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California Postpones Exit Exam
By Greg Winter Faced with failure rates that could bar tens of thousands of students from graduating, the California State Board of Education voted yesterday to postpone the consequences of its high school exit exam for two years. The 9-to-0 decision came in the wake of a state-sponsored study showing that even if students continued to improve on the exam, as they typically do each year, about one of every five seniors would still have failed next year, when it was supposed to take effect. By the state's own reckoning, that means as many as 92,000 students would have been denied diplomas in 2004. Now, the exit exams will take effect in 2006. "From a moral and ethical point of view, our focus is on zero failure," said Reed Hastings, the board's president, adding that the extra time would allow the state's new curriculum to become "further penetrated into the school system." The reprieve in California is the latest example of the reticence some states have shown when it comes time to impose the significant consequences of the testing movement they have pushed so avidly in recent years. More than two dozen states now have some form of make-or-break exams. But last fall, Texas relaxed its third-grade reading standards when it became evident that thousands of students would be held back after failing a statewide achievement test. This winter, Georgia decided to push back its "end of course" exams for a year, switching them to diagnostic tools rather than requirements for graduation, in part because they did not reflect the curriculum students had actually learned. Two weeks ago, New York voided the results of its math exam after an abysmally-low passing rate suggested that the test was too hard and would have cost many students their diplomas. And, much like California, Alaska delayed its high school exit exam, originally planned for 2002, for two years because the test ended up being more demanding than lawmakers had intended. "We needed more time to do the job correctly," Harry Gamble, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development. In California, the problem does not stem from the test itself, which independent researchers called an accurate reflection of the academic standards California children are supposed to learn. Instead, it is that so few students have grasped those standards that in half the state's schools, less than 50 percent of next year's seniors have managed to pass the math part of the exam. Those students cannot fairly be blamed for failing. "They simply haven't been taught all of the material that is being tested," Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent for public instruction, wrote in an op-ed article for The Los Angeles Times this week. Many of the academic fundamentals, like algebra, that students should have learned years before being tested were never taught to whole swaths of the population, the state study found. Moreover, Mr. O'Connell said that the state's instructional materials were woefully out of date, reflecting little of the new curriculum that students are expected to master to pass the exit exam. Two years should be long enough to prepare the younger grades for the exit exam, Mr. O'Connell and Mr. Hastings said. The evidence for that projection lies in the fact that 36 percent of the class of 2004 initially failed the English part of the exam, though only 21 percent of the class of 2005 did, a sign, they said, that the new curriculum has already begun sinking into the lower grades. But the delay has done little to appease many opponents of California's exit exam. They contend that the tests will continue to have a disparate effect on poor and minority students because there are fewer qualified teachers and successful schools in low-income neighborhoods. According to a study last year by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, a group that studies teacher education, students with the highest passing rates in California were more than twice as likely to have had fully credentialed teachers as those with the lowest. And since heavily-minority schools are significantly more likely to employ teachers without credentials, the testing question has become a racial issue as well. "A two-year delay just isn't adequate," said Emily Hobson, a researcher for Californians for Justice, a group working to improve education in low-income communities. "The majority of students of color and low-income students are experiencing a separate but unequal education." While Mr. O'Connell agreed with the assertion that teacher quality is both unequally distributed and an intrinsic part of passing the exam, he said that the state is working with inexperienced teachers and giving additional instruction time to struggling students. The state-sponsored study also noted these efforts as reasons for optimism, though it questioned whether accessories like staff training and extra tutoring would be thrown into jeopardy by California's fiscal crisis. With a $38 billion budget shortfall, it is unclear whether California would be able to summon the financial wherewithal needed to replace its old books and improve instruction. Kerry Mazzoni, education secretary for Gov. Gray Davis, said that every effort would be made to ensure that enough money is on hand to increase the passing rate, despite whatever cutbacks will come. "It is certainly painful to contemplate cuts to education, but given the magnitude of the deficit, it must be done," she said. Under California law, the board can delay the consequences of the exit exam only this once. If the passing rate does not significantly improve in two years, the matter could be taken up by the legislature or the governor, but the board characterized this delay as the last one it would need. |
