The New GED: Making A Second Chance So Much Harder
In a book on expanding opportunity in higher education, Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, Mike Rose describes the GED exam and the students in adult education programs who have come back to school to try to improve their education and their credentials: “I am struck by the diversity of backgrounds and skills in this single room. People with postsecondary degrees from another country and a man who has barely been inside a schoolhouse. People in their early twenties, a lifetime in front of them, and a woman with grandchildren, who comes to school to keep her mind alert. People navigating cultures and languages. People starting over.” (p. 39)
Rose published Back to School in 2012, right after for-profit Pearson, the mega-publisher of textbooks, standardized tests, and test-related curricula, joined with the American Council on Education to take over the GED program but before January of 2014, when a new GED test—much harder, much more expensive, and administered on-line—was launched. The GED has for decades been the way so many people without a high school diploma have been able to climb back on the path to employment or further education.
Pearson’s partner in the new GED Testing Service, the American Council on Education (ACE) is an organization of college presidents, and it is presumably with ACE’s encouragement that the new, revised GED exam emphasizes college readiness despite that many who aspire to pass the GED seek job placement or technical education. The new GED is based on the new Common Core standards, which emphasize analysis, higher-order thinking, and more advanced math. This blog described the new GED and even a sample of one of the impossible-seeming questions in a post last January. That post linked to an in-depth report about a collapse across the United States in the rate of passage of the GED, a sudden drop in scores that accompanied the re-design of the test. Passage in 2014 dropped by 90 percent: “The numbers are shocking: In the United States, according to the GED Testing Service, 401,388 people earned a GED in 2012, and about 540,000 in 2013. This year… only about 55,000 have passed nationally. That is a 90-percent drop off from last year.”
The problems have continued. Here is a July 2015 report from the Columbus Dispatch: “GED Testing Service, a for-profit partnership that has the monopoly on the high-school equivalency degree in Ohio, is on pace to award about 3,700 GED certificates this year, according to the Ohio Department of Education. That is less than a quarter of the 16,500 Ohioans on average who got GEDs each year between 2000 and 2013. As bad as that 2015 number is, it’s up substantially from 2014, when only 2,164 Ohioans passed the test, down from more than 15,000 the previous year. That drop coincided with GED Testing Service’s tripling the price of the test to $120, charging for practice tests for the first time, and selling practice materials on its website.”
Last month, Kentucky Public Radio reported a similar drop in the passage rate: “The number of Kentuckians passing the General Educational Development test, or GED, has dropped by 85 percent in the last two years, according to the state’s adult education program. During the The New GED: Making A Second Chance So Much Harder | janresseger:
