‘Passing’ With Ds May No Longer Guarantee Diploma

Despite an unyielding push by state education officials to “raise the bar” on student academic performance, a D average is still considered good enough to earn a diploma from most California high schools.

But a growing number of school districts across California, including two in Ventura County, are setting out to change that.

Seniors at Fillmore High School will, for the first time this year, have to earn a 2.0 GPA before they can graduate, a significant departure from the district’s previous practice of accepting a 1.0 GPA, or D average.

Under another proposal, high school students in Oxnard and Camarillo would be forced to earn a C or better in English and math before they could receive diplomas.

Other schools have talked about eliminating the D grade altogether, requiring students to earn Cs or fail with Fs.

Similar efforts are underway across the country, said Michael Carr, spokesman for the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals.

“As standards are raised . . . the next step is: Are our old requirements for graduation out of date?” he said.

In California, starting with the class of 2004, all students will have to pass a high school exit exam before becoming eligible to graduate. The state is expected to release the district-by-district results of the first test, taken voluntarily by freshmen last spring, in the next two weeks.

But passing the exit exam is not the same as “passing” a course with a D, said Gary Davis, interim superintendent of the Oxnard Union High School District. The discrepancy could send mixed messages to students and parents, he argued.

“They may think, “Well, my child is passing English and math, so shouldn’t he be prepared for the high school exit exam?’ ” said Davis, who plans to bring the proposal to the board in October. “I would say as we understand the exit exam, a D performance level would not be enough to pass that test.”

The changes also reflect a move to make the high school diploma more meaningful.

“You may have kids saying, ‘Why should I work so hard?’ when someone sitting next to them got Ds and has the same piece of paper,” said Sandy Clifton-Bacon, an assistant superintendent in the Redondo Beach Unified School District, which is also considering incorporating a minium GPA into high school graduation requirements.

“If the standards are driving whether a student leaves a grade level, and a C means they have met those standards, you can see where the 2.0 GPA requirement makes sense,” she added.

On the forefront of this movement was Ventura County’s Fillmore Unified School District, which approved its 2.0 GPA policy in 1998. The first wave of students affected by the change are seniors this year.

About 45 students in a class of about 200 were flagged last spring because their cumulative GPAs were lower than or hovering around 2.0, said Jane Kampbell, assistant superintendent. Each administrator took on a small group of students and met with their parents, showing them what would be needed to get on track.

This semester, the number has dropped to about 30, and continues to fall as students retake classes to improve grades, Principal John Wilber said. Fillmore High offers night classes to make up credits, as well as before- and after-school tutoring.

While high school athletes for years have been required to maintain a 2.0 GPA to play, in Fillmore the threshold now applies to attending school dances and leaving campus for lunch.

“You can’t breathe around here without a 2.0,” Wilber said.

Stacey Villasenor, 17, said the policy has made her work harder and made her learn more in class.

“My freshman year I thought I was all cute and didn’t have to come to school,” she said. “They’re right when they say you dig yourself a grave. I’m still getting out.”

But other students have opted to leave high school altogether because they felt a diploma at Fillmore was out of their reach under the new rule.

Although Kampbell said it is too soon to tell whether the 2.0 GPA mandate is directly responsible, Fillmore’s dropout rate has shot up from 2.9% to 4.4% since the policy began.

Officials say they do not want to drive kids away from school, but they are not willing to settle for graduating those who do not earn it.

“The 2.0 requirement is part and parcel to fostering a more academic environment,” Kampbell said. “We’re letting kids know they have an expectation, and that we think they can do it.”

Other educators, however, say requiring more difficult classes is a better approach than demanding students earn certain grades.

Fillmore officials said the GPA policy parallels the state’s push to put in place more rigorous academic standards for all students in California.

“A ‘D’ average is poor, and we wouldn’t want to send students out performing poorly with a diploma,” Kampbell said. “When they receive a diploma from Fillmore High School, they know they’ve earned it.”