Report: Some groups struggle to pass HSA

Special-needs students, some minorities at risk as states move toward high-stakes exit exams

The CEP report is the Washington-based group's seventh annual to examine high school exit exams. By 2012, more public school students nationally will be required to pass exit exams to graduate, especially as more states move away from minimum competency tests, according to the report.

Beginning with the upcoming senior class, all students must pass four High School Assessment tests in algebra, biology, English and government to earn a diploma. Students who fail an exam twice can complete a project related to the test they failed to graduate.

Before the HSA, students had to pass the Maryland Functional Test before they got a diploma. The state did away with the test because it was so easy that many students passed the exams in middle school, state Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick has said. The HSA, finally approved in October by the state school board, is a 10th-grade level exam.

As of January, 53 percent of the state's special-needs students had passed all four HSAs, and 73 percent of state seniors on free or reduced meals have passed all four tests.

Seventy-four percent of the state's black students have passed all four tests, compared to 95 percent of white students. Eighty-five percent of Latino students have passed all four tests, compared to 96 percent of Asian-American students, according to the report.

All told, 88 percent of the state's upcoming seniors have passed all four HSAs.

As of March, 982 county students were eligible for the test-free alternative, according to school system data. Of those students, 466 were black and 397 students have special-needs, the data show. As for students on free or reduced-price meal plans, 332 were eligible and 293 Latino students were eligible for the projects.

The HSAs and its alternative have been a hot-button issue. The Montgomery school system and several lawmakers have expressed concern with the HSAs, saying the tests should not be a graduation requirement for the Class of 2009. The county school board has sent two letters to the state asking state educators to dump the HSAs and the alternative. Every bill proposed to alter the tests failed in this year's General Assembly.

"Those exams are not a measure of a child's preparedness for the workplace or for college," said school board member Christopher S. Barclay (Dist. 4) of Takoma Park. "The HSAs should not be used as a requirement for graduation. We do not believe it is the way to go. It is not a high standards exam and the students who do not pass them should not be punished."

In discussing the exams, some county school leaders have also complained that the state Department of Education takes too long to get scores back to local school districts. The longer the delay, the longer it takes to give students the intervention to pass the HSA.

The report noted "major challenges" in developing exit exams, "such as managing the tight timelines required to develop multiple exams or figuring out how to get exam results back to school districts quickly," according to CEP. Beginning with the May 2009 HSA, the test will be all multiple-choice. The state Department of Education scrapped written-response questions from the test to reduce the turnaround time on scores.

In the report, the CEP recommends that states better research the effects of exit exams on black and Latino students and poorer children; get final passage rates to determine exactly who is denied a diploma; and put more thought into how exit exams are implemented.

"These high school exit exams are having an impact on a broad majority of students throughout the country, yet we don't know anything about them," Jack Jennings, CEP president and CEO, said during a Tuesday conference call.