Empty diplomas?

Editorial from the BCCT

PSSAs and graduation: Empty diplomas?

School districts argue that state assessment tests are of little value and so students who flunk them get diplomas anyway.

When folks are embarrassed about something, they tend not to want to talk about it. Pressed on the issue, they’ll change the subject, talk their way around it or rationalize — sometimes all three.

Public school officials did a lot of each when our reporter tried to talk to them about state assessment tests and whether they ought to factor into the graduation formula. The response of Barry Desko, Council Rock’s director of secondary education, was typical: “The PSSAs [Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests) are broad brush strokes of understanding.” Essentially, Desko says the assessments don’t paint an accurate picture of students’ abilities.

Really? Seems to us that kids who don’t pass the assessment tests haven’t learned the least they need to know to function effectively in the real world. Yet Desko disputes the tests’ value, arguing that students know more than the tests say they know.

Desko’s tortured logic is typical of the justifications school district officials offer for giving diplomas to kids who, according the PSSAs, don’t meet minimal requirements for core subjects.

How many?

We mostly don’t know — not district by district — because district officials wouldn’t tell us. We asked and they refused. Palisades in Upper Bucks was the lone exception.

We wanted the information because the state Department of Education raised the issue a few months ago, when it reported that 56,000 Pennsylvania high school students flunked state math and reading tests — but graduated anyway.

State officials characterized this as giving students “empty diplomas.” At Gov. Rendell’s urgings, the department pushed the idea of making students pass a battery of graduation tests before giving them a diploma.

We thought it was a pretty good idea — better than passing kids onto college or sending them into the work place without having competency in math and reading.

We’re not talking mastery; just minimum ability.

Yet school officials lined up pretty solidly against the proposal.

New Hope-Solebury High School Principal Steve Young is one of them. He said some students “simply do not test well.”

Be that as it may, Palisades gave us the information we requested. Here it is: 14 percent of students graduated with a less-than-proficient score in reading; 22 percent of graduates did not pass the math PSAA; and 4.6 percent didn’t meet the writing requirement.

If you want to know how many students in your district received diplomas without scoring passing grades on the PSSAs, call your district and ask. Folks in Neshaminy might be told, as we were, that the district doesn’t actually track how many graduates passed the PSSAs.

That might not come as a surprise considering Neshaminy is the only district in our area that failed to meet the state’s Adequate Yearly Progress standards.

We know it’s convenient not to track PSSA results as they correlate to the graduation rate, especially when nosey reporters start asking questions. But how is Neshaminy benefiting from its head-in-the-sand strategy?

More to the point: How are students benefiting?