It’s high-school graduation time. Parents, do you know where your children are ranked?

Increasingly, no. Class rankings are on the way out. The valedictorian is going the way of the dinosaur. It’s becoming, as the Wall Street Journal said recently regarding the anti-competition trend in education, a Lake Wobegon world; all the children are above average.

It is estimated that as many as 60 percent of the nation’s 27,000 secondary schools no longer rank students. Here in Maine, Freeport recently joined the parade by replacing clear numeric rankings with three fuzzy honors categories. The distinction between regular and accelerated courses — honors and advanced placement — in calculating grade points is being erased. More and more schools are dropping grades altogether, replacing traditional report cards with lengthy narratives that describe student performance. Then, of course, they have to provide colleges with a chart showing how that narrative would translate in grades if the school gave out grades.

Meanwhile, the nation’s top colleges cherish the high-achiever. Harvard boasts that it had 442 valedictorians in last fall’s freshman class, the most in the country. The University of North Carolina says the 205 it bagged supports its claim to be the best land-grant school in the land. MIT warns prospective students that anyone not in the top tenth is a long shot.

The top colleges want the best students and they’ll do what it takes to find out who they are. When grade inflation hit high schools in the mid-’70s, that traditional measure of performance was replaced by the supposedly neutral SAT. When an entire industry in SAT coaching developed in the ’80s, colleges gave greater weight to curriculum, to the advanced courses taken by the applicant. If high schools fail to differentiate between the calculus whiz and the master basket-weaver, the top colleges will find a way to do it for themselves.

Competition may be overdone; it may contribute to an oppressive, cliquish atmosphere for many kids, but the top “brains” are hardly the cause.

There are problems with current grading systems. A lot of them would go away if schools simply would return to percentage grading — the difference between a 91 student and an 89 student is duly noted but kept in perspective. None of the problems go away by pretending it’s not a competitive world or that grades and rankings don’t matter.

It doesn’t fool the kids; it doesn’t fool top colleges. The best students don’t get letter jackets, they don’t get their exploits written up weekly in the local paper, there’s no highlight reel on the TV news. They deserve to stand up and take a bow — and to give a valedictory address — once in their four-year career.