State education officials and lawyers representing students who failed the California High School Exit Exam settled a lawsuit Thursday that began last year in an attempt to eliminate the test as a graduation requirement.
Under the agreement, the test remains in place but schools must continue to educate students who fail for an additional two years after 12th grade -- if those students want to return and try the test again.
I'm glad the exam remains. I'm not sure of the wisdom of having 20-year-olds on a campus with 14-year-olds, but I guess that's part of the agreement.
This all started when some students who failed the exam were not going to be allowed to graduate (click on the testing/assessment tab and find some posts on this topic from Spring 2006) and filed a lawsuit. They lost; the state courts ruled that it's clearly within the purview of the legislature to dictate graduation requirements, and those students didn't graduate because they couldn't pass a test that has at most 8th grade math and 10th grade English.
In a remarkable effort at spin, the students' attorney calls this settlement a victory:
"For our clients, this is absolutely a victory," said Arturo Gonzalez, the San Francisco attorney who represented students in the classes of 2006 and 2007 who couldn't graduate from high school because they failed the exit exam.
"It just means that if (a school is) going to have a special course to prepare students for the test, you may have to invite five kids from last year who didn't pass. And that's a lot better than having those five kids out on the street."
OK, Arturo, whatever you need to tell yourself.
1 comment:
I already have serious reservations about having 18 year old men-closer to 19 some of them-on campus hitting on girls that are just days past 13 years old. Someday I want to do a study on the pregnancy rates at schools with four years in one building rather than just three. I think that those students who have failed the exam repeatedly would be better served at an alternative location. We have that in our district for kids to recover credits after failing. They use Plato online for most of it, but that is preferable to having a 20 year old in class. I have had to do that before, and the guy was in the reserves. He kept hitting on me-I was only 23-and when he was absent because of operations in Nicaragua, I got a note from his commanding officer. Sorry, kids that old need another type of situation for education.
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