The most important aspect of a top school is that a student is around classmates with high drive (maybe family influenced) to succeed. This does not just create competition, most importantly, you get the signaling that it is ok and expected to study hard, to do your homework, to say no to playing so that you can finish your assigned homework.
Now if you have a top student in a lagging school, most likely the classmates will drag them down. In my school good students were physically bullied by the “cool” guys.
I think that classes need to be divided based on the performance of the students, that will be assessed on regular intervals. Let the good students go as fast as they need to, focus for the lagging students to get at least the basics right. There is no reason to pretend that we are teaching advanced calculus to lagging students, when they cannot even do simple arithmetic operations.
Now if you have a top student in a lagging school, most likely the classmates will drag them down. In my school good students were physically bullied by the “cool” guys.
I think that classes need to be divided based on the performance of the students, that will be assessed on regular intervals. Let the good students go as fast as they need to, focus for the lagging students to get at least the basics right. There is no reason to pretend that we are teaching advanced calculus to lagging students, when they cannot even do simple arithmetic operations.