It is common to speak of “win-win” situations or to say that “everybody wins” in certain circumstances. And sometimes that’s true. For instance, both the buyer and seller of a car “win” if the car helps the buyer get to work every day to support his family and the price paid helps the dealer stay in business.
But it’s a fact of life that “everybody” can’t win all the time. Two teams cannot win the same Super Bowl, for example, any more than two teams can win the same World Series.
Curiously, however, more and more high schools around the country are naming multiple valedictorians each year. It’s not that the top students had exactly equal academic performance. Instead, the idea is to reduce “pressure and competition among students” and to provide “a more equitable way to honor achievement,” The New York Times reported.
How silly has this trend become? Well, at a school near Houston, 30 “valedictorians” were recognized recently. They represented nearly 7 percent of the graduating class. And the head of admissions at Harvard University said some schools graduate more than 100 “valedictorians.”
“It’s honor inflation,” a professor at Furman University in South Carolina told the newspaper, and it creates unrealistic expectations about life: “In the real world, you do get ranked.”
Giving every student the opportunity to excel is a worthy goal. Guaranteeing equal outcomes is not.