Schools are early childhood prisons not educational institutions.
Vast numbers of our children suffer through the torture chamber to emerge battered and defeated to engage in the real world which awaits them.

Modern day educators are clones of ideology: Mischievous dogmatised morons.
My observations.

Thank you, Steven, for another thoughtful article that combines erudition and common sense. I always enjoy your writing.

It’s a great pity that our children’s education has become a weapon in the culture wars. But it looks like evidence is starting to win over ideology.

Since when has "every student been given the opportunity to succeed".
When it was introduced the purpose of standardized education was to create a literate and numerate work force to work in the factories and offices, and of course to create a large pool of mostly male suckers to be slaughtered in the various colonial imperial wars.

In this time and place the situation is negatively attenuated by the everywhere presence of I-phones and the fact that perhaps a majority of students have a very short attention span (which has also been created by TV) Many youngsters spend hours every day addicted to their must-have phones. They even take them to bed to keep up with the latest FOMO gossip. As such they are effectively being brain-washed by their devices. They thus go to school having had very little necessary sleep.

Furthermore many boys (in particular) go to school having drank Red Bull and other hyper-stimulating energy drinks causing them (using a metaphor) to bounce off the ceiling. Added to that many students probably have atrocious diets too. They thus have very little free energy and attention.

You can only effectively teach anyone anything if they have free energy and attention. And are happy too. Teachers can only effectively teach if they are happy too.

Labor's 1972 catch-cry of free education & everyone should have the Right to go to Uni is the cause of the loss of the quality education everyone expected. Everyone capable of such education has the Right to attend not simply everyone who shunned the options available to them according to their merit.
That's why we now have so many highly educated & highly useless people dragging the Nation to its knees !