A Mississippi lawmaker wants to water down the requirements to get a high school diploma in this state.
Did he not get the memo?
The state Department of Education is already doing this.
Last week, Rep. Tom Miles, a Forest Democrat, successfully added an amendment to an appropriations bill for K-12 schools that would allow high-school seniors who failed their state-mandated subject area exams to still graduate if they passed enough of their classes.
It was a confusing about-face for Miles, who earlier this session seemed on the right track toward restoring some objective measure to be sure that students had acquired a modicum of academic skills and knowledge before being handed a diploma. He had signed on to a bill, proposed by a Republican colleague, that would replace the four state exams that are being de-emphasized by the Department of Education with the ACT college entrance test, on which high schoolers would have to score reasonably well in order to graduate.
The reason the latter suggestion was a good idea is precisely why Miles newest idea is not.
Mississippi has been steadily walking back from high-stakes testing and instead putting the emphasis back on class grades, which is going to produce more social promotions and more inflated claims of how well the state’s students — and those who teach them — are doing.
Last week, the Department of Education was up its old tricks of comparing apples and oranges when it comes to graduation rates.
For the past couple of years, MDE — along with politicians from both political parties — has been bragging about the alleged progress the state has been making in raising its graduation rate.
The latest number, for the 2016-2017 school year, shows an “all-time high” of 83 percent, compared to 74.5 percent just four years earlier.
What MDE repeatedly ignores or fails to emphasize is that the state Board of Education lowered graduation standards during this time.
Back in 2014, when the graduation rate was 74.5 percent and the gap between Mississippi and the nation was wider, a student had to pass all four subject-area tests — in English, history, algebra and biology — to graduate. That’s no longer a requirement. There are now about a half-dozen alternatives for those who can’t pass all the subject-area tests.
It’s difficult, therefore, to tell whether there has been any real improvement in the graduation rate, or whether it’s all an illusion created by the softer standards. Last year, when the graduation rate of 82.3 percent was trumpeted, it was later learned that almost one out of five students who did graduate might not have under the previous standards.
Those who don’t like high-stakes testing, whether students, parents or teachers, say it’s not right to penalize students who do well in classes but just don’t test well. That’s a bunch of malarkey.
The students who do well in classes but bomb the state tests are students whose teachers have low standards and whose classes aren’t doing much that you could call academics.
Sure, a student might fail the state algebra test and still get a passing grade in algebra class, but that’s not because the test is too hard. It’s because there’s not much algebra being taught in the school that student attends.
Many in education keep complaining that Mississippi is putting too much emphasis on testing, that instead of real learning going on, class time is filled with teaching to the test.
If that’s so, it’s only because that’s what the school administrators choose to require because they are worried about how the scores might reflect on them and possibly jeopardize their paycheck.
Where classes are moderately rigorous, where teachers know their subject matter and are good at communicating it, teaching to the test becomes unnecessary. Students who have mastered the material at a reasonably proficient level have no problem passing standardized tests that demonstrate their mastery.
Mississippi is like most states when it comes to education reform. The politicians and the education bureaucracy talk a good game about raising the bar, but as soon as the reforms don’t produce the miraculous results promised, they conspire on ways to lower it.
Heaven forbid that any student’s spirit get crushed because he can’t do the work. Give him a participation trophy — i.e., a diploma — for showing up.
