Improve, Don’t Eliminate, Alternate Diploma Test

By MICHELLE FINE and STAN KARP

LAST YEAR, some 13,500 students received their high school diplomas through New Jersey’s Special Review Assessment, the state’s alternative graduation test.

More than 5,000 were in the urban “Abbott” districts. Another 8,000 were scattered throughout the state.

Ordinarily, one might expect a program that encourages students to stay in school and remain on track to graduate would have broad support. But the SRA has been the subject of contentious public debate.

Detractors have called it a “backdoor diploma” that “hurts the very students it seeks to help.” Supporters argue that the SRA is a much-needed alternative to the state’s traditional test, the High School Proficiency Assessment, and has even saved lives by keeping students from dropping out of school.

This fall thousands of students and their teachers returned to school uncertain if the SRA will survive beyond this year. A new study, New Jersey’s Special Review Assessment: Loophole or Lifeline? conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New Jersey’s Education Law Center, the Institute on Education Law and Policy at Rutgers, and Newark’s Project GRAD, explains why it should.

Despite its reputation as a “free path to a diploma,” SRA graduates are students who have stayed in school, passed their courses and met all the local requirements for graduation. If they don’t pass all three parts of the HSPA, they must complete a series of “performance assessment tasks” that cover the same subject matter and are of comparable difficulty to HSPA test questions, though they are given in untimed, less formal settings and, unlike the HSPA, are available in multiple languages.

If the SRA is eliminated, many students will become dropouts. English language learners and urban students of color will see the most concentrated impact. But the effects will be felt statewide. New Jersey’s nationally leading graduation rate will decline.

Graduation rates for African-American and Hispanic students, now among the best in the country, will fall and, in some places, dramatically.

No one wants this to happen, but it is a predictable result.We urgently need to avoid this outcome.

There is an alternative. Fix the SRA instead of eliminating it. And get serious about secondary education reform.

The SRA’s credibility has been undermined by inconsistent scoring, lax administration and a lack of external review. These issues could be addressed by moving the scoring process away from schools and districts evaluating their own students to regional teams of trained educators scoring SRAs on a blind basis.

But simply eliminating the SRA will not raise achievement levels or improve schools. Neither will relying on a single high-stakes test. If students are not well prepared after 12 years, that’s what we need to address, not just the tests. This means making changes in the ways schools actually function: creation of smaller, safer learning environments, collaborative teams of teachers working with students over multiple years, time and preparation for better professional practice, and better relations and communication with parents and families.

Support, don’t substitute

Changes in graduation standards and assessment systems should support such changes, not substitute for them. We should be expanding multiple pathways to high school graduation, not eliminating them, and adopting policies that actually reduce educational failure instead of imposing new penalties on the victims of it.

Despite much talk of “data-driven reform,” there are no studies that show that the HSPA is a more reliable predictor of success than the SRA. But we already have ample research that documents a predictable rise in dropout rates when states implement a single, high-stakes graduation exit examination and that tracks the high costs of leaving school without a diploma in lower earnings, shorter life expectancy and higher crime rates.

In his State of the State address last January, Governor Corzine declared, “We have the highest high school graduation rates in the nation…Whatever we do, we must keep and enhance the nation’s best school system.”

Improving, rather than eliminating, the SRA would be a small step in the right direction. Supporting higher standards by providing higher levels of support for the students, families, teachers and schools expected to reach them would be a bigger one.

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Michelle Fine is a professor of urban education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Stan Karp is director of the Secondary Reform Project for New Jersey’s Education Law Center.

(c) 2007 Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.