A little bird named Daryl C. mentioned to me that Delaware's plan to develop a "tiered" high school diploma system - based on standardized tests - may be shelved:
Two state representatives from New Castle County said they will introduce legislation, perhaps as early as today, to put a moratorium on the state's controversial three-tiered high school diploma system set to take effect in June.
Thousands of high school seniors are to receive one of three kinds of diplomas this spring - basic, regular or distinguished - depending on how well they scored on standardized state tests administered in the 10th grade.
If adopted, the moratorium would delay implementation of the tiered system until 2006, meaning that all graduating seniors would receive the same diploma this year and next year.
The gist of things seems to be that the Delaware Student Testing Program is under review, allegedly because students are dropping out when faced with receiving diplomas based on test scores. Many eighth-graders have been retained due to test scores, and if the moratorium doesn't pass, many seniors will recieve "basic" diplomas due to their low test scores (although I find it hard to believe that students would rather drop out than receive some kind of diploma).
What's more problematic is that some of those low scores appear to be anomalies:
What may have grabbed the attention of many legislators, however, is the anomaly that some seniors did not score well enough on the standardized tests to receive distinguished diplomas but are on the honor roll, getting good scores on college entrance exams and being accepted to good colleges.
Yvonne Johnson of Wilmington, co-chair of Advocates for Children's Education, which opposes high-stakes testing, called the proposals a great victory for her group.
I certainly don't oppose high-stakes testing, but these kinds of test scores should correlate to some extent. Grade inflation could explain the honor roll standing, but I would be curious about how many students that did well on the SAT did poorly on the Delaware exams. One could argue that a low correlation between Delaware's state scores and SAT scores points to a lack of concurrent validity for Delaware's exams.
A commenter on Daryl's site claims the Delaware test was never designed for individual student rankings, only for district-level comparisons. If so, that's yet another threat to the test's validity for the purpose of a tiered diploma.
Posted by kswygert at March 23, 2004 06:26 PM