The Whiteboard Jungle: The CAHSEE has turned out to be a wasted endeavor
This year’s 10th-graders have reason to celebrate because they no longer have to take the California High School Exit Exam, known as CAHSEE.
Last October, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law SB 172, suspending the test for three years through the 2017-18 school year.
Since 2004, the CAHSEE was administered to the state’s sophomores to test their ability in math, English and writing.
Former Glendale Supt. Jim Brown served on the original committee whose intent was to develop a rigorous enough test to certify that a high school diploma meant something. If students did not pass either portion of the test, they did not graduate.
However, when the test was piloted, it was discovered that half of all students could not pass the test.
Since schools could not have survived the public relations nightmare of a 50% graduation rate, CAHSEE was redesigned, or dummied-down, testing eighth-grade-level math and 10th-grade-level English to represent 12th-grade competency. The original two essays were downsized to a single piece of writing.
The writing prompts demanded little on the part of students, asking them to discuss a place they would like to visit or a toy from their childhood. And with such competency, they are ready for college?
Even with a passing threshold of 55% in math and 60% in English, plus a host of free intervention classes and one-on-one tutoring, along with multiple chances to pass the darn thing, one out of every 10 California seniors still did not pass it.
For those reasons, I never knew a single student who proudly proclaimed, “I passed the CAHSEE!”
State Sen. Carol Liu (D-La Cañada Flintridge), who sponsored SB 172, told me that she agrees “passing the exit exam in and of itself [did] not ensure students [had] mastered grade-12 standards.”
Think about the tens of millions of dollars and dozens of school days wasted on this endeavor. The biggest impact CAHSEE made in the past decade was enriching testing companies.
Besides suspending the test, the measure that went into effect the first of this year allows the 32,000 students who never passed the CAHSEE to now receive their diplomas.
In other words, all the students who ever took the exit exam have officially “passed it,” making the rationale behind it in the first place a very expensive joke, a high-priced, feel-good award akin to all kids on a sports team earning trophies regardless of merit.
Unfortunately, CAHSEE may return in a different form in the future.
One foreboding element of the law stipulates that “the superintendent of public instruction convene an advisory panel to provide recommendations… on the continuation of the high school exit examination and on alternative pathways to satisfy the high school graduation requirements” as worded on the California Department of Education website.
Liu said she thinks that future students could be looking at “multiple measures, such as an exit exam, coursework and a project-based assignment” to prove they have earned a diploma.
Um, whatever happened to using a student’s course grades in determining achievement as colleges do? No college was ever interested if a student passed the CAHSEE or not.
The costly lesson of politician-produced initiatives such as CAHSEE and the No Child Left Behind Act, which officially ended last month, is that elected officials need to stop thinking of themselves as experts on how to improve education.
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BRIAN CROSBY is a teacher in the Glendale Unified School District and the author of “Smart Kids, Bad Schools” and “The $100,000 Teacher.” He can be reached at briancrosby.org.
