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Tuesday, December 10, 2019

NYC Public School Parents: Achieve Inc. seriously misleads the Board of Regents on graduation exit exams

NYC Public School Parents: Achieve Inc. seriously misleads the Board of Regents on graduation exit exams

NYC Public School Parents: Achieve Inc. seriously misleads the Board of Regents on graduation exit exams 




Thanks for Stan Karp of the Education Law Center for much of the data here.

Achieve Inc. has been commissioned by the Board of Regents to research what other states are doing with their graduation exit exams, and review the current New York high school graduation requirements which mandate that students have to pass five high-stakes exit exams to graduate from high school. They are now engaged in an "information gathering phase" that is being being funded with an $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation.

Accordingly, the organization gave a presentation to the Regents today,  entitled "Graduation requirements review," which included the following statements: that "states are making adjustments to their assessments required for high school graduation" followed by this claim: "28 states administer an ELA, mathematics, science and/or social studies exam(s) that factors into students' grades or graduation requirements."

Missing from their presentation are the following facts:

FairTest reports that currently, only 11 states currently have high school graduation exit exams, down from high of 27.

For the year 2018-2019, Education Week wrote this:  "Thirteen states require students to pass a test to get a high school diploma,...Exit exams used to be more popular: In 2002, more than half the states required them.”

Yet their list included Washington which recently approved an end to exit tests for the class of 2020.

The Fordham Institute put out a report over the summer, with the following information:  "just 12 states will require students in the class of 2020 to pass exit exams, falling from a peak of 30 states requiring them for the class of 2003."



When challenged on Twitter about the disparity in their figures compared to other sources, Achieve responded that they "define them [exit exams] as assessments that matter for students - impacting course grades or graduation."  Yet to conflate states that require students to pass a test to graduate from high school with those that assign ordinary CONTINUE READING: 
NYC Public School Parents: Achieve Inc. seriously misleads the Board of Regents on graduation exit exams