Testing to Graduate

Today an article in the Baltimore Sun chronicled the Maryland school board’s intentions to move forward with the plan to use HSAs as a requirement for high school graduation, but it is willing to consider postponing that requirement for students in special education and students for whom English is a second language.

I support the board’s openness to postponing the requirement for these special student groups. As one of the article’s interviewees notes, it would be unfair to subject students in special education to these tests. Students who are now approaching graduation may not have been in special education settings that would appropriately prepare them for the HSA. Regarding English language learners, I believe that until there are assessments that can accurately assess these students in the tested areas, it is not fair to subject them to these tests either. It does not seem right to me that potentially someone who is just coming into the school as a high school senior, who may have completed grade appropriate coursework in all other areas other than English, would get stuck in the system because they do not yet know the language. This becomes a tricky issue though. Would there be guidelines for these students, where students would (or would not) have to take the test based on how long they had been in the system? Or would there be another test prior to the HSA to determine English competency?

Moreover, I am not sure I even support the idea of tying the diploma to testing in the first place. I agree with the idea that the buck has to stop somewhere, but it doesn’t seem right that that’s only occurring at the end of the educational system. If the state sticks to this idea, we may very well see high school classes filling beyond capacity, as new students continue to come in and the older students get stuck trying to pass the test. Alternatively, students will become discouraged and drop out at even higher rates, thwarting the educational system’s supposed goal of seeing its students through to a diploma.

I have often wondered what would happen if, for just one year, the entire school system declined to take any new students (no new kindergarteners or pre-schoolers for one year), and actually failed everyone who did not make adequate progress that year. Obviously, it wouldn’t necessarily make a difference if it was the same bad teachers in the same bad schools, if that was the problem. But we all have so many stories of students who should have failed—but didn’t—and they are the ones who will fail the HSA in the end.