My Catholic school didn’t offer honors anything. You were either college prep in the A, B, or C classes or you co-oped in business. The public schools didn’t have honors classes back then either. It would’ve been nice and much more economical to get college credit back in HS, but that was not an option.
with all of the obsession these days with self-esteem and worrying if one kid feels inferior to another, it is astounding to look back and see the tracking they did back then. my junior high school had tracks 1-7. so you were in 7-1 if you were one of the smarties and barely scraping by, vo-tech if you were in 7-7, and then distributed accordingly in between. sounds shocking to me today.