Why Do Advanced Students Have Such a Hard Time Succeeding?

I rarely write about personal things on this blog, and instead try to stay somewhat objective.  But today I shall make a small exception due to having a discussion with a friend who made some valid points.  I'd be curious to get some feedback, because this is something that has run through my mind many times.

I have the dubious pleasure of being the parent of a gifted child, one who is in fact considered to be twice-exceptional.  This means that whilst there is significant advanced capabilities in some areas, there are also delays in others.  So they have advanced needs and an IEP.

So onto the conversation; I was complaining that the school should be happy to have gifted students, and I didn't understand their reluctance to help an advanced student the opportunity to succeed as it reflects well on the school.  Here are the reasons that schools might not want to help your gifted (NOT high achiever, Type A; know the difference!) child.  This doesn't go into the whole problem about teachers not being sufficiently trained to recognise giftedness (although in the context of this post, thats very convenient too), but more goes to addressing the problems gifted kids have when they KNOW they have a gifted kid in their class.

1. Budget. Schools are beaten into keeping budgets. Kids with differences cost time and money, unless they're (financially beneficial?) disabilities which do bring in extra funding.
2. Testing. Once a child isn't failing, they don't matter. Kids that don't function well bring in more resources. Once they hit average, they do not bring anything more than base funding in. No state gives funding for helping gifted, only to bring the unsuccessful up kids up to the "accepted standard".  So why give extra help to the two kids that get 100% in all of the tests, since they help to raise the average score in your class, moving them on would simply impact the average score.  They don't need help they're doing just fine.  NCLB specifically discriminates against gifted kids.
3. Teachers are humans. They don't, except in outside cases, want to do extra work for no extra money, sure there are the "Mother Theresa's" of teaching who would teach for free under any circumstances just to help the kids, but by and large, they want to go home and get their dinner, mark their papers and wash their kid's karate uniform for tomorrow.  For the most part human nature is such that people don't dedicate the majority their mental bandwidth figuring out how they can do a better job each day, these days a mental dialogue looks more like "oh geez!! I'm late paying the water bill, Johnny has a sleep over in two days and I need to get food in.  Lisa has a cold but still wants to go to soccer practice, do I keep her home? John is on a work trip next week and I have the kids on my own, that's going to be rough.  I really need to get my hair cut..... "  and so on.
4. Teach to Test Recognition. Again a teacher is human, and humans in general crave praise and recognition. A teachers performance is assessed based on the grades of their students, the kids get great grades the teacher gets a pat on the back.  All of the kids in the class pass with top scores, the teacher gets recognised, perhaps awarded, and honoured. This looks great on a resume.  So as a teacher it's only natural that you want to do the "best job" you can do. That job no longer includes teaching kids, it's almost entirely based on tracking metrics via testing, so obviously the teacher wants the best little tester that he or she could have. 
5. Administration.  A school has enough problems keeping on top of the mandatory paperwork as it is.  A child that doesn't fit the norm surely generates more admin, more paperwork, more effort on the part of the school administration.  Conforming to average is good for the administration.

I could have all, or part of this entirely wrong, and if that's the case, I look forward to people providing me reasons as to why kids like mine and my friends' are left to languish in classes that are at least one or two grades below where they need to be learning?  

Chronological Advancement is Illogical, Dogmatic and Archaic

I've not written a post in sometime, because I've been working hard dealing with the "realities" of the public school system as it exists today.  I see lots of people talking about how an overhaul of the public school systems is urgently required; I see yet others claiming that the system needs to be torn down and completely rebuilt from the ground up.  Yet I also thought about some possible ways to solve the problems in the current system; here's one that's been pushed around for a while, so I'm going to add my voice to this, apparently relatively easy fix.

Why do we insist on grouping children by age.  The chronological approach to teaching is inflexible, dogmatic, and archaic.  It serves no purpose other than to enforce bright kids to study with kids that aren't as bright or maybe have difficulties in certain areas.   If child gets held back a year because he hasn't learned the content sufficiently (and when I say content, of course I actually mean "to pass the test"), it's a source of humiliation to the child (you just made him look dumb in front of all the other kids that managed just fine)  and to his parents ("Hey how's Johnny doing? He's in 5th grade now right?".  If the kid was acting out because he realised he wasn't at the same level as the rest of the class, then by holding him back a year, we've just entrenched his resent for the school system even more deeply.  Do we expect him to come back from this and do great things with his life?  I think not, all the positive reinforcement and sticker charts in the world are unlikely to make these kids a cheerleader of the school system.  Also we only get to advance the bright kids once a year, doesn't matter how much smarter you are, you get advanced with the rest of your class, no matter how stellar your performance (with the exception of very very rare instances, where the parents and school both agree and push for this, I can count the number of times I've heard about this happening on the fingers of one hand)

Isn't it much smarter to advance these according to ability, as needed?  Let's look at this for one moment.  There would be no need for a "No Child Left Behind" program since each child would be taught according to ability rather than age.  The kids that are naturally smart would get advanced once they outgrow the capabilities of the class they are currently in.  There would be less stress on the teachers to feel like they were neglecting the kids that need extra help because everyone would be at a similar level in the classroom.  The stress on the students that were unable to advance as fast as the other kids would be reduced, since they would always be surrounded by intellectually similar peers.

And if you take a look at vocational education and qualifications this is exactly how it works, and works very successfully I might add.  Can you imagine the absurdity of wanting to train a project manager as a natural progression of your career and being told I'm sorry, you can't take that course/learn that material until you're <N> years old. No, it simply doesn't happen except in our broken education system.  If I'm capable of taking a course and can meet the prerequisites of attending that course and/or exam, then I do so.  I might have 18 year olds on the course, I might have 58 year old students on the course with me, and no one cares, no one cares in the slightest about any age difference since we're all there to learn the same information.

I'll admit I'm biased, because it's an idea I think would work.  I'd love to hear the reasons why this wouldn't work.