Pro Rege Papers

O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation;
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust!”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

For those of you who say that Christianity was not influential in our founding, this the last verse of the Star Spangled Banner (that’s our national anthem, by the way).

Notice the motto in the 6^th line.

Okay, so the justice system in California still works and has a little integrity. I just found out that the California Supreme Court overruled an Alameda judge’s decision to ban the high school exit exam. The decision will reinstate an exit exam that 1/10 of the California students couldn’t pass on the first try. However, the decision is being appealed.

The people who are against the test say that it discriminates against students who are learning English or are poor. But the thing is; if they don’t know English, then they should learn it before they are awarded a diploma. If you don’t know English, you’re not going to get very far in this country. (By the way, that’s a good thing) You should not give a Hispanic student some false sense of security by handing him a high school diploma, if that diploma doesn’t mean anything. You are failing a student if you just rush him through the grades, and then send him off to college with a good luck wish.

All that a high school diploma means right now is that you spent 12 years of your life in classroom, not that you actually learned anything. I’m not saying that you didn’t learn anything, just that there’s no way to know. Students today cannot fail a course; it’s impossible. That’s bad.

If students fail the test or a course, they should study hard, not sue the state. Even if that means staying in a grade for a longer period of time than a year. That’s right, I actually said that. Those things used to happen in this country when there was accountability, unlike today.

Again, we need to restore meaning to a high school diploma. We need to get back to the old days when an 8^th grade education was enough to get by in life. Right now, the 8^th grade exit exam would probably not be passed by most of our seniors. That needs to change. A high school diploma used to be respected. These people who are against the test are against the students, not for them.