In the fall of 1972, I moved to Germany to take a teaching position in a Gymnasium.  I was brand new to the German school system, and an idealistic young teacher.  In an Algebra class, I worked hard with my students and on their first test everyone in the class did well.  I was thrilled - they had learned a great deal and showed what they had accomplished.

The next day, I was summoned to the principal’s office.  He told me in no uncertain terms that I could not do what I had just done - my tests had to separate students with excellent scores from others with low scores.  I needed to create a bell curve.

He went on, and explained that in the German system, which has a two track education system, not every Gymnasium student could go to University when they graduated;  there simply weren’t enough places.  So part of the function of the Gymnasium was to identify the strongest students and eliminate the weakest.  There was even a guide book to identify under exactly what conditions a student would drop down from the Gymnasium, and the promise of a white collar job, to the Volkschule and, most likely, a career in the trades.  

At least in Germany they were overt about the structural need to sort students by academic strength.  But in the American public school system, it is a fundamental belief that everyone should finish high school.  The way out of this bind is social promotion, moving a student up because his class is moving up.  This often allows students to graduate who have been poorly served by schools and are seriously lacking in skills and training.