In the suburbs, conflicting emotions over new school mandates
FORT WASHINGTON, Pa. — Upper Dublin High School had the 10th highest SAT scores of any public school in Pennsylvania last year. It occupies a gleaming, just-completed $119 million building where a sushi chef supplements the cafeteria offerings on Wednesdays. Its graduation rate exceeds 99 percent, and more than 95 percent of graduates go on to two- and four-year colleges.
Yet even here, teachers are worried about being able to get all their students to pass state exams in algebra, literature and biology, which will likely be required for a diploma beginning with the current freshman class. So where does that leave the rest of Pennsylvania?
“It would be a shame if we set kids up for failure,” said Dan Ortiz, a social studies teacher at Upper Dublin High, a 1,500-student school in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs that was graced with the new building after a 2007 voter referendum.
With student diplomas potentially at stake, the pressures that high-poverty urban schools have experienced for years around standardized test scores may now be heading to the suburbs. For years, suburban educators have had far more instructional freedom than their counterparts at urban high-poverty schools because the stakes attached to testing didn’t pose much threat to them.
But the new “Keystone exams” are significantly harder than the Pennsylvania System of School
Pennsylvania’s stops and starts over new classroom standards
WEST CHESTER, Pa. — In the beginning, Pennsylvania was going to be like most other states, following a new set of national education standards and administering new national standardized tests. Are Pennsylvania students being set up for failure? New education standards, graduation exams highlight school resource needs In the suburbs, conflicting emotions over new school mandates But a lot has