I meant to post this article about the appalling ease of exit exams yesterday, but it didn't get published until today. And, right on the heels of research suggesting that exit exams are far too easy for today's high schoolers comes this discussion of Virginia's SOL, in which testing opponents insist that the test "makes" students drop out:
Of the more than 98,000 students who began their freshman year in Virginia's high school Class of 2004 -- the first required to pass state Standards of Learning exams to graduate -- fewer than 70,000 are expected to receive their diplomas this month. A child-advocacy group charged yesterday that the exams are partly to blame for the gap.
JustChildren, an arm of the Charlottesville-based Legal Aid Justice Center, held a news conference in Richmond to ask state educators to investigate graduation rates and their connection to the SOL exams. "We support high standards, but we do not support punishing children," said Debra Grant, a Virginia Beach mother of three who spoke at the conference.
Oh, I see. JustChildren supports high standards, but doesn't support actually holding any of these "children" to those standards. If flunking students who don't pass the test is "punishing children," in what way can JustChildren be considered to "support" the standards at all?
Andy Block, legal director for JustChildren, said he suspects that the pressure of the tests discourages students and prompts them to drop out. "Given the significant percentage of students who end up without diplomas, we hope that figuring out why this is going on becomes an urgent priority," he said.
I've yet to see one person making this argument deal with the issue of grades and class exams. Somehow, exams and homework pressures for six classes a semester is acceptable, and yet it's this one standardized test, which probably only lasts a couple of hours, that will force a student to choose a GED over a diploma? Does that make sense to anyone?
And of course there's the issue of how exactly to measure dropouts. Some voices of reason point out that the existing data do not support the claims of organizations like JustChildren:
State education officials said a study has been commissioned, but they said that until individual students can be tracked more accurately, it is difficult to know whether students drop out, move out of state or transfer to private schools.
When the testing regime began in 1998, passing rates were low, and educators feared that thousands of seniors would be at risk of not graduating this year, when the results would officially begin to count toward their diplomas. Based on the survey, they now believe that the percentage of seniors who fail to graduate with their class will be similar to that of past years...
Lisa Abrams, a Boston College research associate who has examined similar data for all 50 states, said calculating graduation rates starting with freshman year is more comprehensive. Otherwise, she said, "you're not factoring in students who have left school before 12th grade. It doesn't give you as much information about the capacity of schools in the state to graduate students in four years."
By that measure, Abrams's study found that Virginia ranked better than 36 states in recent years.
(Thanks to Devoted Reader Jeff B. for the link.)
Posted by kswygert at June 16, 2004 10:18 AM