I don't remember a lot of pullouts either but I was an "baby buster" and classes were so small they closed elementary schools behind me. I don't think I ever had an elementary class of more than 17 kids in public school. It was when schools were experimenting with new teaching techniques and to my advantage one of those was to let students to do a lot of independent work at their own speed. It was also the era of "new math", something that worked to my advantage as it was something I was good at. I was placed in a 2nd/3rd grade class in 2nd and didn't even realize I was mostly working in the 3rd grade books. And I remember a lot of SRI's & math workbooks we could work through at our own speed.