Exit Test a Done Deal for Most Students
While the vast majority of next year’s senior class has already aced both the English and math portions of the high school exit exam, there are hundreds of local students who haven’t, according to data released Monday by the state Department of Education.
Now they’ll have just three more chances to pass the test or they won’t get a diploma in the spring.
Starting with the class of 2006, passage of both sections of the California High School Exit Exam is a graduation requirement. Statewide, 88 percent of all incoming seniors have successfully cleared the English hurdle and an equal percentage has met the minimum benchmark in math, said Jack O’Connell, the state’s superintendent of public instruction.
In the South Bay area, most high schools are exceeding the state averages.
Campuses in the El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Redondo Beach and Torrance unified school districts, for example, all have English and math pass rates of at least 94 percent, according to calculated estimates that don’t take into account dropouts or students who didn’t take the test a second time during their junior years.
Some schools, including El Segundo High, Palos Verdes High and Palos Verdes Peninsula High School, are boasting pass rates of nearly 100 percent.
But other campuses still have their work cut out for them, data shows. At each of Los Angeles Unified’s Gardena and Narbonne high schools as well as Centinela Valley’s Hawthorne and Leuzinger high schools, at least 100 soon-to-be-seniors have yet to pass either the math or English sections.
Exit exam scores weren’t the only figures released Monday. The California Department of Education, as it usually does this time of year, also released a battery of ultra-specific scores by grade and subject that show how well students know the state standards.
And, if that weren’t enough, there were also results from the California Achievement Text, Sixth Edition, or CAT-6, that indicate how students in this state measure up against a national sample.
All of these scores will be scrambled together at the end of this month to assign each school a triple-digit rating — on a scale of 200 to 1,000 — as part of the Academic Performance Index, the cornerstone of the state’s recent education reform efforts.
Naturally, the standards tests carry the most weight in each school’s API score. But for students, the exit exam can be a bigger source of concern. That’s because starting this year, it has dire consequences.
“It’s high stakes,” said Bruce Auld, superintendent of the El Segundo Unified School District. “People are really anxious about it.”
Students first take the test as sophomores, but they get up to five additional chances to pass the test before graduation.
While O’Connell said the 88 percent pass rates for the class of 2006 exceeded his projections, stubborn achievement gaps continue to separate minority and special education students from the statewide average.
For example, he said African-American students made a 21 percentage-point gain in math and a 19 percentage-point gain in English, yet by the 11th grade they produced passing rates of only 75 percent and 82 percent, respectively.
Latino students also made gains but were separated by a similar margin. And only about half of special education students in the class of 2006 have passed the math test, while 54 percent have passed the English test.
O’Connell said he was troubled by the “persistence of the achievement gap among many of our subgroups.”
“I expect our high schools to focus on those students who are in danger of not mastering the skills measured by this exam,” he said, “and I want to remind all students that passage of the exit exam will be a graduation requirement this year. I urge them to take it seriously.”
Centinela Valley Superintendent Cheryl White is taking it very seriously. She said her district will take an aggressive approach to getting hundreds of students over the hump this year.
In addition to optional preparatory classes after school and on Saturdays, she said seniors who have yet to pass one or both sections of the exit exam will be required to take a prep class during the school day.
“They’re not going to have a choice,” White said. “This is what I like to call a mandatory elective.”
In addition, 12th-graders who haven’t passed at Hawthorne High will be grouped together in their advisory periods to focus on concepts of the test.
Similar prep courses will be offered throughout other local districts — even Torrance Unified, where pass rate percentages for the class of 2006 were well into the 90s.
“We work with students to analyze where the gaps are, why they’re not passing the tests, and we try to go back and teach what they haven’t learned,” said TUSD Assistant Superintendent Laurie Love.
Hilary McLean, spokeswoman for the state Education Department, said local school districts can decide whether to allow students who haven’t passed the test to participate in graduation ceremonies. But they won’t be considered official graduates, she said.
Some legislators have been critical of the program and said students who fail to pass the exam should be given an alternate means to prove their proficiency.
In June, the Assembly approved a bill that would allow high schools to determine if students who fail the exit exam can qualify for graduation using other assessments. Such programs would require approval from the state school superintendent.
Despite the numbers released Monday, many high school students are likely to fail the exam and thus not receive a diploma, said the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles.
She said she is concerned about the percentage of minority students who have failed at least one section of the exit exam: “That’s just not acceptable to me.”
Bass also urged the Department of Education to release the percentage of students who have passed both sections of the exam so far, giving a more accurate picture of performance.
That’s something the Los Angeles Unified School District has done on its own.
According to LAUSD officials, local schools’ pass rates reflected the range across the district: 81 percent at San Pedro and Westchester high schools, 74 percent at Banning, 72 percent at Carson, 68 percent at Narbonne and 52 percent at Gardena. Harbor Teacher Preparatory — a 130-student high school operating at Harbor College — was the only LAUSD campus where 100 percent of students have passed.
Meanwhile, there were other scores to talk about. Results from the California Standardized Testing and Reporting program, which tests 4.8 million students in grades 2-11, showed improvement while revealing persistent achievement gaps.
The STAR tests are scored on a five-level system — advanced, proficient, basic, below basic and far below basic.
The state goal is for every student to achieve at the proficient or advanced level. Indeed, more students reached those levels than last school year on the math, English, history and science tests. Still, on each of those tests, more than half the students have not reached proficiency.
Locally, educators Monday were looking for trends within the STAR figures released by the state.
Auld, El Segundo’s chief, said his fourth-graders saw a significant rise in their writing scores. Torrance Unified’s Love said so far she’s noticed that more students overall have moved into the “advanced” category.
“Our students continue to show improvement, which of course is what our goal is,” she said.
Statewide, schools made little or no progress in eliminating the achievement gap between white and Latino and black students, the results show.
STAR results also are used to calculate how well the state is meeting the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Under the federal law, states must ensure all students are proficient in reading and math by the 2013-2014 school year. Schools must show yearly progress and include English-language learners and special education students. That measurement, called Adequate Yearly Progress, is scheduled to be released at the end of August.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.