Posted on 06/14/2003 12:29:09 AM PDT by sarcasm
California's high-school exit exam, once heralded as a sure-fire way to ratchet up achievement and make a diploma worthwhile, will be postponed amid concerns about high failure rates and the political and legal backlash from denying thousands of students the right to graduate next year.
A majority of the members of the California Board of Education said they would vote next month to delay implementing the exit-exam policy. By pushing back the requirement for passing the exam at least two years to the Class of 2006, board members said they would give students more opportunity to master the necessary English and math skills.
The intent of accountability for individual students has given way to a mixture of politics, ethnic anger and educational and social-justice concerns for students who have been repeatedly unable to pass the test, even though it is geared to a ninth-grade level in math and a 10th-grade level in English.
Forty-two percent of elementary and junior high students passed city and state reading exams this year, and 37.5% passed math, according to test scores released yesterday by the Education Department.
Scores were considerably higher in the lower grades than the upper grades.
This report provides a comprehensive overview of the educational performance of the New York City public schools over the past five years. It finds that educational performance has not improved during thatperiod. Among its specific findings are:*
Only 70 percent of students complete high school, either by obtaining a diploma (60%) or aGED (10%) within seven years of initial enrollment.
Only 50 percent complete high school,either with a diploma (46%) or GED (4%) within four years of initial enrollment.
Thesefigures are unchanged from the beginning of the 1990s.*
Only 44 percent of black students, and only 39 percent of Hispanic students, complete highschool within four years.*
While passage rates on the State's Regents exams have increased since 1995, fewer than 50 percent of City students pass even one of these challenging exams. Only a maximum of 19 percent of City students could have passed five exams last year, based on low passage ratesfor Biology (16%) and Earth Science (19%). Since students will have to pass five of these exams to graduate from high school by 2005, City high school graduation rates may dropprecipitously in the near future.*
City elementary and middle school students are also not learning what they need to. Only 41 percent of these students scored at an acceptable level on the citywide reading tests in 2000, while only 34 percent scored at an acceptable level on the citywide math tests.*
One in five City elementary and middle school students scored at the lowest level on thereading tests, and nearly one third of these students scored at the lowest level on the citywidemath tests.
Many areas of the City are virtual educational dead zones. Seven entire districts (23, 19, 12, 7, 5, 9 & 85)have fewer than 30 percent of students passing the city's English exam, and fourteen (the seven above plus17, 13, 8, 4, 6, 10 & 16) have fewer than 30 percent of student passing the city's Math exam.
They're already making the Regents exams easier - can't bruise the self-esteem of the teachers or students.
It's not just a liberal boondoggle. I was in the room when George I's regional Education Dept official announced the initiative to have all students ready for the world of technology by the year 2000. Schools were filled with now-obsolete computers and kids were put in classes where they often knew more than their teachers and ended up playing video games or with microsoft paint all year.
Then came the tests. In Massachusetts, it has become a very hard, culturally biased test (Honest, one of this year's questions was about purchasing $10,000 of valuable artworks and compounding their appreciation), that is really about very specific skills to teach to. Curricular development is out the window; if it isn't on the test, it needn't be taught. This year, students who hadn't passed by the beginning of their Senior year were taken into a room and privately read the test by someone who would help them understand the process but not help with answers (believe that and I've got a bridge you might want to buy).
It's a BRAVE NEW WORLD kind of thing...we've got Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and we know who they are by the end of Sophomore year. Many SATs are seriously down, because the MCAS does not translate to SAT skills, which are more subtle, analytical, and indirect. Honors classes are being cut back for MCAS options for the failures. Life stops in the school for one week while MCAS is administered to Sophomores (unless you count watching Tom Hanks movies as education). Those who struggle on MCAS miss out on things they might be good at, such as Art, Drama, Music, hands-on opportunities that might actually enhance their ability to achieve MCAS skills through less direct experiences.
It's costing a fortune. It's wasting time. It's teaching the kids their place in the world. It's destroying feelings of self-worth. But that's okay; corporate America will have plenty of minimum wage workers when the population finally demands an end to the border-foreign labor nonsense.
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