I'm also struggling to understand how the teacher is "required" to force your child to do this. Required by whom?
You'd be surprised. A district I've worked in had a very "all teachers must teach the core curriculum with fidelity to all students" attitude. Exceptions were made if a student was cognitively disabled, but any differentiation of curricular expectations had to be under the table, and done in such a way so that the right boxes could be checked on the districts report cards.
They did, however, have a very fluid sense of grade level, so kids working up a grade or more in various subject areas was not uncommon. So... once you'd ticky-boxed all the stuff for grade 3, for example, that student could move on to grade 4 material. HOWEVER, you couldn't ticky-box things until they'd passed a district assessment, which made it kind of unwieldy to advance kids... you had to just throw assessment after assessment at them.
They've gone in a different direction now, for better and worse.
