What school systems are for to a student failure comes in a myriad of forms. They talk about failing grades, dropouts, students at risk and test score failure.
Perhaps the most effective way to maintain these patterns is to continue this conversation about student failure instead of teaching failure. Change occurs when we stop blaming students for their inability to learn and to look instead at how we can transform the way teaching occurs. From this perspective it's not the students failure to learn but the systems failure to innovate in teaching.
The biggest contribution to the old conversation was the irrational belief that putting more pressure on students would somehow make them better at learning. This completely misses the point about teaching as being the effective focus.
The new conversation is about experimentation, trying new things and seeing the results iterating into progress. This is the only hope for moving education forward.