They should onbly implement the test if each emplyee of PA department of Education and PA school teachers can pass the test.
When the state pays their 50% share of costs, then they might have the right to stick their noses in local school board business.
The students of Pennsylvania do not all enjoy the same resources. If the governor wants to spend $200 million dollars plus to improve education, the money should be spent on teacher development, early childhood education, and adequate and relevant resources (technology, modern buildings instructional materials). Tests do not improve education. Pre-K experiences, teachers who know their fields well, and sufficient resources improve education. Why spend our taxes on things that do not help students succeed? The people have spoken. We do not want these tests forced on our children.
There is an obvious disconnect in education between the high school and college level and the college level and workplace,lack of communication as well as consensus.
Of the 65% of public high school students that must pass an exit exam in order to graduate, the 24 states with exit exams (done with the help of Achieve, Inc. through the American Diploma Project) only six states indicated their exit exam process was designed to measure the knowledge and skills needed for college, while only nine of the 24 states said their tests were intended to measure readiness for the workplace…..this according to the Center on Education Policy’s national survey and white paper on “High School Exit Exams” released on September 6th, 2007.
There is a process in place is with the PSSA, however, there is no denying that refinement is needed in a multi-pronged approach to address these and other issues which can enable us to prepare our students to be college ready without the extensive proposed course of action our Governor is now proposing for millions of dollars. It will take work, but, it can be achieved and it can be achieved with less tax dollars than the alternative proposed and we can still proceed forward competively as a Commonwealth regardless if national standards see fruition or not. The process of having students graduate high school with the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful in college or the workplace begins much earlier than the beginning of high school or in the 11th and 12th grades of high school.
May 13, 2008
State High-School Exit Tests Do Not Improve Academic Achievement, Study Finds
By Peter Schmidt
A new study has found that state requirements that students pass exit tests to graduate from high school appear to do nothing to improve achievement on federal reading and mathematics tests.
The study, the results of which have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Educational Policy, compared the reading and math scores of children in states with exit examinations to the scores of children elsewhere in the United States and concluded that there.....................
The rest of this article is available for purchase from:
The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://www.chronicle.com
Email Address *
Your email address will not be published. (We add your Gravatar icon if you have one)
Name *
Your Website URL
Comment *
Maximum of 4000 chars. (0/4000)
(Fields marked * are mandatory)
Use the link below to share this poll.
You can also place this poll on your website or blog as a widget. Simply copy and paste the code below into your HTML.
Alternatively, we now support oEmbed.
