john-taylor-gatto-weapons-of-mass-instruction

88 WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION
Hector was conducting an experiment to answer a simple question:
Could the interlocking bars of the automatic turnstile be defeated
What safer way to find out than with a paid ticket in hand in
case he got caught
Later, as I searched school records for clues to understanding this
boy, I discovered that, in his short time on earth, he had built up a
long record as an outlaw. Although none of his crimes would have
earned him more than a good spanking a hundred years earlier, now
they helped support a social-service empire.
At the time of this incident, Hector attended one of the lowestrated
public schools in New York State, part of a select group threatened
with takeover by state overseers. Of the thirteen classes in
Hector's grade, a full nine were of higher rank than the one he was
in. Hector was an exhausted salmon swimming upstream in a raging
current that threatened to sweep away his dignity. We had deliberately
unleashed the flood by assigning about eleven hundred kids
to five strict categories: "gifted and talented honors;" "gifted and talented;"
"special progress;" "mainstream;" and "special ed:' (These last
kids had a cash value to the school three times higher than that of the
others, providing a genuine incentive to find fatal defects where none
existed.)
Hector belonged to the doomed category called "mainstream;' itself
further divided into subcategories labeled A, B, C and O. Worst of
the worst, above special ed, was mainstream O. This was where Hector
reported. Since special ed was a life sentence of ostracism and humiliation
at the hands of one's peers, we might even call Hector lucky
to be in mainstream, though as mainstream 0, he was suspended in
that thin layer of mercy just above the truly doomed. Hector's standardized-test
scores placed him about three years behind the middle
of the pack. He wasn't just behind the eight ballj he was six feet under
it.
Shortly after I found Hector breaking and entering, he was arrested
in a nearby elementary school with a gun. It was a fake gun, but
it looked pretty real to the school's secretaries and principal. Hector