No Exit

Of the 450,000 students scheduled to graduate from California high schools this June, about 100,000 have still not passed one or both parts of the state's exit exam. About half of the students for whom English is a second language haven't passed it.

The class of 2006 is the first to face this graduation requirement, which has now generated a students'and parents' lawsuit claiming the exam is discriminatory. Many of the aggrieved students, whose first language is frequently Spanish, have very high grade point averages.

However, this past Wednesday the state Board of Education voted against offering any kind of alternative assessment to compensate for the high failure rate. The Board has already agreed, in the face of earlier spectacularly high rates of failure, to lower the minimum passing scores from 70 percent for both parts of the test to 55 percent for the math portion and 60 percent for the English section, but otherwise remains convinced, in the words of Board member Donald Fisher, that the exam meaures basic English and math skills that all potential high school graduates should possess.

I decided to go on line and see if I could take some sample portions of the test to be able to decide if the complaints were justified. After answering 30 sample questions from one "strand" of the algebra and numeric reasoning portion of the test I found myself right about where I'd been in high school -- at 70 percent accuracy, even with my extremely modest and deficient mathematical skills. I managed to miss all six of the algebraic graphing problems -- something I never learned. So if I was to spend a month or so learning how to chart and read those silly graphs, which few people other than engineers will ever need to manipulate in a real-world working situation, I could probably do quite well.

When I tried to download a section of the sample reading test the enormous number of KB's in the 46-page PDF document swamped my little laptop's central processing unit and froze my machine harder than a hockey rink. Even though I can safely assume I wouldn't have any trouble with the reading and writing parts of this test, there's no doubt that's where the problem lies, especially with writing.

Is it really fair to expect a kid who only began learning to speak, read and write English at age 12 or 14 to write with the same degree of proficiency at age 18 as native-born English speakers?

I think there's a good way to find out. Before demanding that high school students successfully negotiate this exam as a graduation requirement, we should administer it to all the high school teachers in the state and see how they do with it. Then we should give it to a large sample of the Chamber of Commerce business types who agitated so aggressively for it back in the nineties, and see how many of them pass it.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to have all the members of the California Legislature and the state's Board of Education take it as well.

If more than 20 percent of the people in those select groups flunked the thing, I'll bet it would, like the victims of a boojums snark, "softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again."