There can be no doubt that the Clintons,Kennedys,Kerrys,Gores,etc will never employ/consult a physician,attorney or accountant who hasn't passed every single exam that could possibly have been thrown at them.
A high school diploma should reflect how well a student's performance over 12 years reflects innate potential -- and that's a judgment best left to dedicated and knowledgeable educators, not the whims of politicians or judges.
What does this mean, exactly? Is it that 'educators' be the gatekeepers of whether you get a diploma? I can just see the lawsuits resulting from the (extremely unlikely) possibility that someone sits in judgement of a student's deserving a diploma or not. In our current climate, the only hope is for an objective, one-size-fits-all test that everyone has to take. Anything else would be 'subjective' and therefore 'discriminatory.'
Schooling must be desystematized, the system must be put to death. Adam Smith has correctly instructed us for more than two centuries now that the wealth of nations is the product of freedom, not of tutelage. The connection between the corporate economy, national politics, and schooling is a disease of collectivism which must be broken if children are to become sovereign, creative adults, capable of lifting a free society to unimaginable heights. The rational management model has damaged the roots of a free society and the free market it claims to defend.
-- John Taylor Gatto
Excerpted from "The Underground History of American Education".