Is school about bringing the best up or is it about educating the general populace? Public education in the US is about offering a minimum level of education and acculturation to students. It is _not_ about producing elites.

A contrast to this is Soviet education policy which explicitly tried to select for talent from a young age and funnel them up. In the Soviet Union though, poorer students had full employment guarantees, so the danger of falling through the education system was a lot lower.

Education the population is bringing the best in every student. For every subject, there are some students with a best better than the best of other students. We need to learn to live with it.

There's no dispute that students differ in aptitude for subjects. Where things get more complicated is when you view this in terms of other variables like time. Do some students eventually get better than others, say start off worse but end up becoming better (a sharper trajectory)? If so, at what point do we deem a student's aptitude to be better than another student's, or should this always be a time-varying function? Do certain subjects which become more important due to technological or social changes, like say computing, benefit a student who otherwise would not have shown a talent in anything taught in a school? Donald Knuth was a history major in school originally.

I think there will always be really good and really bad students in every subject. The hard part is everyone else.