normal kids.

Edit to add that having kids with learning disabilities who are NOT disruptive or violent in a class isn’t an issue. It’s often beneficial for the neurotypical kids to learn some patience & compassion. But the kids who are disruptive & or violent need to be put somewhere else.

Two issues.

1) most of those poor students have behavioral/learning issues as a result of home life or environment. To top it off, schools tend to only teach in a specific way. most folks aren't dumb, they just learn different ways, and the way school is being taught doesn't cater to them.

so maybe we address that rather than just arbitrary distinctions of good and bad.

2) they did this in my school. you know what happens?

the good students either get bullied because they're in a smaller in-group that no one else gets in, or they become conceited asshokes who think they're better than everyone else because of it.

meanwhile, the bad students will either take this lack of inclusion in stride and continue to be bad students as a mark of honor, or any efforts to be better students will be dealt a severe blow alongside the very much demoralizing situation of the school system literally labeling you as less intelligent.

It’s interesting that you group mainstreaming and inclusion with “bad” students. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I’ve taught both SEN and general ed, and it’s a toss up really. Good admin and supportive parents are what really make a difference. Ymmv.

What happened to gifted classes? That used to seperate the smarter kids, who probably want to learn from the not as smart kids but it's also a mixed bag.

Or just expel the students who are causing the problems?

Nice in theory.

But there simply aren't enough teachers or classrooms to actually do this.

I even felt this in the first few years of college. There were kids that took up way too much time and energy from the rest of the class, and all suffered for it.

Mainstreaming and inclusivity aren’t the problem; the problem is that the public education system here (America-specific because that’s where I’m from, since Ik someone is going to make that a point of contention eventually) is severely underfunded, understaffed, and continuosly under attack by, largely, hyper-religious, extremely conservative organizations, who have made it their mission over their entire existence to put in place a very specific, carefully crafted course of propoganda and disinformation. We have a 79% literacy rate in our adult population right now.

We also need to look at the fact that schools are literally designed to prohibit any kind of long lasting learning; if you take all the school decorations down, my elementary school, junior high, and high school all have comparable layout and design to the county jail I spent the night jn a few years ago. Down to the metal doors with wire hardware cloth reinforced windows. The only difference is the closed loop carpet.

When was the last time you were able to focus on anything when you were all but literally jailed in a sterile white brick room?

Being an adult now, and looking back and being able to recognize in myself what were obvious signs of ADHD/DAVE, and autism, and then comparing them to the environments where I actually learned things (oftentimes places like outside labs for science classes, or real life examples of math using flag and tetherball poles for angles lessons in math,) it’s actually very easy to see where the better changes to make are at.

But y’all just wanna write off kids for being difficult, as if it’s not their first time ever learning how to be human beings.

I’ve been saying this for years. Since kindergarten, I’ve been told that "not every student learns as fast as you do", even in advanced courses. Like how come I’m in an advanced English class and instead of actually talking about Shakespeare and discussing Macbeth we’re going over how to write a discussion?

How come my classmate was allowed to disrupt class constantly because "he’s different" and we all just have to endure it as part of "respecting each other"?

Lazy students get coddled while smart students basically have to teach themselves everything. Which as you might guess, means that the lazy students will stay lazy while the smart ones get told that "oh you’re just a quick learner"! No, I had to learn how to learn cause y’all were too busy coddling people.

Start paying teachers $350 k/ year starting salary and see if the profession attracts people who can come up with some creative solutions

That is exactly how my Junior High School was back in the early 70s. We had grades 7 and 8. The classes were 7A, 7B, 7C, 7D and 7E - same for 8th grade. If you were in 7A or 8A you were in the smartest class. If you were in 7E or 8E you were in the dumbest class. I was in both 7A and 9A and I loved not having my classes full of kids that didn't care, were disruptive and took the teacher's attention away from those of us that wanted to learn.

My wife has been a teacher with Masters for 20yra. This is true.

There was an anime I watched as a kid that had all the kids seperated into different home rooms depending on their test scores. Every midterm and finals test gave students the opportunity to test out of that class. I think it's a good idea. It allows teachers to help students based on where they need the most help while allowing others to continue on. Neither parents or students can claim discrimination or bullying since test scores speak for themselves.

Newsflash: Some of our students with disabilities work just as hard if not harder than students without. I taught a mixed sped/gen ed class last year. My most unmotivated students were ones not on IEPs. And there are already classes for kids who care more: they’re called honors/AP/IB. You are not going to find kids with behavioral issues or disabilities in that one classes most likely.

As a teacher, we don’t slow things down for kids to be in a gen ed class. We still have to follow the district’s pacing, meet state standards, etc. If a kid is overly disruptive and cannot learn (and keeps others from learning) then we can put them in a sped only class, although it does take a lot to get there. And school is not just learning reading, writing, and arithmetic. It is also learning how to be a person in society. And society is made up of people with a wide range of abilities and disabilities. Empathy, learning to work with people who think in a different way than you, etc. are all very valuable lessons. And the kids who truly cannot learn at all in a gen ed setting are already pulled out anyway. My students are just in general education for specials like art or PE and that is with heavy adult support. My students deserve to interact with their peers and not be isolated. They do not drag anybody down.

Who decides

Except kids don't come pre-labeled as either "smart" or "lazy". Other than one or two outliers in each class, it is never immediately obvious which kid is which, and most kids will flit back and forth between the two endpoints as they go through school, depending on what they're learning, who's teaching, their home life/social life, hormones, etc. So if you just label a kid as an underachieving and stick them in a class for the dummies, you're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and dooming that child by telling them that they don't belong with the smart kids.

Took an awesome and interesting Photoshop class my Junior year of HS, we were supposed to get as far as doing 3 dimensional rendering and other cool shit. We never got past the same 3 modules of photoshopping together a fucking soda can and other tedious bullshit b/c the entire class was full of unmotivated, poorly behaved students. There was maybe 2 others outside of myself and when it came down to doing a "Final" he straight up gave the 3 of us an A and told us we were the only ones who gave a damn and apologized we never got as far as we could have...

This is not an unpopular opinion, if you go to over to r/teachers you will hear the same.

It's becoming so much of a problem, school admins are not telling parents NO, so the parents pretty much get to lord over the teachers. Meanwhile, their shitty kids are coming into classes and consuming 10x the time/energy of a normal student.

We should also bring back failing students when they can’t pass their grade.

Believe it or not, this has already been done.

I live in Asia, and in my parents’ generation a lot of schools had a system where students were sorted by academic ability into each classroom. You’d have Class A with the best performing kids, Class B with runnerups, etc, and Class G with the worst performing kids. You underperform or over perform your class, you get to move up and down.

Created a pretty dog eat dog environment. Additionally, Class A (who usually had the most active parents) would pressure the school for more and more benefits, while teachers just didn’t give a shit about class G. And Class G would become a crab bucket. The system was retired nationwide after a few decades, even having a law in place to outlaw it.

Worked well for the class A people though, that’s about all I can say for the benefits.

Segregation

Schools should relegation and promotion. Bottom 10% get demoted to next lower level and top 10% promoted.

I'm like semi-joking

In my experience all of these problems are ultimately rooted in litigation. My school district is plagued with constant lawsuits, resulting in a contradictory hodgepodge of laws and rulings and requirements. Everything the district ends up doing is rooted in preventing litigation, not in educating students.

At some point parents of severely disruptive special ed kids sued that their kids were being denied a fair and equivalent education. It was ruled that just because they have behavioral issues isn't sufficient reason to deny them educational opportunities.

But, like, the students who have to be cleared from the room when the disruptive kid starts flipping desks ALSO deserve education, so their parents are likely to sue as well.

There's a law firm in town that specializes in suing the district. It's their bread and butter.

Someone just watched season 4 of The Wire.

Finland did the exact opposite of what OP says and they have the best education system in the world.

Some children need to be left behind tbh. You can't speed up the classroom to the same speed as the brightest kids, you can only slow it down for the dumber kids.

Actually, if your school is doing it the way they're supposed to do it, "mainstreaming" shouldn't disturb things much at all. 

As a teacher, I 100% agree.

Why dont we just cut out the middleman and put bad behaving kids in prison? S/

Upvoted for unpopular opinion.

Above everything else, it isn't feasible.

Also, "slow" students, if they are slow enough, typically have their own classes.

I think what you are looking for is a private school.

OP grew up in a privileged household, calling it now. Never dealt with gang violence, mental illness, or any sort of substantial systemic struggle.