HARRISBURG, Pa., – Twenty-two statewide organizations representing hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania citizens, and one national organization, have expressed their opposition to regulations proposed by the State Board of Education that essentially would mandate high-stakes standardized high school exit exams.
The organizations, which include the Pennsylvania State Education Association, announced today they have endorsed a statement, which is available on the PSEA website at www.psea.org. The organizations represent parents, teachers, students, school support professionals, children with disabilities, gifted children, members of minority groups, school principals, school superintendents, and school board members. In addition, more than 130 elected Pennsylvania school boards have passed resolutions opposing the exit exams, also known as Graduation Competency Assessments (GCAs).
“While we applaud the attempt to raise standards, we believe establishing an exit exam system for graduation to be a bad idea and bad public policy,” said PSEA President James P. Testerman. “We do not believe it will have the desired consequences. We are not alone in this belief.
“The diversity of the organizations opposing high-stakes exit exams, from the Pennsylvania PTA to the National Association for the Advancement of for the Advancement of Colored People, dispels once and for all the claim by testing proponents that opposition is limited to teachers and school boards,” said Testerman.
“It’s simply not fair for the state to use a standardized paper-and-pencil test to deny high school graduation to students who have qualified in every other way, at least until the state lives up to its responsibility to ensure that all students have a fair opportunity to learn what is being tested,” said Len Rieser, co-director of the Education Law Center. “Before creating an expensive new testing system, the state should first provide adequate funding, teacher training, and student support services, not just in the wealthiest school districts but in all communities.”
“We are totally opposed to the passage of the GCA regulations,” said Donald Clark, spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Consortium of NAACP. “The impact on the African American community in general, and to the struggle for the educational success of our young people, would be catastrophic.”
Marybeth Irvin, president of the Pennsylvania Middle School Association, said, “We oppose the exit exams because they are not the type of best practice assessment that promote quality learning. As a single, high-stakes assessment, they do not provide differentiated opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge.”
Kathleen Kelley, superintendent of the Williamsport Area School District and president of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators, said, “The policy question for us is not how we change the ways we measure proficiency, but rather what the state can do to help schools increase the performance of their low achievers without increasing the number of students who give up and without adversely affecting the quality of instruction for the many students who are already achieving at or above state-identified proficiency levels.”
“This proposal is not about what is good for the children of Pennsylvania,” Testerman said. “It is about who makes the final decision about whether a child graduates. It is about eliminating local control of the education, assessment, and graduation of our students and replacing that local control with a high-stakes assessment system controlled from Harrisburg.”
“Tens of thousands of students across the nation are collateral damage from the graduation testing explosion,” said Lisa Guisbond, a policy analyst at the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), which endorsed the statement opposing GCAs. “Evidence shows high-stakes tests are the wrong prescription for what ails public education.”
The statement endorsed by the organizations reads, in part: “Denying a student a high school diploma has serious long-term negative effects on that student’s life, as well as significant social costs. Before fundamentally altering Pennsylvania’s system and structure for earning a diploma, the state must be sure that the change will not unfairly hurt our young people. It would be appropriate to first audit the local graduation assessments of various districts to determine why some students do not score ‘proficient’ on a PSSA test but do show, through local assessments, that they have mastered the curriculum. It is inappropriate to assume that paper-and-pencil standardized tests are so accurate that students who do not score highly enough should not be able to graduate from high school.
“While the proposal continues to allow the use of local assessments for graduation purposes, it creates numerous costly barriers in the name of test ‘validation’ that would be a disincentive for most school districts to continue using local graduation assessments. Therefore, the only option for high school graduation for most students under this new proposal would be scoring proficient on the PSSA or on six out of 10 state tests. For all practical purposes, there would be no local option for students to graduate,” the statement continues.
Testerman noted that while Pennsylvania’s State Board of Education appears determined to remove alternatives to high-stakes exit exams, the Maryland State Board of Education recently moved in the opposite direction. The Maryland SBE voted in November 2007 to allow students to complete projects as an alternative to a set of state tests required to earn a high school diploma.
A recent survey of Pennsylvania citizens by Susquehanna Polling and Research showed that 62 percent of the respondents oppose using a test to determine who graduates from high school.
Testerman is a middle school science teacher at the Central York School District. A state affiliate of the National Education Association, PSEA represents more than 185,000 future, active, and retired teachers and school employees, and health care workers in Pennsylvania.
Copyright Associated Press 2008
Posted by heraldstandardcontinuousnews 
Posted by heraldstandardcontinuousnews 
Posted by heraldstandardcontinuousnews 