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High school exit exam hinders female and non-white students, study says
Stephen Krashen Letter to
Los Angeles Times: A Waste of Time
and Money
The discovery that California's high school
exit exam unfairly
prevents 20,000 students a year from graduating
is only the most
recent evidence showing that the exam is a
waste of time and money
('High school exit exam hinders female and non-
white students, study
says," April 22).
Recent research done by scholars at Indiana
University, UC Davis and
the University of Minnesota has shown that in
general state high
school exit exams do not lead to higher
employment, or higher earnings
by graduates, nor does the presence of high
school exit exams result
in improved academic achievement.
In fact, researchers have yet to discover any
clear evidence that
High School Exit Exams benefit anyone except
the companies that make
and sell them.
By Mitchell Landsberg
California's high school exit exam is keeping
disproportionate
numbers of girls and non-whites from
graduating, even when they are
just as capable as white boys, according to a
study released Tuesday.
It also found that the exam, which became a
graduation requirement in
2007, has "had no positive effect on student
achievement."
The study by researchers at Stanford University
and UC Davis
concluded that girls and non-whites were
probably failing the exit
exam more often than expected because of what
is known as "stereotype
threat," a theory in social psychology that
holds, essentially, that
negative stereotypes can be self-fulfilling. In
this case, researcher
Sean Reardon said, girls and students of color
may be tripped up by
the expectation that they cannot do as well as
white boys.
Reardon said there was no other apparent reason
why girls and
non-whites fail the exam more often than white
boys, who are their
equals in other, lower-stress academic
assessments. Reardon, an
associate professor of education at Stanford,
urged the state
Department of Education to consider either
scrapping the exit exam --
one of the reforms for which state Supt. of
Public Instruction Jack
O'Connell has fought the hardest -- or looking
at ways of intervening
to help students perform optimally. Reardon
said the exam is keeping
as many as 22,500 students a year from
graduating who would otherwise
fulfill all their requirements.
"No one can be happy with these results,"
Reardon said. "The exit
exam isn't working as it was intended."
O'Connell issued a statement containing
measured praise of the report
but defending the exam, saying it "plays an
important role in our work
to ensure that a high school diploma has
meaning." Other officials in
the Education Department reacted skeptically to
the study, sharply
rejecting its assertion that the test has no
positive effect on
learning.
"I'm not ready to agree with that at all," said
Deb Sigman, deputy
superintendent for assessment and
accountability. The researchers, she
said, "don't look at grades, they don't look at
classroom observation
or interviews with children."
But Russell Rumberger, a professor of education
at UC Santa Barbara
who directs the California Dropout Research
Project, called the study
"very sophisticated" and said policymakers need
to take heed of its
conclusions and perhaps consider an alternative
test.
State Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los
Angeles) issued a statement
saying that the research "reinforces the
concerns that many of us have
had about the exit exam from its inception."
She said the results
"must make us all pause and take stock of
whether the exam could be
fixed or is fatally flawed."
The exit exam, which students can take multiple
times beginning in
their sophomore year, includes math and English
tests, with the math
aligned to eighth-grade standards and English
to 10th-grade standards.
It has been criticized both for being too easy
and for unfairly
denying a diploma to students who otherwise
might graduate.
The study, funded by the private, nonprofit
James Irvine Foundation,
is based on analysis of data from four large
California school
districts, those in Fresno, Long Beach, San
Diego and San Francisco.
Reardon said the results were very similar for
all four districts,
suggesting that the conclusions had broad
application for all
California schools.
Not surprisingly, the researchers found that
the exam was toughest on
students in the bottom quarter of their class,
based on state
standardized test scores. That was also where
the study found the
strongest inequality of results.
"Graduation rates declined by 15 to 19
percentage points for
low-achieving black, Hispanic and Asian
students when the exit exam
was implemented, and declined only one
percentage point . . . for
similar white students," the study said. Low-
achieving girls had a 19
percentage-point drop in their graduation rate,
compared with a
decrease of 12 percentage points for boys.
Reardon said he initially was skeptical of the
"stereotype threat"
effect, but that it has been well-established
by social psychologists
and appears to apply to the test disparities.
mitchell.landsberg @latimes.com
— Mitchell Landsberg, with comment by Stephen Krashen
Los Angeles Times
2009-04-22
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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