Okay, since we have upended everything else, why not traditional year/grade structures?
Before I get into that though I need to describe the lesson system I am envisioning so you can better understand how this all works. Every student would have an tablet with the school app on it. The school app would have sections for all the students school subjects. They could watch all the class lectures through the app whenever they wanted to and as much as they wanted to. The app would also have a lot of their homework on it so that they had it all in one place and so it could be graded quickly and automatically. Any projects or homework that couldn't be completed in the app would send notifications to a teacher who would help them get whatever materials were needed to do the assignment.
The app would allow kids to get feedback on their work faster than any teacher could manage. I am imagining something very much like Khan Academy. It would free teachers up from writing or grading most assignments.
The way this affects the traditional year/grade system is that with the app managing the kids' entire lesson plan keeping them all synced together no longer becomes important. So kids could be allowed to advance on their own pace in every single subject. You could have a 10 year old child at a "third grade" level in English and an "eighth grade" level in math.
Every student would be able to advance as quickly and/or slowly as needed. Teachers would get automatic notifications if a child was having issues and getting overly behind. But just because one student was slow on one subject wouldn't make keep them from advancing in other subjects or their classmates.
In the end students who were not performing well wouldn't get rushed along to stay with their class and exceptional students wouldn't get frustrated by their classmates.
Also, having a mixed skill set of students in a class would allow lots of opportunities, if encouraged, for students to tutor each other. This would help both the tutoring student and the helped student advance in their understanding and lower the load on the teachers.
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