Right to Opine

What should we do when the high school dropout rate is around 30% and many students aren’t meeting standards? Lower the standards, apparently. Failing grades appear to be somehow unfair and engender a culture of failure. Good Lord we’re raising a generation of namby pambies. As Michael Petrilli of Stanford University comments,

This is clearly about dumbing down expectations for our students. Some of these children are just a few years away from being in the workforce, in college or even in the military, and in none of those environment will they be coddled like they are in these programs.

Next time you’re in an elevator on the 50th floor or driving across a freeway bridge, ask yourself who you’d rather have designing that structure: the product of a “no fail” education system or an engineer who had to pass a rigorous exam with no regard for his self esteem? I’ll take the latter, thank you.