Many parents dread 2009, when Maryland law requires students to pass all four of the state’s High School Assessments to get a diploma, so there are growing public fears about such high-stakes testing. Several bills introduced in the General Assembly direct the Maryland State Board of Education to downgrade the HSAs from sole graduation requirement to a mix of classroom work and standardized tests. Parents and officials must remember that a diploma is worthless unless the graduate holding it has demonstrated at least basic proficiency in essential lifeskills like reading and math. Too many Maryland schools have struggled for too many years to produce successive classes in which the vast majority of graduates receive meaningful diplomas.
Perhaps predictably, after years of warning that passing all four HSAs would be mandatory for the Class of 2009, state School Superintendent Nancy Grasmick recently started explicitly backpedaling in Annapolis while seeking tax dollars to re-bid HSA contracts. “The linkage of assessments to the high school diploma is a proposal,” Grasmick told legislators, one-third of whom are newly elected. It’s “not carved in stone,” she assured them.
Just a proposal? That’s news to thousands of parents with children whose permanent transcripts now include “Not Proficient” in English, biology, algebra or social studies. It’s also news to Del. Charles Barkley,
D-Montgomery, who wondered aloud why “we’re spending $100 million on tests that don’t count.”
But education advocates as diverse as The Maryland Coalition for Excellent Schools and analyst Zalee Harris have been warning for years that as many as 24,000 high school students statewide — 5,500 in Prince George’s County alone — are in danger of not graduating in two years. Many are “permanent ninth graders” who have never been taught the subject matter covered by the HSAs. Last school year, just 78 percent of Montgomery County high school students passed the algebra and biology assessments, as did fewer than half of Prince George’s County youngsters.
Worse, parents are not allowed to review either the actual test questions or their child’s HSA answers, even though under current rules a failing grade on one test means no diploma. According to the Maryland State Department of Education Web site, officials “release a form of the high school assessment each year” to provide “an example of how students are being assessed.” An “example” doesn’t cut it when your kid’s future is on the line and you want to know specifically what he or she hasn’t been sufficiently taught.
Besides those tests and their kids’ results, parents should also be demanding to know why so many Maryland children are still soacademically ill-prepared despite the billions of tax dollars spent in the past decade and more by politicians and education bureaucrats promising improvements.
