Comment by shcheklein

> should be a natural way to work on your own pace at your own level

Analogous to the old one-room-school model where one teacher taught all grade levels and students generally worked from textbooks. There were issues with it stemming from specialization (e.g., teaching 1st grade is different than teaching 12th). They were also largely in rural areas and generally had poor facilities.

The main barrier in the US to track separation is manpower. Public School teachers are underpaid and treated like shit, and schools don't get enough funding which further reduces the number of teachers.

Teachers just don't have the time in the US to do multiple tracks in the classroom.

You can have a multi-track high-school system, like in much of Europe. Some are geared towards the academically inclined who expect to go to university, others hold that option open but focus on also learning a trade or specialty (this can be stuff like welding, CNC, or hospitality industry / restaurants etc.), while others focus more heavily on the trade side, with apprenticeship at companies intertwined with the education throughout high school, and switching to a university after that is not possible by default, but not ruled out if you put in some extra time).

Or you can also have stronger or weaker schools where the admission test scores required are different, so stronger students go to different schools. Not sure if that's a thing in the US.

This was the way all schools worked in my county in florida, at least from middle school on. Normal/Honors/AP split is what pretty much every highschool did at the time. You could even go to a local community college instead of HS classes.

> Also if there is an explicit split there will be groups of people who "game" it (spend disproportional amount of time to "train" their kids vs actual natural talent - not sure if this is good or bad).

The idea of tracking out kids who excel due to high personal motivation when they have less natural aptitude is flat out dystopian. I'm drawing mental images of Gattaca. Training isn't "gaming". It's a natural part of how you improve performance, and it's a desirable ethical attribute.