Frederick Hess for the American Enterprise Institute’s AEIdeas: A Maryland middle school has sparked heated controversy by holding an end-of-day pizza party for high-performing students. As Donna St. George reported in [the] Washington Post, Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring only invited straight-A students to the final period celebration, while allowing B and C students to join after school. Students with less than a C average (306 of Eastern’s 865 students) weren’t invited at all. Some parents and education professors complained bitterly, with one Mount St. Mary’s professor denouncing the school for “creating a caste system.”

I’m not unsympathetic to the concerns, especially when students with special needs, for instance, may have a tougher time earning an invite. Educators must always strive to strike a healthy balance between encouraging hard work and rewarding merit, on the one hand, and creating an environment that embraces and supports all their kids, on the other. If the school was routinely holding exclusionary events or assigning cafeteria seating based on grades, I’d think they’d probably have gone too far.