Diploma Penalty Misplaces Blame

Last Monday, the state released the latest round of scores on California’s High School Exit Exam. More than half of the 431,000 10th-graders who took the exam last spring failed it--most for the second time. They will have more chances to pass, but unless something extraordinary happens, they can forget about a high school diploma. They can also forget about attending any of California’s public universities, even if they’ve had all the right classes, gotten good grades and taken the SAT.

The exit exam is a blunt instrument, useful for exposing the California schools in greatest need of attention and resources. But it should not be used to bludgeon students whose misfortune it is to attend those schools.

Consider the prospects of 11th-graders at L.A.’s Crenshaw High School. After one month of school, many have not yet received textbooks for their classes. More than a third of their teachers lack full credentials. This is not an exceptional year for these students, who have faced similar or worse conditions year after year. Now, though, the state has come along and threatened their futures with a test that their school has not prepared them to take.

This is the same test that students at Palos Verdes Peninsula and Beverly Hills high schools take--students who, throughout their school careers, have been taught by fully credentialed teachers who are conversant with the curriculum standards on which the exam is based. They have had access to high-quality textbooks and they have learned in well-equipped classrooms that optimize instructional time. Should we be surprised that only 20% of Crenshaw’s class of 2004 has passed the math portion of the test and 47% the language arts, compared with 95% of Beverly Hills High students in math and 100% in language arts?

Unfortunately, Crenshaw’s 11th-graders are not unique. Many others are far worse off, particularly students of color, many of whom are clustered in the state’s worst schools.

Statewide, 72% of the African Americans and 70% of the Latinos who took the exam last spring failed it. Of the 25 lowest-performing high schools in the state, eight are in the LAUSD. These facts reveal not the failure of children, but the failure of adults. Denying students diplomas because we have withheld what they need to achieve simply blames them for our state’s failure to provide a decent basic education.

Consider the following:

* At high schools where math pass rates fall in the bottom 10% in the state, 24% of the teachers, on average, are without full certification. In contrast, only 8% of teachers lack credentials at schools where pass rates fall in the top 25%.

* Statewide, minority students are five times more likely than other students to have under-qualified teachers.

* Schools with teacher shortages also have the worst shortages of textbooks and instructional materials like calculators, measuring tools and graph paper for math classes. A recent Louis Harris poll found that 42% of teachers in schools with the largest concentrations of low-income children don’t have enough books for their students to take home, and 21% use books that don’t cover the state standards.

* One in three California students attends an overcrowded school or one in need of significant modernization, according to the state’s legislative analyst. Some 70,000 high schoolers are in buildings so overcrowded that their schools must squeeze them into a multitrack, year-round schedule. Students lose 17 days of instruction each year as a result. To make up the time, their school day has been lengthened--an ineffective strategy, according to many teachers. Nearly all of these students are low-income Latinos; most are in Los Angeles. The average exit exam passing rate in math at these multitrack, year-round schools is 31%, while the rate of students on normal schedules is 58%.

Education leaders across the state have voiced concern this week about the failure rates. Some argue that the state should either back off its timeline or lower the bar for passing. Others argue for “staying the course” in order to maintain high standards and accountability. Such responses only foster cynicism and alienation. The problems revealed by California’s high school exit exam won’t go away by adjusting cutoff scores in order to make the failure rate less shocking. Nor is postponing the consequences a solution. These problems can be solved only by providing all students a real opportunity to learn what’s on the test. That requires extraordinary action.

In January 2000, Illinois Gov. George Ryan called for a moratorium on his state’s use of the death penalty. Ryan, a supporter of capital punishment, decided that no one should suffer the severest of all penalties until the system could guarantee that innocent people were not being put to death. This moratorium opened public debate with a sense of urgency. He established a prestigious commission and set it up to operate outside the partisan world of state politics. The commission made a comprehensive investigation of the system and recommended ways to improve it. The people of Illinois were then presented with a series of proposals for ensuring accuracy and fairness.

This is exactly the course that California must take with its high school exit exam. The loss of life opportunities that stem from a poor education is certainly not on a par with the loss of life itself. But neither loss is acceptable. California needs a moratorium on the diploma penalty, and it needs a rigorous, independent and high-powered commission appointed by the Legislature to press the state to take the extraordinary actions needed to guarantee educational quality and fairness for all its students.

The commission’s work should begin with some basic questions. Do certified staff have appropriate degrees and credentials to teach core academic subjects? Are school staff teaching to the standards? Has standards-based instruction been implemented in the grades leading up to the test? Do teachers have the resources they need to teach? Do students have the things they need in order to learn?

They won’t be starting from scratch: The Legislature’s Joint Committee to Develop a Master Plan for Education has already, with input from hundreds of educators and others around the state, laid out the problems and ways of attacking them. Now we need action.

This year, the Legislature overwhelmingly approved SB 1408, a bill that would require schools with high failure rates on the exit exam to determine the reasons and develop specific plans to address problems. But Gov. Gray Davis vetoed the bill, saying that California already has all the information it needs and that implementing the bill would cost too much money. Weighed against the personal, social and economic costs of failing hundreds of thousands of young people, fixing the state’s schools could be the best bargain California has ever found.