Here’s a multiple choice question. Some Mississippi state lawmakers and a bunch of Mississippi high school teachers and administrators want to do away with the required subject-area tests because:
A. The tests are too hard.
B. The tests are keeping otherwise good students from graduating.
C. The tests waste time that could be better spent earning college scholarships.
D. None of the above.
The correct answer is D.
Even though opponents of the required tests in algebra, English, biology and U.S. history might cite some of those other reasons, it’s nonsense.
All four subject-area tests have a low bar for a passing score.
The state has already watered down graduation requirements — mostly with alternative paths to a diploma for those who can’t pass the four exams — that 84 percent of seniors graduated this past year, the highest ever.
If a student can’t pass those four tests, it is illogical to think that the same student could score high enough on a college entrance test to get a merit-based scholarship.
Still, some of this nonsense got a forum at the Capitol this past week thanks to state Rep. Tom Miles, D-Forest, who has been pushing to further de-emphasize the subject-area tests.
Miles apparently wants to return to a time when social promotion was rampant in this state, when it was much easier than it is today for weak schools to graduate students who couldn’t read or do math past an elementary school level.
He would like to replace the objectivity of standardized tests with the subjectivity of classroom grades to measure whether a student knows enough to get a diploma.
Or if not that, use the ACT college entrance exam instead as the graduation barometer.
“It’s a sad world we live in today that a child can go all the way through school but because they have test anxiety they’re unable to graduate,” Miles said.
We hate to break it to State Rep. Miles, but if they’re anxious about subject-area tests, they should be just as anxious about the ACT.
What is truly sad is what one of the educators, presumably called to bolster Miles’ case, had to say.
The 10th grade English teacher in the failing Jackson School District claimed that her students on average read at a fourth-grade level.
She doesn’t see how she can be expected in one year to get them ready to pass the English test the state requires.
This teacher understandably may be feeling pressure, but the problem is not the test that’s coming up for her students next year. It’s all the tests — if they were even given tests by their teachers — that they must have failed and were still promoted to the next grade year after year.
If the 10th grade English teacher is not able to perform a miracle, should these students be awarded diplomas anyway?
A. Yes.
B. No.
C. Not just diplomas but also college scholarships.
D. Depends on their level of “test anxiety.”
The answer should be obvious.
