State needs to focus on students, not on tests

At Locke High School in downtown Los Angeles, only 46 percent of
the Class of 2006 has passed the math section of the California
High School Exit Exam. At Palos Verdes High School, this number is
97 percent, according to reports from UCLA’s Institute for
Democracy, Education, & Access.

Only 57 percent of mathematics teachers at Locke have the
appropriate credentials to teach college preparatory math while 98
percent of teachers at Palos Verdes have those same
credentials.

Eighty-one percent of the population at Palos Verdes is white;
at Locke, 63 percent of the school is Hispanic and the other 37
percent is African American.

Roughly 1 in 10 high school seniors has failed this two-part
test, and of these students, more than half are limited English
learners or poor, according to a Los Angeles Times article.

Jack O’Connell, the state superintendent of public
instruction, has come out throughout May in support of the exit
exam in the face of these statistics. O’Connell wrote the
legislation making the exit exam mandatory in 1999, but it was not
implemented as a graduation requirement until this year.

Why does our public education system, instead of providing
much-needed resources to our youth, focus on testing and measuring
their ability to succeed through multiple-choice questions and
reading and decoding sections? Not all schools have access to the
same resources, and many students are limited by the information
and the level of education they can receive.

Students should not be punished for where they live or where
they go to school. The state should focus on addressing the large
disparities between schools like Locke and Palos Verdes.

If the governor wants to ensure that no child is left behind,
then the state government must engage educators at underfunded high
schools to ensure that student needs are being met. Leuzinger High
School, one of the sites served by the Xinachtli Project in the
Student Initiated Access Center, is one of the most diverse high
schools in the area, and counselors, though few in number, are
ready and willing to speak with state officials about improvements
that could be made regarding the exam and standardizing school
curriculums across the state.

The superintendent should focus more on ensuring that every high
school senior has the skills to graduate and go on to higher
education not because they were able to pass a test but because
they had qualified teachers, good books, clean classrooms and a
relevant education regardless of their income or ethnicity.

Chavez is the chairwoman for the Student Initiated Access
Committee.