Our local middle school ditched honors classes because the teachers and administrators are lazy, bureaucratic union hacks who couldn’t be bothered to maintain a separate system of classes and student records.
The school district my kids did this starting in about 1988. No more GATE (gifted and talented education) classes. No more putting the kids into groups based on ability. A neighbor whose son was in the same grade as my son liked it because her son wasn’t in the top math group. Her son was more athletic than mine and, of course, it was okay to still separate kids by athletic ability.
When my oldest son had been in first grade, the teacher gave the children work at the grade level they were able to work at - from first to third. Seven years later when my daughter was in first grade, the teacher was told she could only teach first grade level material. She refused. She asked how she could do that when she had kids starting first grade barely knowing their letters and numbers and others reading “chapter books” and already proficient in addition and subtraction. They didn’t fire her, but made her life pretty miserable.