It's a question that serious school reformers and education advocates have been tackling for years: what's the best way to reduce a drop-out rate in America that hovers around 30%, and that approaches 50% in certain low-income and minority communities?

In a maneuver that completely misunderstands the nature of the debate, Louisiana is poised to answer that question in a non-sensical fashion: by making it shockingly easy for a student to get a high school diploma. As it currently stands in the state, a student must score at the "basic" level on either the math or reading 8th grade test and at the "approaching basic" level in the other subject in order to attend and graduate from high school. Not a particularly lofty hurdle, right? Seems only logical that we would want our students to at least read and do math at or near an 8th grade level before giving them a diploma, right?

Yet Louisiana lawmakers have noticed that a large number of students are dropping out of high school. Their solution? Not to increase the quality of school programming so that students learn more, feel more engaged, feel safer, or recognize the value of a quality education. Not to increase funding for after-school and extracurricular programs that might increase student involvement in their schools. No, the legislature, by overwhelming majorities (38-0 in the state Senate and 87-10 in the house) has decided that the best way to reduce the drop out rate is to make it easier for kids to coast through high school without learning much of anything at all. The only kicker? Those students who take that track won't get a regular diploma, they'll get a "career diploma" on graduation day.

I don't even know where to begin when discussing how big of a mistake this act will be for Louisiana's future. In a day and age where we are rapidly realizing that today's children will need to master complex skills in order to succeed at the cutting edge of the 21st century economy, Louisiana's plan is tantamount to societal suicide--it gives license to educators who don't believe their students can learn and it tricks students into believing that they can succeed in the world without knowing how to read and write or do math and science at a basic level.

What Louisiana should be doing is the opposite of this bill: it should be demanding more of its schools and students, not less. Demanding more in the way of student achievement must come, of course, with providing more in the way of educational resources--finding quality teachers and paying them for their successes, ensuring adequate facilities and educational materials are present for every student, etc. But that's a trade that will do much better for Louisiana's kids than the trade Governor Bobby Jindal and state law-makers have effectively pulled: they've traded the future of their children for a short-term political gain they can cite since they will have "fixed" the drop-out rate problem.

The thing is, fixing the drop-out rate in high schools is not the end goal for our efforts to improve education. If all America needed to ensure its long term success was 100% of its 18-year-olds owning a piece of paper that says "high school diploma" on it, the federal government could solve that problem by printing out a bunch of the darn things and mailing them out to every adult in the state. That theory of education reform fundamentally fails to understand our challenges much like a basketball coach who, seeing that his players can't shoot during games, decides to lower the hoop to 5 feet and triple the circumference of the rim so that his players make every shot during practice. Yet that's exactly what Louisiana lawmakers have inflicted upon their children, with only a handful of dissenters voicing their opinions.