I'm not claiming that it is what's happening in teaching right now, mind you. I'm just claiming that it's certainly possible. I've certainly seen the idea happen elsewhere (it's how I came to realize that).

I will say that the statement relies on the assumption that honest folks cannot get a perfect score consistently. Although, even then, if one person always gets a perfect and the other person goofs up rarely and the business has to lay one of the two off, guess what usually happens?

That statement as written is trivially true. The question is whether it is what is occurring, which isn't going to be possible to ascertain. I don't think anyone really has a firm grasp on what it is possible for an average child to learn, which would be a prerequisite to answering the question.

(There is some idea what an average child can learn in our current system but that's such a small part of the possible state space of educational systems I don't pay much attention to it.)

Yes, I was referring to the space of actual school systems around the world, and standards they would ever be likely to adopt.

For good information about what is possible for young learners around the world, see

http://nces.ed.gov/timss/

and

http://timss.bc.edu/

For thoughts on how to improve teaching in United States schools, see (among many other sources)

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

or

http://mit.edu/6.969/www/readings/ma-review.pdf