Mercury News Editorial
January 10, 2006

With graduation day 2006 closing in, the Legislature will feel pressure to pull the teeth out of the state's high school exit exam. California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell has made it clear he's not about to call in the dentist.

O'Connell released a 20-page analysis in which he dissected and rejected alternatives to the exam. He said that focus now should be on giving extra time and help, at state expense, to those who haven't passed the exit exam, not on creating officially sanctioned ways around it. On Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stood foursquare behind him.

On balance, they're right. Students who cannot meet the test's demands -- bare competence in eighth-grade math and 10th-grade English -- aren't ready for a competitive work world. For years, school districts have been doing an injustice to these students -- and society -- by giving them diplomas.

Already, the exit exam has had a sobering effect, injecting urgency into high school courses while motivating thousands of students to pursue after-school tutorials and weekend remedial courses. A study commissioned by the state has found that the exam has not increased the dropout rate, as some had predicted.

Now is the time to raise the rigor in high school, not let marginal students off the hook or send them and their parents mixed signals. Instead, O'Connell believes capable students who haven't passed should have the option of taking exit-exam courses at a community college or through adult education or attending another year of high school or a charter school.

Critics of the test, who are threatening to file suit, have proposed alternatives -- substituting a portfolio of a student's work or allowing districts to create their own tests. But these would create subjective measures and undermine the state's demanding content standards.

At the same time, even O'Connell favors a one-year exemption for handicapped students, who represent 45,000 of an estimated 460,000 seniors. He should keep an open mind also to granting narrow exceptions to other students who truly have mastered skills but become flummoxed by standardized tests, or to awarding an alternate certificate to say, an English learner who's a math wiz.

The problem with changing the policy now is that the numbers are shaky. As of last fall, an independent evaluator estimated that 100,000 students -- 22 percent of seniors -- hadn't passed either the math or English sections despite testing since their sophomore year. For minorities, it was closer to one-third. But if you subtract special-education students, it was closer to 70,000. Since the fall 20,000 more students have passed English and 19,000 have passed math, with two more opportunities to take the test.

O'Connell predicts that 90 percent of the students eventually will pass. If so, that still would leave 45,000 students without a diploma, many of them poor, minority kids in low-performing schools. What's not clear is how many would lack the credits needed to graduate anyway.

The state needs to take a hard look, after June, at who these kids are.

Meanwhile, O'Connell and school districts should stand firm while fulfilling his pledge to those students struggling with the exam ``not (to) turn our backs on you.''

Copyright 2006 -- San Jose Mercury News Editorial