Cultivating failure

I tend to excel at standardized tests. It is how current education system and society define success. People with good scores are entitled great incentives for their "merits" (sometimes as the loss to people who can't keep up in the system). The definition of "merits" then comes under my analysis. Would we limit definition of "merits" to just the scores of standardized tests? And let others fail?

I have spent my life, it seems, in and around schools. For complicated reasons, I attended a score of them, both in the United States and abroad; I taught in Louisiana and Los Angeles for more than a decade; I have volunteered in all sorts of schools, and am now a mother of elementary-school students. I have never seen an entire school system as fundamentally broken and rudderless as the California public schools, a system in which one out of five high-school students drops out before graduation, and in which scarcely 60 percent of the African American and Hispanic students leave school with a diploma. These young people are cast adrift in a $50 billion system in which failure is almost a foregone conclusion.

Above is an abstract from an article (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/201001/school-yard-garden) by an educator highlighting how the education system determine "failure" instead of educating all in benefit of society.

In my opinion, society is like lotuses in a pond; only when water-level comes up, lotuses could rise. It is not so wise to polarize individuals just with results of standardized tests.