President Obama wants states to require young people to stay in school until they turn 18 or get a high school diploma. The idea sounds noble, but events are arguing against it every day in Connecticut, which last year raised its school withdrawal age from 16 to 17.

Connecticut's high schools are filling up with kids who don't want to be there, have no interest in learning, have parents who don't cooperate with teachers (or no parents at all), and, most importantly, who are dragging schools down for everyone else.

That's what Connecticut's "magnet" and "charter" school craze is about. While created in the name of racial integration or educational innovation, "magnet" and "charter" schools are mainly the mechanisms by which responsible parents get their motivated kids out of the regular schools that are being dragged down by the parentless and unmotivated kids. This flight accelerates the decline in performance of the regular schools, so their administrators and teachers are complaining that they have to take everybody while "magnet" and "charter" schools "cherry-pick" students.

"Magnet" and "charter" schools are not supposed to do that. Usually they are supposed to select their students by lottery. But their applicants tend to be the motivated kids from responsible families who have the resources or determination to send their kids to school a little farther from home for better and safer learning.

As high schools retain more kids who don't want to be there, academic standards are lowered, there is more social promotion, and diplomas are debased. Improving graduation rates at the expense of learning may make politicians and educators feel good and relieve them of political responsibility, but it accomplishes nothing educationally. Indeed, about 70 percent of students admitted to Connecticut's state university and community college systems now require remedial English and math. That is, except for social promotion, they never would have been allowed to graduate from high school.

The president's approach - keep kids in school longer against their will - is just more of a failing policy, as the recent change in Connecticut's dropout law suggests. Indifferent, disruptive and even violent kids are shuffled between regular schools and special schools for the troublesome, their rare successes small in comparison to the damage they do to the education of others and the huge extra costs they impose.

While this mandate was meant to signify the importance of education, it has conveyed the opposite to young people - that education is not a great gift but just something society has to give you no matter how badly you receive it or even if you reject it and ruin it for others.

Education would do better by lowering the dropout age, not raising it, and by making more adult education available when the troublesome think better of what they've done to themselves.