America has over recent years made great progress in seeing that more and more young adults graduate from high school, in which, as reported by npr.org, "The high school graduation rate in the U.S. reached an all-time high of 83 percent in the 2014-2015 school year." Of course, digging beneath those impressive numbers lies some very disappointing news, in which as reported by theatlantic.com, ” The World Economic Forum ranks us 48th in math and science education," in addition to America scoring poorly in reading, and mathematics. Further, the ACT reports that, "76 percent of our high-school graduates “were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses.”"
All of the above, indicates quite clearly, that gaming the system, so as to have more "graduates" might sound good on paper, but even a cursory review of the real facts of the matter demonstrates that far too many Americans are graduating with skill sets that are leaving them woefully unprepared for college curriculum, clearing suffering from not mastering the basic subjects of English, math, science, and reading at levels that clearly demonstrate a lack of competency.
While there probably are plenty of places to lay the blame for such a woeful performance of so many high school students, from the schools themselves, to the teachers, to the materials, to the students, to the parents, and so on and so forth, the answer, most definitely is not to paper over our lack of valid high school achievement, by disseminating to the public that high school graduation rates are increasing as if this actually means, more and more graduates of high schools are now better prepared for college and have more competency than previous years, but rather the truth of the matter is that our graduates are, and especially shown via other countries, falling further and further behind.
This would indicate that whatever steps that have been taken to rectified our pathetic high school performance and to ameliorate our poor high school learning, have not been resolved and are not close to being resolved. If, this national government, in conjunction with State governments, finds some sort of purpose in simply graduating students from high school who have demonstrated via national standardized testing standards that they are not competent, so be it, but that simply means, in effect, that those that have graduated high school, and are now looking for employment, or some sort of college entry, will instead be tested by those organizations on their own terms, to help those institutions to more easily determine the actual competency and readiness of those so applying or their lack thereof.
In point of fact, a nationalized standardized test law, for those graduating high school, must be passed, in which this law, stipulates that all high school graduates, need to pass this test, in order to receive a document, that states that they have mastered and passed the High School Qualification Completion test. This test, will for all practical purposes, supersede any document that simply states that somebody is a High School graduate, as the successful passing of the High School Qualification Completion test will be demonstrative proof that such has indeed achieved education competency on core subjects. Those passing ACT tests or SAT tests at a certain score level, would, as a matter of course, by default, earn the High School Qualification Completion certificate without having to take the test, by virtue of their successful scores on those nationalized tests.
There isn't any good point, in having a school structure, where everybody graduates, without actually having a meaningful standard to graduate to, at least with a High School Qualification Completion test, students, their teachers, and the school infrastructure, would now have a valid target to work towards, rather than simply passing students for essentially showing up and being able to spell their own names.