Comment by gjm11

"Progress is made by the people in front" is plausibly true by definition.

"Progress is made by the people who were in front 15 years earlier" is not true by definition. (So: you can't safely assume that the people you need for progress are exactly the people who are doing best in school. Maybe some of the people who aren't doing so well there might end up in front later on.)

"Progress is made by the people who end up in front without any intervention" is not true by definition. (So: you can't safely assume that you won't make better progress by attending to people who are at risk of falling behind. Perhaps some of those people are brilliant but dyslexic, for a random example.)

"Progress is made by the people in front and everyone else is irrelevant to it" is not true by definition. (So: you can't safely assume that you will make most progress by focusing mostly on the people who will end up in front, even if you can identify who those are. Maybe their brilliant work will depend on a whole lot of less glamorous work by less-brilliant people.)

I strongly suspect that progress is made mostly by people who don't think in soundbite-length slogans.