It's hard to imagine how this happens. My school district has a magnet school that is ranked at or near the top annually and people whisper that students/parents cheat on the admissions requirements. If they are cheating, then the school is letting them skate through the four years. The numbers say otherwise. The graduation rate and college acceptance rate is 100 percent. Big name colleges. The average SAT is near perfect. A few years ago the admissions department was forced to open up seats in the name of diversity. The under-qualified kids were eaten alive. Apparently the faculty were not told to drop standards. I just checked their current demographics which shows 68 percent Asian, 21 percent white, and less than two percent black and Hispanic. The other indicator of success is the free and reduced meals and fees is less than two percent. Those of lesser means do not perform as well in school.
I finished my M.Ed. a few months ago and wrote a few papers which included demographics, low income students, English Learners, and the effect on learning in a general education classroom. A goal of administrators every year is to narrow the achievement gap. That's a noble goal of course, but when the methods of narrowing the gap include bringing the top performers closer to the lower performers instead of bringing the lower ones up, something else must be figured out. It's difficult these days to talk about that without somebody invoking Brown v. Board, but I believe the system must change to where the hard chargers take one path and those less qualified take a path with less rigorous academics. Students would still have equal opportunity to excel in their journey through high school. Pressure would be taken off educators to slow down instruction in order to bring along the slower students. An alternative path to four years of high school might be at grade 10 when students go the vocational route and learn a trade. After two years, the student graduates with a high school diploma and continues learning the trade in a journeyman program and receive pay and benefits. The student who took the academic path is better prepared for college since he/she sat in classes with rigorous instruction.
I teach in career and technical education, formerly vocational education, and that type of student has kept me employed for 12 years. Most of my students though will not go to college, yet they are required to sit through four years of math, English, and social sciences. Anyway, speaking of students, I am at work. Rant off.