I agree with Bostonian and Iucounu; causation fallacy produced by misinterpretation of a correlation.
We've seen this locally in terms of pressure to place high school students of moderate ability into AP coursework, too.
MOST kids just aren't prepared/able/ready for 'advanced' material. Duh. That's what makes it "advanced" material; if it were suitable for the middle of the distribution, it would be the standard already, no?
Placing all (well, all average and up) learners into advanced coursework is just asinine and, I'd argue, somewhat cruel. That's no different than expecting a profoundly intellectually disabled child to do standard curriculum at standard pacing in order to "keep up with peers" in a regular classroom. Cruel. Because some kids realy cannot manage it, and it just sets them up for failure. Unfairly so, really.
We see this quite a bit in our local district-- it's a regular pressure cooker because of parent demands and expectations. Our district touts that 25-30% of their students are "GT" according to the state's definition of the term. So most kids take one or more AP courses in 11th or 12th grade. Of course, that also means that even capable 9th-10th graders have no room to get into those classes.
More ominously, it means that the suicide rate and mental health disorders among the high schoolers here are frighteningly high. (We have two high-tech employers, a major regional medical center, and a land-sea-space grant university in a town of 55K residents. So yeah-- not hard to do the math and figure out how many terminally-degreed households that adds up to be.)
Not offering any of those opportunities at all limits the potential achievement of those (unusual) students who are ready, eager and able, but pushing ill-prepared students into them is no better.
Reality is a pretty harsh taskmaster, unfortunately-- what the 'haves' (in an educational sense) possess that the have-nots do not, is, in spite of all efforts to ignore it, probably not something that can be "given" to a person via tangible means.
Opportunity costs indeed.
