Exit Exam is Straitjacket.

[George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>]

Don Arnstine spent 35 years teaching in public schools and at colleges, 
including the University of California, Davis.  He is responding to the 
editorial "48,000 To Go: Keep Exit Exam and Students on Track  on Track," 
which appeared in the Sacramento Bee on March 30.

http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/14243897p-15062556c.html

Exit exam is academic straitjacket
By Don Arnstine -- Special To The Bee
Published  Sunday, April 16, 2006
Story appeared in Forum section, Page E3


What a shame. At the beginning of the school year more than 90,000 seniors 
had not passed the exit exam. But according to the school district's 
consultant, there's just no alternative to the exit exam. So these 90,000 
souls who faithfully attended public schools for 12 years, passed their 
courses and did what they were told must keep taking the exit exam (for 
which there is no legitimate substitute) until a miracle occurs and they 
pass it.

So who wrote the exit exam? It was a collection of consultants, panelists 
and "experts." All of them educators, but none of whom ever actually met 
the children who will have to take the exam.

Why on earth should every child in the state of California be obligated to 
acquire a specific fund of information selected by strangers who never even 
met them, their parents or their teachers? We would have to assume that 
students, teachers and parents in California have no idea of what's worth 
learning.

There are two very serious shortcomings in California's high school exit 
exam. First, the content that is tested for represents only a small 
fraction of all that's worth learning, and the insistence that everyone 
learn this content means that students will never have the opportunity to 
learn anything else - including what interests them.

Second, when all students must take the same exam they will, sooner or 
later, be expected to study the same curriculum, the same courses, the same 
knowledge. The successful student, the one who wins the college 
scholarship, will be the one with the highest scores on the exam. It will 
not be the creative student, the one with a rich imagination or the one who 
has explored a subject in depth and has learned more about it than even her 
teacher knows. When the curriculum is determined by exams, nothing will be 
learned by accident, or just for the satisfaction of knowing. Everything 
will be for the test.

The exit exam is an academic straitjacket. Schools and teachers must teach 
for whatever is on the exam. But is it the goal of public education to 
insure that every child in the state learn the same facts? And why should 
we take such satisfaction in this list of facts, rather than any other? 
Meanwhile, the things we wish all students would learn, like helping 
others, obeying the law, becoming involved citizens, are no longer included 
among our educational goals. All we want them to do is just pass the test.

*

George Sheridan