Not suggesting that, and it's wrong anyways: the point here is that we, as a society, want people to have a basic floor of an education by the time they reach adulthood. Not necessarily MIT, but not nothing either, and the track I was on for a bit in my childhood was closer to "nothing" than it was to "decent", and it was certainly way off course if I were to shoot for MIT.

For the students that never left that track… I cannot imagine that school did much, if anything, to produce a citizen with a high-school education.