Yeah, no. Schools could be better, yes, but the literature does not indicate that tracking improves outcomes for smarter kids. What it does indicate is that tracking hurts outcomes for the rest. Tracking is, I posit, therefore a bad thing.

As an aside, the probability that any given person posting here is actually 3-4 standard deviations above the average is small. I had the best elementary-school test scores in the town in which I was raised (pop. ~20k), and I doubt I am 3+ sd better than the mean.

I'm waiting for the price to hit $50. $70 isn't bad, though. Maybe I should bite the proverbial bullet.

Sadly, no. As the other guys said, R does absolutely everyting you claim it doesn't. Every positional function argument is a shortcut you can call explicitly in any order. Don't put any stock into this recommendation.

If you are working in python, have discovered that SciPy's stats functions are not ready for prime time (they aren't), and need drop-in replacements, use rpy. Otherwise, you will find it does not play very well with R. It feeds and returns objects in what I found unintuitive and unuseful ways. Yes, you can make it work, so if you're in python already, you should use it. Otherwise, learn and use R when it makes sense, which is roughly 90% of the time doing data analysis.