EDITORIAL: Taking Aim At Standards
Advocate (excerpt)

Louisiana should not dumb down school curricula to deal with a high-school dropout problem.

That may please some legislators and other officials, because it defines away a tough problem. But we hope that most leaders in the state don’t want to take some easy way out, because there are terrible consequences for issuing a generation of students a watered-down diploma.

Perhaps the graduates will have a diploma and feel better about themselves. But what happens when they go out into the workforce and try to function in a computer-organized society?

That’s the question not faced by the critics of today’s system. In one way, we agree with some of the statements made by officials genuinely worried about the dropout issue. About four in 10 students won’t finish high school in four years. Even if they drop out, at least they should have some job training along the way, something to allow them to be productive.