Pa. seeks new approach on a test for graduation

HARRISBURG - After spending considerable time raising doubts about the quality of locally designed graduation tests, Pennsylvania education officials are finally preparing to test their theory.

Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak recently asked the state's 501 school districts for samples of local reading, math and writing tests they administered last year to high school students in the class of 2008 as alternatives to the state's standardized tests for 11th graders.

With assistance from Pennsylvania State University's College of Education, the agency will spend the next several months cataloging and analyzing the tests to determine whether they are as rigorous as the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, also known as the PSSA.

Many school boards and educators say the exercise is long overdue, given the rhetoric that has colored this year's debate over whether high school students should be required to pass a battery of state-sanctioned final exams to graduate. For the moment, legislative opposition has forced the department to abandon its effort to mandate the tests statewide.

"It was frustrating for us to hear a number of different people arguing that school districts were issuing empty diplomas and just graduating kids who were not prepared," said Thomas Gentzel, executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. "If there are local assessments that are not adequate for a variety of reasons we can agree on, we ought to be talking about that."

The administration has tried to bolster its argument by comparing two sets of statistics: graduation rates and the previous year's 11th grade PSSA scores. It has concluded that some failing students have nevertheless received diplomas in districts where the graduation rates are higher than the PSSA passing rates.

In turn, the school boards association and other opponents complained that the state had jumped to conclusions without knowing what the local tests looked like.

It's a classic conflict in the increasingly intense tug-of-war over whether the state or locally elected school boards should ultimately decide who graduates, and how.

Decades earlier, the state was more hands-off, basing its expectations on the number of course credits students earned, rather than on standardized testing, said Mark Wescott, education services director for the Pennsylvania State Education Association.

"For the longest period of time, it was assumed that if the child put the seat time in and sat through [the course], they would learn," Wescott said.

That began to change in the 1990s under Gov. Tom Ridge's administration as the emphasis shifted to measuring students' knowledge, which meant implementing a statewide testing program, Wescott said. The testing push intensified under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.

The current graduation requirements, which included the local testing option that preserved some semblance of control for school boards, took effect in the 2002-03 school year.

But even before talk of new graduation tests heated up this year, the Rendell administration was concerned about the state's inability to verify that local tests were truly equivalent to the PSSA, Zahorchak said.

To fix the problem, the state Board of Education proposed in 2005 that the state be allowed to certify annually that the local tests were comparable to the PSSA, and make passing the PSSA a graduation requirement in districts where the passing rates were substantially lower for the state test than the local test.

The idea was overwhelmingly opposed by state lawmakers and educators, who cited fears about the possible erosion of local control, among other concerns. The board withdrew it in January to make way for the new testing proposal.

Gentzel and Wescott are eyeing the department's latest attempt to scrutinize the local tests with some wariness, however. They say they hope the inquiry will lead to constructive discussions about how to improve any local tests that are faulty, not an edict to scrap the local option altogether.

Zahorchak promises that the evaluation will rely on scientific and statistical methods, not politics.

"We may find that there are lots of good practices and ways to do this locally," Zahorchak said.