(NaturalNews) Whether it's the effect of vaccines, laziness or just plain old stupidity isn't really clear, but the thousands of high school dropouts in California who are too dumb to pass a very rudimentary exit exam are about to receive diplomas without having to prove that they learned anything.

California Governor Jerry Brown is likely to sign a bill passed by the state legislature that will suspend the requirement retroactively from 2014 until 2018 for dropouts to pass the California High School Exit Exam (CASHEE) before receiving their high school degrees.

The CASHEE exam, which was introduced in 2004, was designed to make sure that students have at least a basic command of the English language before graduating. The test was instituted to counter the phenomenon of students graduating without having learned a minimal amount of anything even though they somehow fulfilled the basic requirements of their schools and received passing grades.

How these students were able to earn passing grades in school without learning enough to pass the extremely simple CASHEE exam remains a mystery.

Just how easy is the CASHEE exam?

From the DailyCaller.com:

The test is hardly complex. The math test, for instance, only covers 8th grade-level material and can be passed if students answer 55 percent of questions correctly. About 80 percent of California high schoolers take and pass it on their first try while in the 10th grade, and overall passage rates for the class of 2014 were above 97 percent.

Although SFGate.com reported that around 40,000 dropouts will benefit from the exam suspension, others suggest the number will be much higher given the fact that 249,000 students between the years of 2006 and 2014 were unable to pass the test at the end of their senior year.

The author of the bill, Carol Liu (D-La Canada Flintridge), said: "We cannot in good conscience continue a graduation requirement that no one can meet," but it's hard to understand what she means considering the above-quoted figures that show that 80 percent of tenth-graders could pass the exam on their first try. That's hardly "no one," unless my own math skills are more derelict than I had imagined.

The dumbing down of America

This case is just one more example of how academic standards in America continue to fall with the blessing and cooperation of the government.

In a blog entry written by Marc Tucker for EducationWeek.org, the author explores the issue and speculates on the possible causes leading to what he calls the "collapse" of American educational standards.

Tucker says that "high school textbooks that used to be written at the 12th-grade level for 12th graders are now written at the 7th- or 8th-grade level" and "colleges are typically teaching most students what we used to teach in the high school college-bound track and are not doing it very well."

What happened in a country that once prided itself on being a world leader in education?

According to Tucker, part of the problem is "grade inflation", which has been instituted so that children will be able to make it into college whether or not they really learned anything in high school.

This seems to apply to the current situation in California. Whether a significant amount of the dropouts there who will benefit from the suspension of the exit exam are actually destined for college is unclear, but there certainly seems to be an effort to give them high school diplomas whether they earned them or not.

Other contributing factors, according to Tucker, are the decline in the quality of new teachers and the fact that the "standards movement was stolen by the accountability movement."

Tucker writes:

Facing tough sanctions from the federal government for low test scores, many states lowered whatever standards they had for high school students, so they could escape the consequences of poor student performance.

As American educational standards have been allowed to decline steadily, other countries have been busy raising their own standards. This has led in to what Tucker terms "reaping the rewards" of failure in America.

Sources include:
DailyCaller.com
SFGate.com
Blogs.EdWeek.org