This month and last, as also happened during May-June 2002 in what threatens to become a new seasonal ritual, efforts to adopt state graduation testing are under fire. Nevada has announced that 12 percent of its 12th graders may not graduate. Florida reports that 13,000 students may be denied diplomas, while the number in Massachusetts is said to be 5,000. Parents are reportedly furious. Civil rights groups are threatening boycotts. In Massachusetts, seven communities have announced their intention to ignore state guidelines governing the issuance of diplomas. Everywhere, media outlets are highlighting heart-wrenching tales of "B" students who can't pass the math graduation exam, with suggestions that the exam systems are themselves flawed.
In fact, these exit exams are pitched at a rather modest level and offer students multiple chances to pass, which leads to an entirely different explanation: perhaps a nontrivial number of students actually lack mastery of essential knowledge and skills. If "B" students are failing, either their school grades are too high or they have not learned basic content. Either way, merely packing them off into the adult world of college or work does them no favors and ensures that our schools will continue to shortchange a new generation of students.
These high-profile complaints coexist with polls showing that more than 80 percent of Americans support high-school graduation testing. The result has been the inevitable call for appropriate "refinements," spearheaded by "temperate" critics.
This is a siren's song. Standards-based reform is alluring because it promises that all graduates will master critical knowledge and skills. Setting bona fide performance standards makes it inevitable that some students (and schools) will fail to meet them. This poses a daunting political challenge in a democratic society where those who fail have specific incentives to challenge the legitimacy of the system, while the larger community will little notice the diffuse benefits of better-prepared graduates and more demanding schools.
Simply put, there are two kinds of accountability: coercive and suggestive. Coercive accountability uses incentives and sanctions (like withholding diplomas) to ensure that students master specified content and that educators teach that content. In such a system, school performance no longer rests upon fond wishes and good intentions.
Suggestive accountability seeks to improve schooling through informal social pressures and norms, by using tests as a diagnostic device, and by increasing coordination across schools and classrooms. These changes produce educational benefits, but they tend to be modest, uneven, and dependent upon individual volition. Relying on these is tantamount to asserting that General Electric's famed six-sigma initiative would produce the same results if divorced from employee evaluation, promotion, compensation, or termination.
In practice, these rival visions constitute two ends of a continuum. Many accountability programs begin with a rhetorical commitment to the transformative power of coercive accountability and then are eroded by opposition into something more like suggestions.
Let's face it. The details of accountability - governing the content to be tested, the assessments used, what constitutes adequate mastery, and how to deal with students who fail-are inherently arbitrary. Neither developmental psychologists nor psychometricians can prove that specified content must be taught at a particular grade level. Such decisions are imperfect judgments about the needs and capacities of children.
Accountability advocates have difficulty standing firm on program details precisely because decisions regarding what students need to know, when they need to know it, and how well they need to know are reasonable approximations.
Loath to concede that graduation testing can never be perfect, such advocates try to placate critics with one "refinement" after another to the standards, the tests or the system of consequences. Adjusting required scores, giving students additional chances, adding essays, or delaying implementation can be appropriate. But no amount of tweaking will yield a perfect instrument, so the result is most apt to be a series of compromises that leave the fa??ade of accountability but eventually strip it of its power to motivate reform.
Ultimately, the choice is between an imperfect system and none at all. Absent coercive accountability, we have seen how easy it is to graduate ill-equipped students and excuse inadequate school performance - especially among the most disadvantaged students. In the end, standards are a useful and essential artifice.
For those who endorse graduation testing, there is promise on the horizon. While the push for coercive accountability initially generates fierce opposition, once these systems are in place for a while they become part of the "grammar of schooling" for parents, voters, and educators.
Eventually, critics find themselves in the unenviable position of attacking established benchmarks that help ensure that students are learning, teachers are teaching, and schools are serving their public purpose. The question confronting state officials in Nevada, Florida, Massachusetts, and many other places is whether they will use graduation tests to raise the bar for educational achievement or permit them to become another hollow rite of spring.
"States high school exit exams have become political minefields," by June Kronholz, Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2003
"Success in the schools," editorial, Boston Globe, June 9, 2003
Frederick Hess is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute