High school exit exam delayed

[jamesinca]

Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, July 10, 2003

Sacramento -- That low rumble heard across California Wednesday was the sound of thousands of teenagers sighing in relief at the state Board of Education's long-expected decision to delay the high school exit exam as a graduation requirement until the 2005-06 school year.

But foes of the test, including hundreds of teens who protested loudly outside of the board meeting, said even the two-year delay was not enough time to improve instruction and transform the exam into a fair measure on which to base a student's future.

Members of the class of '04 as of October, when figures were last compiled, 52 percent of the class had not yet passed both the math and language arts portions of the test, which are set at middle-school to 10th-grade levels.

Failure rates were far higher among special education students, who have sued the state for an alternative exam.

In Florida, the court delayed the exit exam for four years to give schools enough lead time to prepare for the test.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/10/MN86421.DTL

[leftyandproud]

1. I heard this discussed on the radio

I'm sorry, but the test is the LEAST of these kids problems..


Here's the deal:

They must past a test based on the assign high school curriculum.
Too many kids were flunking it, so they decided to lower the difficulty to a 10TH GRADE LEVEL.
Result: 60% of the kids failed
They gave a 2 year extension to get them prepared, and lowered the passing requirement from a traditional 60% to 40%
They also give the kids 5 TRIES to take the test.

SO...
High school seniors have...

5 TRIES...
to get a FORTY PERCENT...
on a 10th GRADE test...

and 52% still failed it..
My Gawd...

[jamesinca]

2. And federal funding is decreased

year after year after year... I think part of the funding was picked up with property tax prior to Prop 13, then that was stopped. Time to actually come thru on the "leave no child behind" lie that you have told George.

[leftyandproud]

3. federal funding

is only a tiny fraction of CA's education budget
There is something else in the works here

[jamesinca]

4. It is a tiny part now

but in the good old days it was a nice piece of it. I know it is not a problem one can just throw money at and it will dissapear, but money sure would help.

[mike_c]

5. I agree, and as a Cal State University prof with freshman advisees....

...I can't tell you how many times I've seen kids crash and burn in college protesting all the while that they received good grades in high school "without ever opening a book."

I don't have any answers, but I do have some personal observations. Public education in the states where I've taught college (Georgia, Pennsylvania, and California) seems to be doing a terrible job of educating students, at least if we use their incoming college freshman academic skills as a measure of high school success. We can argue all day long about what it means to successfully educate someone-- my definition will certainly differ from most state legislators' views-- but by any measure the system is doing poorly. The number of freshman students who need remedial math and English language courses before they can begin even basic college level course work is at an all-time high (and it includes a VERY substantial number of native English speakers who just can't read well enough to survive their freshman year in college without remedial attention). These are skills that should have been learned in high-school. And remember, here we're talking about a group of former high schoolers-- often a minority-- that were self-selected for college-prep academic tracks, and who therefore should represent the CREAM of the crop.

I have direct experience with the education programs at two of the institutions where I've worked and in both cases teachers-in-training were required to take lowest-level courses in math and science that were not accredited by the departments in which they were taught for their own majors. In other words, biology courses (my dept.), even for Master's level education majors, were so diluted that they were not acceptable choices for our undergraduate biology majors. The rational for this was that if we required education majors to take the same entry level courses as our own majors, they would do too poorly or would simply not take them at all. So if the teachers themselves have-- at best-- overly simplistic views of essential math and science skills, how can we expect them to do a better job of educating kids? I've focused on math and science because those are academic areas in which I have direct experience with teacher preparation, but I'm sure the situation isn't much better in other fields. And please, I don't mean to paint everyone teaching in public schools with the same brush-- I do know that there are lots of highly qualified professional teachers out there-- but my point is that at least the teacher prep programs that I've been associated with don't deserve much of the credit for this.

The teachers' unions and professional associations have argued that exit testing is not the answer, and while I tend to agree with that, I also must say that it will at least be a good way to gather data on system performance. College freshman performance is another good indicator, but ONLY for that segment of high school students that goes on to college. Likewise college entrance exam scores.

Lowering the standards for passing high school exit exams is clearly not a good answer to the general problem, but again, I don't have any real answers.

[Star]

6. As a high school science teacher in CA

I see the reading and math level of the kids when they leave elementary school, and it is appalling.

My school is atypical - 7 thru 12th grades - so I get to see kids right out of elementary school. The majority of them are reading at a 3rd - 4th grade level at best. So, if we manage to bring these kids' reading and math scores up even one grade per year, they are still reading at a 7th or 8th grade level when they leave HS.

IMO, one of the major factors contributing to this is social promotion with no strong remedial program to help kids who have fallen behind. I have failed 7th and 8th grade students because they had poor attendance, did not complete their assignments, etc., etc., and the next year, found that they had been promoted to the next grade. Many of these students are just sliding by because there are no consequences for poor performance. Then, when they get into the high school grades, they find they must pass each class in order to get enough high school credits. I can only imagine what happens to those who manage to go on to college.

Another major factor is the language problem. Since we can't have bilingual education in CA, students who have a very low level of english comprehension are placed into regular classrooms with no support. These kids have little chance of catching up to grade level before they graduate. And, again, social promotion pushes them on.