Years of school and nothing to show for it

A century or so ago, children went to school for as long as they could, learned as much as possible, and the knowledge itself was both the goal and the reward. These days, many classrooms feature a poster showing how average income increases with educational level. If learning takes place within that byzantine system of rewards and punishments that John Gatto has described, money is the system's last, ultimate reward. A high school diploma (or equivalent) is the passport that must be shown to be hired for many jobs, or to be accepted for most further schooling. (I've written before that homeschooling circumvents this system to some extent.) It's not that I personally feel that a diploma is terribly important-- in fact, I've said the opposite-- but when society is geared so that your diploma is your passport, it's a pretty important document to have. If you aren't a homeschooler, if you've devoted 13 years to public schooling, that diploma is your final goal, your certificate of success.

With this in mind, it's very disheartening to look at California's K-12 public school system. Consider, first of all, the drop-out rate. These rates can be difficult to estimate because individual students are not tracked, but the situation isn't good in California:

[I]f one compared the number of students in California who enrolled in the ninth grade with the number of students graduating from high school four years later (the graduation rate), one would find that approximately one third of those ninth graders never graduated....

According to [Sacramento] Bee reporter Deb Kollars, "In 1993 there were 406,551 ninth-graders in California public schools. Four years later, in the spring of 1997, there were only 269,071 public school graduates — a loss of 137,480 girls and boys [for a graduation rate of 66 percent, and an attrition rate of 34 percent].

Any estimate will be inexact, but it's reasonable to say that in the 90's the K-12 system was losing roughly 1 in 3 students, and only giving diplomas to 2 in 3. But that was before the "CAHSEE" program-- which stands for CAlifornia High School Exit Exam. As you might guess, it's a standardized test that students must pass in order to be given a diploma-- starting in the 2005-2006 school year. If you haven't heard of the CAHSEE disaster, it's because no student has yet been denied a diploma. (Just wait until next summer!)

The exit exam has been given to tenth and eleventh graders. As part of the CAHSEE program, students take the text twice prior to their senior year, so that students at risk of not graduating can be identified and presumably be given additional help. (Where the money for additional help is supposed to come from is anyone's guess, in a state with massive budgetary problems.)

Telling students they're not likely to graduate because they've failed the diploma test in their trial run is a sure way to boost your drop-out rate. Of course, no one will be sure, in future years, what proportion of the dropouts are attributable to early failure on the CAHSEE. This is very convenient for the CAHSEE proponents. It's not their fault if students get discouraged and give up, they'll argue. Those (lazy, irresponsible) students are rejecting the promised extra help which would insure they would pass the exam as seniors. The early testing is meant to help students, not discourage them, they'll claim.

I would argue that if schools haven't been able to teach a student to read at grade level by the 11th grade, then one more year isn't likely to help. Some students will feel the same way and will give up and drop out, including some students who may in fact have passed the CAHSEE when it counted. (There is a lot of variability in testing, and if the test is poorly designed that's true even for repeated tests of the same person.) Luckily for the folks over at Educational Testing Services (contracted to design and score the CAHSEE), very few people will hold the test pushers responsible. If school hasn't been successful for you, it's always your fault (or your parents').

Putting the issue of early failure aside, consider the test results among juniors in 2005, that is, for the class of 2006. These results are the trial run for the first class who will be denied diplomas if they can't pass both the math and "English language arts" (ELA) parts of the CAHSEE next year. Here's how this class is doing, heading into their last year:

• 34% passed the math test
  
• 35% passed the ELA test

Students have to pass both to graduate. At best, that means a third are on track to receive diplomas. Is the State of California really prepared to decree that 2 in 3 students educated for 13 years in their public school system have not obtained minimally acceptable skills? How do they expect to place blame on students and parents if most students have not managed to obtain a minimally acceptable education? I guess they'll fall back on that other explanation: not enough funding.

If we add up the one third of all students who drop out, plus the students who will now drop out because of discouraging CAHSEE results in 10th or 11th grade, plus the students who complete all 13 years of schooling but are denied a diploma because they fail the CAHSEE, we're talking well over half of all students.

What an enormous waste. The property taxes, the school board elections, the hours wasted on buses, the cries for more funding, the nights spent on homework, the textbooks, the testing, the worksheets, the violence and angst and negative socialization, all those years of stressful parent-teacher conferences and worrisome progress reports....

What does all that add up to? Would we never learn to read without schooling? Would we never learn basic arithmetic or how to balance the checkbook? Or is the diploma that certifies you for higher wages or college the real point of it all? If so, then for more than half of all students in California, all this schooling comes to nothing.