Ontario

There used to be three "streams" for Ontario secondary schools:

• Academic - these were kids that teachers expected would go to universities after high school (if you're from the US, universities in Canada are analogous to US colleges)
• General - these were kids that teachers expected would go to colleges or trade schools after high school (if you're from the US, colleges in Canada are analogous to US trade schools or maybe lower-tier colleges)
• Basic - these were kids that teachers expected to do menial jobs straight out of high school

Those descriptions may be harsh, but they were absolutely the unwritten-yet-widely-understood implications of being put in one of these streams. I understand that later on the Basic and General streams were merged into a single "Applied" stream, but that's the gist. The course focus in each stream was tuned toward those expectations. Academic kids were steered toward math and science, General kids toward shop classes, and Basic kids toward courses like Home Economics.

The stream system was basically the Pygmalion effect applied to a couple generations of Ontario students. Kids put in the Academic stream tended to succeed because educators expected them to succeed, and thus educators would be more likely to give those students the attention and resources required for success. Kids put in a lower stream tended not to succeed again because that's what educators expected, causing those educators not to apply the same focus or opportunities as they would on kids in the Academic stream. It was absolutely self-fulfilling prophecy type stuff. There was also a hugely problematic racial component to the system. For example black students were far less likely to be placed in the Academic stream. It is/was a truly awful system and its death is long overdue.

Full disclosure: I directly benefited from the system, because I was a white kid put in the Academic stream. At the time I thought it was normal, but in hindsight I can see how unfair that system was.