WTH? Wow! This ought to be an interesting tangential adventure.
I'm suspecting a bad bottle of Irn-Bru or something?
I'm completely serious - are you thinking I'm not? Whenever students and their parents care about achieving something for which the system is set up so that only a limited number of classmates can achieve it - whether it's straight As or being valedictorian - you have a situation in which someone can only succeed if enough of their classmates fail, for that particular definition of success. I think that's a bad situation.
I feared you were completely serious.
I wonder, though, where you developed your understanding of the US educational system, as what you describe is totally foreign to my experiences in multiple states across the country.
You seem particularly disturbed by the idea of the valedictorian award. (Is there no equivalent, such as Dux Litterarum, in Scotland?) How does recognizing the academic achievement of one or more individuals result in (or from) the failure of fellow students? Perhaps with the exception of someone who misses the mark by a fraction of a point, I can't imagine any non-first-place student being particularly disappointed --- and he certainly wouldn't consider himself a failure... any more than an Olympic silver medalist would consider missing the gold to be an abject failure. Speaking from personal experience, those of us who were no where near contention for top spot didn't give it a second thought! It was just one more boring speech on graduation day.
As for straight As, how exactly does that condemn a lesser student to a life of failure? You do know that more than one student can earn straight As, right? That sounds to me like the same system you describe with the example of a UK student being "awarded a Level 3 in writing." I'm assuming that every student in a particular UK class could potentially earn the top "Level," right?
So you had your "opportunity to attack the US teacher-given-grades-led system," but I believe you did so without enough of an understanding of how it all works.
