Sadly, this may be coming to NYC. In principle, I am all for trying to improve the baseline, but you cannot sacrifice better students to do that. Not only is it silly (how would this sacrifice exactly benefit worse students?), but unjust. Furthermore, education begins at home. Parents are the primary educators of children, not necessarily academically, but in the broader "life" sense. If the home environment is not conducive or supportive of education at school, you will be facing a very uphill battle.

The dumbing down of education goes further than what you note, though. Think of classical education and the formation of the human person (I'm not talking about "Dead Poets Society" ersatz, but the real deal). Think of the principles behind the trivium and quadrivium. In the best case, we are producing superficially technically savvy barbarians. Schools are effectively savage factories, and universities are laughable and should be ashamed of calling themselves universities.