Fully half of the Class of 2006 at Lew Wallace High School, in
the Rust Belt city of Gary, Indiana, graduated despite flunking the
state’s Graduation Qualifying Exam repeatedly, which they are
supposed to pass to graduate. Students had had five chances to
pass, but the school ushered them out into the “real world”
anyway.
The school was hardly an exception to some Iron Law that
students don’t pass if they don’t pass the test. Five percent of
the state’s graduates in 2006 donned cap-and-gown without ever
passing the GQE. At 52 high schools, at least 10 percent of
graduating seniors repeatedly flunked it.
Nor is this only an Indiana phenomenon. Most states grant
numerous opportunities and loopholes for schools to send students
onto college and into the workforce without adequate academic
preparation.
The evidence (which we’ll get to shortly) contradicts the
rhetoric of critics of these and other forms of standardized exams.
It also shows that the standards and accountability movement that
championed the No Child Left Behind Act is still struggling to sell
parents and politicians on the long-term value of standardized
tests, strict curriculum standards, and real consequences.
The standards struggle is as much about control over the
nation’s public schools as it is about learning. For reform-minded
advocates, change-oriented urban school superintendents, business
leaders, and a few civil rights groups such as the National Council
of La Raza, exit exams advance their agenda by exposing the shoddy
instruction given to children — especially minorities and the poor
— by school districts.
For teachers unions and suburban school districts, the tests
threaten to reduce their influence over school curricula and
subject them to the kind of objective performance measurements that
they loathe.
So the teachers and bureaucrats are making hay over the
supposedly dire consequences students face if they don’t pass.
Their sob story goes, in this new era of high-stakes testing, kids,
especially those suffering from learning disabilities such as
autism, will either eventually drop out of school or be “pushed
out” by school districts attempting to game the system.
IN REALITY, THE PROBLEM slices the other way. States with exit
exams make it too easy for students to graduate without
passing the tests. Just eight of the 26 states currently offering
or rolling out exit exams require students to actually
pass the tests in order to graduate, according to a report
released last month by the Center on Education Policy, a
Washington, D.C.-based centrist think tank.
Three states — Indiana, Georgia, and New Mexico — allow
schools to grant waivers to students who somehow demonstrate
through such alternatives as portfolios of class work or letters of
recommendation from teachers that they “deserve” to graduate,
despite the pervasiveness of social promotion. Other states also
allow portfolios to substitute for passing scores; 11.5 percent of
New Jersey’s high school seniors graduated this way last year.
Even better, seven states, including New York, allow frequent
flunkies to submit scores from a variety of tests, including the
SAT and end-of-course exams given for Advanced Placement courses,
as substitutes for the exit exams. That amounts to an automatic
pass, because none of these tests results are measured against
minimum state standards.
Far from being “pushed out,” special-ed students and those with
limited English skills can avoid the tests. Federal law allows
states to exempt the most developmentally-disabled students from
regular exit exams. States can also exempt those with limited
English fluency if they have been enrolled in an American school
for less than a full school year.
Many states make it easier for special-ed students taught under
so-called Individualized Learning Plans to either pass with lower
scores or skip the exams. The problem, as pointed out by Erin
Dillon of the Education Sector, is that most learning-disabled
students are capable of learning at the same level as their regular
counterparts, and are thus being ill served by the exemption.
EVEN THOSE STUDENTS who take and pass the test are meeting an
absurdly low minimum. The tests rarely cover all that is taught in
high school. Most graduation tests are first taken by students
during their sophomore year and are only aligned with 10th grade
standards.
In some states, standards are dumber still. The math portion of
Indiana’s GQE covers just one high school-level math course —
Algebra 1; eighth grade math accounts for the rest of the questions
on the test. Sixth and 7th grade math questions account for most of
California’s exam.
The opposition to rigorous standards from parents, especially
those in suburban districts, is one reason why the tests are
anything but high stakes. Parents may not necessarily object to
their children being tested — in the abstract. However,
practically speaking, mom and dad don’t want to bear the costs of
these exams, most notably in flunked tests that expose the
shoddiness of the education that their children receive. Their
pressure, along with that from the education establishment, leads
state officials to water down the tests or create loopholes. In
Maryland, the state board of education recently voted to allow
students who fail the exam twice to instead complete a nebulous
“project.”
Educational reformers may find this push-back over standards to
be depressing beyond words. If there’s a silver lining in this,
it’s that the hue and cry over even minimal, loophole heavy
standards, is helping to bolster the reformers’ case for just how
far public education has fallen.
