To have a Russian/China system, is not really that easy.
Russian/China system builds on a competitive hierarchy of exams to basically classify people into buckets according to their intelligence level. Even though it may be good on a national scale, it is indeed a cruel system to individuals. Your confidence or personality is least of this system's concern, and living a micro society where score is literally everything and the ones with low score will be looked down upon by teachers and peers alike and being told constantly low score meaning no future, I doubt such system will be welcomed here by American society for, you know, greater good.
Disclaimer: survivor of such system, not really miss it though. It almost destroys my love for science, which only recovers many years later.
I don't think you can conflate the Russian and the Chinese systems together. In the Russian system (at least as it was), not all students were driven to push the limits. Generally speaking, teachers would identify those with potential, and push them. But no-one told others that "low score means no future". Indeed, the system tended to segregate the aforementioned buckets - bright students would go into specialized math schools - and so different messaging could be done to students in different buckets, and their peers would be from the same bucket, as well.
Romania also has a competitive school system. Surprising to me (from UK) to find that even the class (in addition to the school) you get to attend in high school depends only on the final published mark you get in the National Evaluation (taken in 8th grade) plus your course mark. The exams don't measure intelligence as such, they measure performance in the subjects examined and how else should one objectively measure this?
No one defends the making of unwarranted perjorative conclusions from low scores other than as a measure of competence in the subject tested.
Russian/China system builds on a competitive hierarchy of exams to basically classify people into buckets according to their intelligence level. Even though it may be good on a national scale, it is indeed a cruel system to individuals. Your confidence or personality is least of this system's concern, and living a micro society where score is literally everything and the ones with low score will be looked down upon by teachers and peers alike and being told constantly low score meaning no future, I doubt such system will be welcomed here by American society for, you know, greater good.
Disclaimer: survivor of such system, not really miss it though. It almost destroys my love for science, which only recovers many years later.