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'A' for effort: Is a new bill watering down academic standards or broadening them?
Las Vegas City Life
May 11, 2007
by ANDREW KIRALY
See story on City Life web site
THEY SAY THE THIRD TIME'S A CHARM. That adage may soon apply to Nevada's high school proficiency exam: Fail three times -- but still get your diploma.
That sums up the controversial component of a bill that proposes to alter the standards for graduating high school. Tank on the exam? No problem. With alternative criteria, students who've struggled with -- and failed -- the writing portion of the mandatory test can opt to turn in an essay or portfolio of work and, come graduation time, proudly walk with the rest of the class.
The bill "would allow students an alternative pathway to demonstrate proficiency in these subject areas rather than just through a test," state Sen. Steven Horsford, one of Senate Bill 312's primary sponsors, explains in an e-mail. "Students learn differently and should have multiple pathways to demonstrate what they have learned."
"The policy question is what do you do with kids who go to school, don't cause trouble, make good grades, but then you tell them they can't have a high school degree?" asks state Sen. Terry Care, another sponsor.
Giving those kids a diploma anyway has led some to ask whether this represents a broadening of academic standards or their watering-down. The bill, unanimously passed in the Senate and now in the Assembly Education Committee, has broached a discussion of how students are sized up for graduation, and whether testing is the only -- or best -- way of measuring academic readiness. Critics, meanwhile, characterize the bill as a soft response to flagging school achievement.
"We need to have exams," says Joe Enge, an educational analyst for the conservative Nevada Policy Research Institute. "It's debated whether we're overkilling kids with various exams, and we should take a look to what extent we do give exams, but in this case, [federal measures of progress] are based on proficiency exams.
"This [bill] is a crack in the dike," he adds. "It's just a small crack, but I know how these guys operate. You give them a small crack, and they kick it wide open." It's not the first time he's seen accountability under siege. Enge tells the story of a Nye County civics teacher whose tough grading scale was causing some students to flunk his class. He says an outcry among kids and parents led to the school district setting up an "alternative" civics course.
Other legislators are just happy to have come up with a heavily amended bill that minimized that so-called crack; SB 312 originally proposed to let students use grade point averages, essays or senior projects to make up for any single portion of the test they failed, not just writing.
"It was a compromise measure, and probably didn't make anybody happy," says state Sen. Bob Beers, who reluctantly voted for the bill. He'd rather see a stronger relationship forged between what's required to be taught in schools and what the high school proficiency exam measures. Maybe the problem, he says, is that the test is measuring something the schools aren't teaching.
In Nevada, students must pass the high school proficiency exam in order to graduate. The three-part exam covers math, reading and writing. But among some of those students, those No. 2 pencils are chewed in ultimate frustration: According to the Nevada State Board of Education, 6 percent of students, or about 1,100, failed the high school proficiency exam in the 2004-2005 school year. It's an added burden to a statewide high school graduation rate that is already among the lowest in the nation. A 2004 report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education ranked Nevada 39th for its high school graduation rate -- and last for the number of students who go directly to college after graduation.
It seems like a particular disgrace in an era when No Child Left Behind has pounded home buzzwords and phrases like standards, accountability and adequate yearly progress. But while the Bush administration's focus on standards seems obsessed with tests, Horsford is taking his cues from a different -- and competing -- philosophical strain in education circles: The idea that there's more than one way to measure how much kids have learned than by that shibboleth of No Child Left Behind, testing.
"It's wrong to assume a test is the only way to measure all the standards," says Elle Rustique-Forrester of Stanford University's School Redesign Network. "That not all students do well on one type of learning assessment has been established by decades of research. You can have other measures in place that provide additional opportunities for students to show they have met the standards." The network is at the forefront of studying what works better: things like "high-stakes, single-measure" tests -- like Nevada's high school proficiency exam -- or the multiple-measure "dashboard" approach.
The dashboard idea was catching on before the test-centric mania of No Child Left Behind swept the education system. And while Rustique-Forrester says there's been some "pushback" among educational conservatives, the idea is still holding its own. According to the network's 2005 study, 25 states dole out diplomas based on a range of measures rather than a single exam. And graduates get more than a piece of paper. The network says multiple-measure testing leads to more intellectually well-rounded students.
"There's a balance between having some form of accountability and standards, and allowing schools and teachers to meet the needs of their students," says Rustique-Forrester. "I don't dismiss the intent of wanting to raise standards, but you can't do it with a single measure. The kids get short shrift in that game."
Meanwhile, Horsford says that while his amended bill is far from what he envisioned, it "opens the door to recognizing that standardized testing is not the only way to show whether a student has demonstrated competency in a subject area."
But the more tradition-minded will take comfort in knowing this hardly signals the death of testing in Nevada: The school board plans to add a science portion to the exam as early as next year.
Andrew Kiraly is CityLife's managing editor. He can be reached at 871-6780 ext. 352 or akiraly@lvcitylife.com.
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