In a world where a high school diploma has decreasing relevance
to the world of work, you’d think high schools would be doing
everything they can to make them more meaningful.
In a world where a high school diploma has decreasing relevance to the world of work, you’d think high schools would be doing everything they can to make them more meaningful.
That is why we’re baffled by the action taken by the San Benito High School District Board of Trustees, which recently approved a policy to grant “certificates of completion” to seniors who complete their course work but fail the California High School Exit Exam.
What’s really at stake, going by purely anecdotal evidence, is that the district is providing seniors who fail the test with a fig leaf that allows them to take part in graduation ceremonies with their friends. God forbid anyone should be embarrassed by their absence.
But that’s just the point of the test, isn’t it? If no one fails, if there is no price to be paid for passing what is clearly not a difficult examination, then all we’ve done is provided a back door to the kind of social promotion policies that got our schools into academic trouble in the first place.
And make no mistake: the test is not that difficult to pass. Here’s a sample question:
“Some students attend school 180 of the 365 days in a year. About what part of the year do they attend school? 18, 50, 75, or 180 percent?
If you can’t answer that, then you don’t deserve a high school diploma – except in one instance:
We believe that reasonable accommodations need to be made for the special ed kids whose needs were never properly addressed by the No Child Left Behind Act, which gave rise to the CAHSEE exam in the first place.
But granting such an exception is a far cry from granting a virtual blank check to kids who simply can’t be bothered to learn enough to pass a basic skills test.
A high school diploma qualifies you for very little anymore, and yet without it young people are condemned to lives of low wages and underachievement. At some point, the student has to make a decision about his or her future, but schools shouldn’t make it easier to get a faux diploma that makes the kid feel good but actually demeans the achievements of those hard-working kids who took their studies seriously.
At the very least, the district should decide that students who get certificates of completion cannot march with the recipients of real diplomas during graduation ceremonies. Such a policy would at least treat such certificates for what they really are: fig leaves for failure.
