I personally think most of the reaching resources available in primary education should be focused on the dumb kids, because they're the only ones who will see a benefit from the added effort. For the smart kids, the effort should be on making sure they have access to counseling and etc. to weed out problems at home or with other kids that may discourage them from doing their best.
Wrong. If you focus on individual students - their capacities and their efforts - and reward the results appropriately, you'll do the best by
everyone. There are structural and funding issues to deal with in the established public education systems around the world, but there are some basics.
Apply one simple standard. An example. No child leaves junior primary level without being able to read and write at a standardised age 8 level. This means that
something has to be done about a child's literacy and learning skills at the earliest age that a problem appears. When this kind of approach is implemented, suddenly you eliminate the problem of students struggling unsuccessfully through to year 6 or further before someone magically discovers that they're a bit deaf or astigmatic or dyslexic or whatever. The child who seems unintelligent or apathetic or disruptive at age 5 or 6 or 7 gets all the testing needed to determine whether they have physical or intellectual impediments to learning. Then you need to restructure your system so that any problems are dealt with immediately.
In one stroke you've eliminated all the problems associated with perfectly able students failing to benefit from their first 4, 6, or 8 years of schooling because nobody noticed they needed glasses or speech therapy. For students who have learning difficulties, the earlier they're identified and acknowledged in schooling, the more benefit they get from all teaching and learning thereafter.
The biggest benefit from all this? High school teachers can concentrate on delivering advancements in students' learning, rather than eternally identifying problems and devising individual remedial programs for those who've missed out on basics for the lack of really simple interventions. They'll only have to deal with emerging problems attributable to the increased complexity of the subject matter taught rather than the lack of adequate grounding - in reading or arithmetic and the like.
There are other super simple objectives or criteria you can come up with that have similar domino effects of the whole system. The big thing is to work out what you can and can't do with the resources you're willing to devote to education.