State graduation exam: Is it fair without funding?

STUDENTS, parents and supporters of the academically struggling Philadelphia School District are bracing for today's scheduled vote by the state Board of Education on whether to adopt new graduation tests for high-school seniors.

A committee of the state board yesterday unanimously recommended that the board adopt the requirement, which would, for the first time, tie earning a diploma to passing a series of new tests in English, math, science and social studies.

State board Chairman Karl Girton said such exams are sorely needed because graduation standards vary across the state's 501 public-school districts, resulting in some students graduating without basic skills.

"That's grossly unfair to everyone involved," he said yesterday. "We've reached the point now where we need to agree on how we're going to measure whether students know what they need to know to graduate."

Girton said he expects the board will approve the new requirement, which would trigger a regulatory review process that could take about a year.

Gov. Rendell "aggressively" supports the new exams, state Secretary of Education Gerald L. Zahorchak said.

Philadelphia School District officials said they support the new testing, too, as long as it comes with new funding.

"I trust that the district will work with Secretary Zahorchak to make sure that Philadelphia and other districts have the money and supports needed to meet the standards and the flexibility to implement a testing system that doesn't unfairly penalize the students," said Sandra Dungee Glenn, chairwoman of the city's School Reform Commission.

But others from Philadelphia were not as optimistic. Opponents of the proposed exams are already crying foul, charging that the state board has no business stiffening graduation standards when a recent board-funded study found that 95 percent of the state's school districts are underfunded.

"It's not fair to hold students to standards if you don't give them the things they need - that's my concern," said Eric Braxton, an organizer with the Philadelphia Student Union. "The state has not paid its fair share of education for a long time."

"We believe the real issue is whether the state is doing enough to ensure that all students in all districts have a fair opportunity to learn the skills and knowledge they need to be successful," said Baruch Kintisch, of the nonprofit Education Law Center. "The opportunities now are very unequal.

"So just putting new tests in place does nothing to help students in districts where they don't have libraries, computers and qualified teachers," he added.

Rev. LeRoi Simmons, whose Germantown Clergy Initiative supports Germantown High School, said the last thing that Philadelphia schools need is a battery of new tests.

Of the 420 ninth-graders who enroll at the school each year, just 120 graduate, Simmons said, while 70 to 75 percent of the school's students score at the below-basic level on the state's annual math-and-reading exam, the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment.

"I understand the goal is to put more meat into the high-school diploma," Simmons said, "but the method to get there should be to increase funding and education as opposed to thinning the group [that graduates] with this test."

This past fall, the state board's costing-out study found that schools across the state are underfunded by about $4.6 billion a year.

Still, state officials said that waiting to implement the new testing requirement until funding problems are solved would be irresponsible. Zahorchak also noted that under Gov. Rendell, school funding has gone up $2.4 billion a year.

By mandating the testing requirement, Pennsylvania will join 26 other states that have implemented or plan to implement such an end-of-year requirement, according to a fact sheet issued by the state Department of Education.

The first students to be impacted would be the graduating class of 2014, or this year's sixth-graders.

Zahorchak said the current system results in "empty diplomas" being conferred on thousands of students each year.

"We need to clearly define what we mean by a 'high-school diploma' so that it's consistent across the state," he said. "Whether you live in Philadelphia [or elsewhere] we need to know that you reached a base line in proficiency."

He noted that of the 126,000 seniors who graduated last year, 57,000 - or just over 45 percent - failed to reach the proficiency level on the state's math-and-reading PSSA exam. Given in high schools to 11th-graders, the PSSA is not used to determine graduation eligibility in Philadelphia.

Ross Wiener, a vice president at Education Trust, a Washington-based organization that advocates for poor and minority public-school children, said that graduation exams in some states have led to higher quality classroom instruction and improved academic results for all students.

When such tests are implemented, Wiener said, the public should seek to learn what their school district's plan is to provide every student with a teacher qualified to teach higher-level courses, the plan to align the curriculum and instructional supports with standards and the plan to provide extra help to students who are not meeting the standards.

"Those are the three fundamental questions that need to be answered," he said. *