Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, references George Leef and the Pope Center for Higher Education in his column today in the American Spectator:
Our lives are filled with measures of achievement. From cleaning our rooms as children and taking a driver’s test as teenagers to annual job reviews through the course of a career, there are benchmarks of achievement that follow us through the entirety of our lives. As we grow, these benchmarks become more numerous and the stakes become higher.
Curiously, these benchmarks are being consistently eroded in primary and secondary education, a stage of life when they should be most emphasized. Standard benchmarks in educational achievement are increasingly falling by the wayside and the results are troubling.
George Leef with the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy wrote of this problem at the college level, noting that more college students today expect high grades for simply showing-up in class or completing reading assignments. The New York Times explored the issue as well, quoting college educators bemoaning the fact that too many students are equating effort with quality of work.
