The path ahead....needs to be a simplified tests that a 10th grader can take, and if successful...they are graduated there on the spot, and at sixteen, move onto local community college. We could take ten percent of the kids and move them on easily. Repeat the same situation in the eleventh grade, and thirty percent of them would likely move on. We could then concentrate on the punks who have issues and simply get them to a point of being acceptable to graduate.
First time I heard this suggestion - sounds good. I think some students would push themselves to learn in order to exit with the first group.
Content “stabilizes” after 8th grade anyway so a portion of the students just tread water those last two years, having learned the core and now faced with repeating it until graduation.