Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern writes in the current City Journal about the failure in many public school systems to challenge their best students. Mediocre standards that focus mainly on the weakest students and ignore the sharpest leave the latter much less prepared for college than they would have been otherwise. While his article doesn’t make the connection, one result is that many of those students shy away from rigorous college majors and instead go into easier ones where there is no math and there are no wrong answers. This is yet another instance of the harmful effects of well-intentioned federal meddling in education.