By Jim Bartholomew, June guest blogger
Minnesota’s quarter-of-a-century debate over high school graduation standards continued this year as lawmakers considered a new set of recommendations by the CCRPI Assessment and Accountability Working Group. Those recommendations, contained in the stalled omnibus education bill, would have replaced Minnesota’s current exit exams with end-of-course exams whose results would have accounted for just 25% of the course grade. While this approach has some merit, it also has a “back to the future” aspect about it — which would take Minnesota in the wrong direction.
Minnesota has generally relied on a “pass the course” approach to determining high school graduation requirements. In short, the state sets expectations and districts define mastery. In 1988, the Legislative Auditor reported that 98% of all districts offered courses in state requirement subjects like English, math, science and social studies. However, two-thirds of all districts had NO policy on how well high school students should do in English or math in order to graduate.
As part of an overall response, the legislature, in 1992, first adopted a policy calling for minimum competency tests, later called the Basic Skills Tests (BSTs). Lawmakers set the bar low, requiring the Class of 2000 to be able to read and do math at the eighth-grade level. Nevertheless, when more than 5,000 students in the class of 2000 were at risk of not graduating, the pressure was on to eliminate the requirement. But lawmakers held firm and by the time the BSTs were phased out in 2005, the anxiety had all but disappeared. The bar — once thought to be too high — had become too low.
Intent on raising the bar to reflect the global knowledge-based economy, lawmakers replaced the BSTs with the Graduation Required Assessment for Diploma (GRAD), which set state expectations higher (10th grade for reading, below 11th grade for math). Like the BST before it, the GRAD provided incentives for students and schools to improve. In fact, the percent of non-white students performing at or above grade-level in reading started to rise faster than white students.
Test anxiety, however, struck again last year as educators and legislators worried that too many students in the Class of 2010 would be unable to pass the math GRAD. This time, lawmakers flinched. They kept the GRAD exam requirements in reading and writing, but placed a five-year moratorium on the math GRAD. Students still have to take the test, but they don’t have to pass it. The Legislature also instructed the Minnesota Department of Education to create a workgroup to make recommendations on yet another set of graduation requirements.
This brings us back to the future. Rather than a common set of statewide expectations for how well students should do in math and science, the new ACCESS system proposed end-of-course exams in these subjects. Because these tests would account for just 25% of a student’s grade, students could easily graduate without passing the tests. In other words, ACCESS would return Minnesota to an era when individual school districts determined how well their students should perform in math and science in order to earn a diploma.
While end-of-course exams are appealing, the lack of a common expectation for how well students should do has several shortcomings, including:
- Allowing for diverse expectations for student achievement;
- Misleading students and parents about their level of preparation;
- Weakening the value of a high school diploma, because of the uncertainty of what that diploma represents; and
- Making it more difficult to raise expectations in the future, since the state will have allowed the gap in expectations to grow.
These aren’t theoretical shortcomings — they’re the shortcomings that led to the need for common expectations. Eliminating common expectations for how well high school graduates can perform only jeopardizes their future success in the increasingly global economy. As the world moves forward into the 21st century, Minnesota cannot retreat to the 1980s.
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