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Forum: Graduation tests suggest 'ugly truths' about public education
After the first few weeks of my seventh-grade English class, I came home enraged about a test. My perfect grades from elementary-school English meant nothing in the face of an unyielding and unfair test on adverbs and prepositions that I somehow had failed.
Continue to Athens Banner-Herald - Forum: Graduation tests suggest 'ugly truths' about public education
After studying for hours and working hard to memorize all those new words and concepts, I took a retest - and failed again. No amount of complaining would change the result; I didn't know a preposition from a participle or an adverb from an adjective.
Finally, after plenty of fuss, I buckled down, studied harder and managed to pass the test on the third try. In doing so, I learned a valuable lesson about the value of perseverance. I also earned a strong reprimand from my teacher for my repeated complaints about retaking the test.
But, as a recent Banner-Herald story showed, testing can reveal ugly truths about education ("Despite his 3.0 GPA, senior can't graduate," Sunday).
Graduation tests, which measure basic skills that students are supposed to have learned in the course of their education, are necessary to provide some measure of accountability in secondary education. If a student cannot pass a basic test of skills, that student has not earned a high school diploma.
There are many explanations for why students finish their schooling without learning enough to pass such a test. The fault might be with teachers who failed to teach their students the basic curriculum. It might be with a system that promotes undeserving students to the next grade in the name of social considerations. It might even be with the students who simply did not learn the material. Although the latter possibility always seems to be furthest from the minds of testing critics, in the end responsibility should rest with the students themselves.
At my high school, I volunteered some mornings to help tutor students who needed to pass the state mathematics test for graduation. Although I entered the tutoring sessions with high hopes, I was shocked by the apathy of most of the students. For them, it wasn't a question of lacking test-taking skills; many had not even learned basic math concepts such as multiplication tables and fractions. And while some tried hard to cram the needed information, many took no interest in trying to improve.
Our culture of false self-esteem, however, demands that students never be told the truth about their actual skills and achievements. I remember how strange it felt to be awarded a trophy for T-ball league with the title of "Champion Athlete" along with everyone else on my team. We hadn't won a game and I hadn't played particularly well. But apparently just showing up was good enough to merit a shiny trophy, regardless of the actual contributions made to the team.
This culture has steadily crept into the field of education, resulting in such landmark pedagogical advances as replacing red ink with green or purple ink for grading papers to soothe the bruised egos of students.
Are tests perfect measures for everything? No, but at the basic level of achievement that graduation tests measure, they provide a badly needed measure of accountability. By gauging how much students across the state actually learn in such critical areas as math, English, and science, graduation tests ensure that a Georgia high school diploma signifies that students obtained at least a basic education.
Establishing standards that students must meet in order to graduate prevents high schools from becoming mere diploma mills, and benefits students by making them learn these needed skills before heading out into the work force or on to college. When 1 in 4 entering freshmen in Georgia colleges need remedial education, the emphasis should be on raising standards, not eliminating them.
The question should not be whether forcing students to take tests to see how much they learned in high school is unfair. The real question should be, as former President George W. Bush so helpfully put it, "Is our children learning?" The sad answer that graduation tests tell us is that no, they is not.
• Chris Chiego of Athens is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia, where he majored in history and international affairs. He plans to pursue a doctoral degree in political science beginning this fall.
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