CA: Adding to excuses for failure (theory for underperforming minorities, girls on exit exams)

San Diego Union - Tribune ^ | 5/4/09 | Editorial

[NormsRevenge]

With the Class of 2006, California began requiring high-school students to score at least 60 percent on a test of 10th-grade English and at least 55 percent on eighth-grade math to graduate. With numerous chances to take this exit exam, 90 percent of all students pass it before the 12th grade and graduate with a diploma.

Why, then, do the relative few not pass and not graduate with a diploma? Sean F. Reardon, an associate professor of education at Stanford University, is seeking answers.

Using records of the San Diego, San Francisco, Fresno and Long Beach school districts, Reardon compared the graduation rates of the lowest-achieving students just before the exit exam became mandatory and just after.

The lowest-achieving female, black, Latino and Asian students who had to pass the exam, he reports, graduated at rates far below their predecessors who didn't have to pass it.

That isn't surprising. While the exit exam is objective, letter grades may be subjective. But Reardon notes an anomaly.

Of students in the bottom quartile on earlier standardized tests, 5 percent of the girls and 10 percent of the minority students had scored high enough to expect they would pass the exit exam. Yet they did not . They underperformed, moreover, greater extent than boys and whites whose prior test scores were similar. Further statistical research, Reardon says, eliminates the usual causes, such as test bias and varying school quality. This relative underperformance, he concludes, is consistent with “stereotype threat.”

According to this theory, high-stakes tests such as the exit exam particularly stress minorities and girls because they fear the results will “confirm negative stereotypes about the academic skills of their group.” If told, for instance, that a test measures intelligence or asked to write their race, ethnicity and gender on the answer sheet, low-achieving girls and minorities underperform, but similarly low-achieving whites and boys do not.

Therefore, Reardon reports, the perceived stereotype threat compromises the exit exam as a measure of the true academic skills of all students. Therefore, the high school diploma conveys to potential employers a false impression of the academic skills of underperforming girls and minority students. Therefore, the state should either ditch the exit exam or offer them a less crippling alternative.

No one has yet asked these students why they think they failed. But Reardon now offers all underperformers an academic rationale for faulting society at large and demanding an easier path to a diploma. In the movement to lower academic expectations of low achievers, any excuse will do.

[VanShuyten]

ping

[junta]

Life is graded on a curve, a bell shaped one.

[junta]

As for compiling stats on “race” its the law in California, the voters there rejected Connerlys’ ballot initiative by a wide margin that would have banned race stats gathering by the state government. Once the stats are gathered “by law” the grievance industry pours over them looking for disparate impact versus white stats as grounds to sue. Then politicians appeal to the losers of life with the opiate of hating whitey for bad mojo or something, what a racket.