The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) has passed a proposal to make sweeping reforms to state graduation requirements, drawing widespread reactions from school district administrators, union leaders, and community members in Lower Merion and across the state.
The most controversial, and perhaps most talked about, section of these new graduation requirements regards the Keystone exams. The Keystone exams, approved by the Independent Regulatory Review Commission on October 22, would require students to pass six standardized tests before receiving a diploma.
The Keystone exams would replace the final exams in specific courses of four different subject areas: English, math, science, and social studies. Students can either take a Keystone exam, a local assessment from the district (if available), or an Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate exam to compete that course. The tests will account for at least 1/3 of a student’s final grade.
The tests will be rolled out in stages, as tests in Algebra I, biology, and English literature are planned to be available for incoming freshmen next school year. All ten Keystone Exams will be implemented by the 2014-2015 school year.
The movement for state graduation exams can be traced back to 2005, when a commission was formed to study career and college readiness in PA, explained Leah Harris, deputy press secretary for the PA Department of Education.
“One of the suggestions they came up with was a uniform graduation policy. From that, the state board of education looked into the subject and realized ‘Yes, we need to give the Pennsylvania diploma weight,’” said Harris.
This brought about the Graduation Competency Assessments proposal in 2008, tests that were “high stakes–if you didn’t pass, you wouldn’t get your high school diploma,” said Jerry Oleksiak, treasurer of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the largest labor organization in Pennsylvania, representing more than 191,000 teachers and support staff.
Eventually, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association compromised with the PDE to create the Keystone Exams 1.0, a proposal with tests that a coalition of education agencies “w[as] not thrilled with,” according to Oleksiak.
“The problem was that these exams were coming in one way or another. There was no way to stop them legislatively,” Oleksiak said.
The coalition of education agencies came up in April 2009 with Keystone Exams 2.0. This proposal called for exams worth no more than 20 percent of the student’s final grade, combined with a local assessment option.
While the final proposal passed in October may not have carried everything the coalition wanted, “there was enough in there to fix the mess that it was initially to withdraw our opposition,” Oleksiak said.
Lower Merion School District, however, opposes these tests. The School Board objects because “the current data we have available from the PSSAs…are sufficient and actually excellent in identifying which students are struggling in the areas of reading and math,” said District Director of Curriculum Steve Barbato.
“We’ve had that data running for the past five years and we have finally have gone to a point that where we have a historical record on students that we can do comparative data and find out where their strengths or where their weaknesses are in specific areas within reading and math,” said Barbato. “The Keystone Exams are basically going against the history that we’ve had with the PSSAs.”
However, Harris argued that the Keystone exams, which will supplement the 11th grade PSSAs, would be better indicators of student achievement.
“We thought that the PSSAs, although good, are a general look at achievement, not a specific glimpse at how well a student understands the course,” said Harris.
David W. Patti, President and CEO of the Pennsylvania Business Council, believed the PSSAs could not provide any accurate sense of a student’s learning.
“The scary thing is that we really don’t know how they’re doing. Given what they’re handing in and what’s being scored, only 55% of the students are scoring at a proficient level right now in 11th grade. Maybe 45% are goofing off…I don’t know,” said Patti. “Yet almost 99% of the same students are getting their high school diploma a year later.”
In the spring of 2009, the PBC’s Policy Roundtable conducted a poll of over 400 businesspersons from all different backgrounds and levels of business on the skills of high school graduates. 80% of those polled supported “new guidelines that would require high school students to… prove they are proficient in basic skills by passing a series of common exams to graduate.”
“When non-college high school graduates come to us, we don’t feel that a lot of them have the math skills, the reading and the writing skills…necessary for success. And so they have a diploma, but we can’t count on that as meaning much,” said Patti.
To calm fears that the Keystones would be “pass/fail,” Harris mentioned that for a student who failed a specific portion of a certain test (e.g. graphing in algebra), the student would be able to do a project to show that he/she “understands the subject material.”
When asked about whether the District considered the project option in deciding a course of action, Barbato said the district has received little, if any, information from the state.
“The PDE hasn’t really clarified how the process would go about. Who would approve the project? This whole process needs to be outlined for us,” said Barbato.
Barbato disagreed with some of the PDE’s actions. With all 501 school districts forced to administer graduation exams of some kind, Barbato questioned whether such wide implementation was necessary.
“They’re brushing all the 501 school districts in PA as the same. Why are we being placed in the same place? There are students in our school district who do struggle but we already have an assessment system in place,” said Barbato.
While the District opposes the Keystone exams, it is unsure of whether to provide their own assessments that would replace the Keystones, said Barbato, noting the high cost and the fact that the PDE “[doesn’t] have anything in place to go through the process of validating a local assessment.”
All those interviewed said public education needs reform. Yet, some believe that these tests will not cure the problems that plague learning.
Loraine Carter of Concerned Black Parents, an organization that advocates on behalf of minority students in Lower Merion said, “We haven’t gotten public education right, and the Keystone exams are no indication that the government will get it right with this new legislation either.”
Matt Rublin
Class of 2011
