Abandoning High School Exit Exams Would Be a Mistake

Requiring the exit exams in a time when classes are likely to get even bigger, textbooks scarcer remedial courses less accessible, and counselors and reading specialists more overloaded thus seems to compound both the cruelty and to create even more opportunities for the right to attack the allegedly failing system.

Chances are that, despite last week’s recommendations of the Democrats who control the legislature’s budget conference committee, the exit exam will survive. State schools chief Jack O’Connell, also a Democrat, defends it. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed to veto any budget that doesn’t include it.

But the committee’s call for suspending the test until there’s more money nonetheless shows a fundamental, if well-meaning, misapprehension of the dynamics of school funding. Among the most effective long-term arguments for adequate schools, especially for the poor and minority kids stuck in the worst schools and for help for the demoralized teachers who are supposed to educate them is that looming exit exam requirement.

In recent years, courts in state after state have ordered more adequate funding precisely because those states demanded relatively high achievement without providing the resources to permit students to meet their own standards and pass the tests they require.

Nearly a decade ago when Public Advocates, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued the state’s decrepit urban and rural schools, complaining about the unprepared teachers and the inadequate materials that their students were forced to learn from, the lawyers warned the liberal plaintiffs not to attack the state’s curricular standards but to use them as levers to extract more resources from a state that had – and again has – one of the lowest per-pupil funding formulas in the country. Among the items on the governor’s education chopping block are the very improvements he agreed to provide in settling that suit.

For anyone trying to improve the dismally inadequate educational resources that hundreds of thousands of California’s poor and minority children are stuck with, the far more promising strategy is to keep that exam.

It’s almost certainly one of the most effective devices we have to keep the system – teachers, principals, school board members, legislators, the universities – from the chronic neglect and indifference that kids from the wrong side of the tracks were historically subject to.

The school reforms, state and federal, of the past fifteen years – the increased curricular requirements, the testing requirements, the requirement that all major groups be counted in measurements of adequate yearly progress – have hardly closed the historic achievement gaps. School success, we too often forget, is heavily influenced by economic and social conditions outside the schoolhouse door.

But the reforms, including state exit exams and George W. Bush’s now much-maligned No Child Left Behind law, much as it desperately needs revisions, have succeeded in forcing schools to pay attention for the first time to children that they’d systematically written off before – often as being ethnically or economically unable to benefit from all but the most basic education.

That makes the Democrats’ current efforts to get rid of the exit exam that much more unfortunately ironic Were the exam-suspenders to succeed, they’d set the cause of those kids back once again on the road to the invisibility from which they’ve suffered for so long. The president and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, seem to understand that. Why don’t California’s Democrats get it?

Peter Schrag, who will be writing every Wednesday for the California Progress Report, is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future and California: America’s High Stakes Experiment. His new book, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism, Eugenics, Immigration will be published early in 2010.