My niece now attends public school (8th grade) after years in private. She is lumped into classes with slower students and is WAY ahead of her class in math. The teacher has my niece spending her time in math class going around helping the other students! She SHOULD be in honors math or 9th or 10th grade math. I don't even know if her school has an honors program. Back in the day, our classes were divided into 3 levels. Smart kids weren't stuck in math or reading classes with slow kids. You were allowed to progress if you showed potential.
That's a real problem. My daughter was struggling with math in public school while her teacher would allow those kids who got their math done early to turn on the class television to MTV as a reward. Considering the fact that my daughter also has super-hearing, it was nearly impossible for her to learn math in that class. My other daughter faced an American history teacher with a doctorate in history from Berkeley who started the class with the America-Is-Evil claptrap from Day 1. My daughter's first essay assignment was whether the class should learn typical American history or "the real history" as defined by that teacher. In my own experience I was a motivated student who loved history. Too many times I sat in a class staffed by coaches who were more interested in coddling his athletes and discussing game strategy than teaching history. When one coach/teacher had a silly feud with the librarian, he suddenly declared that no one in his class would ever have to set foot in the school library and he cancelled our term papers.