[sershe]

To be fair to Soviet Union (I'm from USSR/Russia), they were actually the reverse in that area, there were gifted programs, gifted schools where you would be tracked if you were good, competitions for school kids in many subjects (from history to physics) that would also track you to gifted schools or could earn an automatic college admission, etc. AFAIK even the classes in regular run-of-the-mill schools would sometimes be "semi-tracked", with most of the smarter/better behaved kids ending up in some classes and the less smart/worse behaved kids in others for the same age group, without any other differences (i.e. lessons would be more or less the same). Soviet Union was an evil empire, but it was not entirely dumb.

The modern progressives, on the other hand, are evil AND dumb.