Ken Berwitz
Some years ago – ok, a lot of years ago – I was a student at Queens College, City University of New York.
One day, between classes, I went into the men\’s room, closed a stall behind me, and had a seat. Then I started laughing.
The reason for my laughter was that someone had drawn an arrow pointing to the toilet paper and wrote “Queens College diplomas. Take one”. I still smile when I think about it.
But, amazingly, California has decided that those words are not a joke. They really are giving out diplomas with the same value as Queens College toilet paper.
From Blake Neff\’s blog at dailycaller.com:
The state ofCalifornia is poised to award thousands of high school degrees to dropouts bypassing a new law retroactively removing the requirement to pass a high schoolexit exam.
The California HighSchool Exit Exam (CASHEE) was created in 2004, and is intended to make surethat students have a rudimentary grasp of English and mathematics beforebeing awarded a high school diploma, and to counter the phenomenon of studentsreceiving passing grades while learning almost nothing.
But now, a bill passedThursday by the California legislature, which Gov. Jerry Brown is expected tosign, suspends the exam through 2018, while also retroactively suspendingit back to 2004.
In the \’60\’s, The Mamas and The Papas sang “California Dreamin”. The lyrics are a little esoteric, but somehow I doubt that the California dream they were referring to was giveaway diplomas.
I wonder how the students who actually learned something in high school and deserved their diplomas feel about those diplomas being declared equal to the diplomas of “students” who managed to slip-slide through high school and learn nothing.
