Years of interventions designed to help students pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) have had little impact. A study released last night by the Public Policy Institute of California found that tutoring didn’t help students at all, while CAHSEE prep classes and continued support after twelfth grade had only modest success.
“The glass is [...]
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A good comparison benchmark for past years, if one was wanted, would be the California High School Proficiency exam, which was an alternative to a normal diploma. Someone must have old copies of that in a file drawer somewhere. No algebra on it in the 1980’s.
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I raise El’s question all the time about the regular standardized tests — could the “reformers” and editorial writers cope with the tests they so avidly require of our kids (and by which they’re eager to judge teachers)? (Especially the editorial writers, since journalists are a famously math-phobic subgroup.)
But my kids tell me that the CAHSEE is very, very low-level; both of them passed it easily with perfect scores as sophomores.
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When CAHSEE was first proposed, many opponents said it might drive the drop-out rate higher. Did this study address that? Or does another study give us any insight on whether that happened?
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Interestingly, for all we talk about the CAHSEE’s low standard, it’s substantially higher than was expected of high school students when I was one in the 1980’s, where probably half the kids who graduated were never even enrolled in an algebra class.
Especially those guiding “education reform.” 
It would be interesting to see how many 40+ year old adults could pass it on the first try.
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Caroline’s last question is a good one. A viable interpretation of the story is that the last decade wasted enormous amounts of time, energy, and money on an examination (the CAHSEE) the passing of which leads to nothing of value to the student. One of the strongest memories of my educational career was running into a former student whom I had taught in a CAHSEE-prep class when he was a 12th-grader who had already failed it multiple times (that was a requirement to get into this special class I taught). He ran up to me and said, “Mr. Smith, I passed the CAHSEE! (this was in the late spring, almost a year after he had finished high school, and therefore we hadn’t seen each other in a long time). I said, “Great, (student’s name), what are you doing now?” He said, “Nothing.” He had arrived on an education reform group’s bus chartered in order to place lots of cast members in matching, sloganized T-shirts into the backgrounds of news shots of the group’s leaders making speeches and demands.
Is this the kind of future these reform groups’ programs lead to? Is this the best we can do for the next generation?
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So in other words, the CAHSEE isn’t realistically testing whether students have reached an achievable level of academic skills.
Students who have any academic capacity at all are passing it easily as sophomores. Students with serious challenges (language, certain disabilities, severe life challenges) don’t pass it, and another year or two of school isn’t making a difference when the challenges are that serious.
Teachers already know which students have those serious challenges, so what’s the point of wasting time and money administering the CAHSEE?
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How about grade-level ENTRANCE exams…. ?
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Caroline, that’s generally accurate. The exit exam is written at a 10th grade level for English language arts and an 8th grade level for math. Most of the students who fail are newcomers with limited English. Some are also students at risk for dropping out because because they’re not engaged in school for one reason or another. Reaching out early to the EL students and other at-risk students makes sense, but that doesn’t help immigrant kids who arrive in California as high school students.
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CarolineSF: it might be a controversial point of view, but I whole heartily agree that the CAHSEE is a bar set much too low to be a meaningful measure of an individuals’ academic attainment during a thirteen year long career in the school system.
Our agency has been using an “off the shelf” commercial assessment system with displaced workers and jobseekers, as well as a substantial number of high school students interested in participating in one of our industry-specific workforce development programs for several years. One local school district invested several thousand dollars to assess their entire senior class for three years in a row, and the same group of students that successfully completed the commercial assessment were the same group of students that passed the CAHSEE!
I’m currently working to design and implement a GED program to serve in excess of 70,000 people in our community that lack a diploma or GED, and have discovered that the vast majority of the academic skills needed to pass the CAHSEE and the GED are being taught in the elementary and middle school grades, not high school. Perhaps “el” is on target with his suggestion of focusing and concentrating intervention efforts to those students with chronic rates of absenteeism.
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Also, to expand on my own comment, we should separate out high absentee students into groups making satisfactory progress and those falling behind. It’s not a given that every absent student is in academic crisis.
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