We have fought it off in Connecticut; we have killed its eggs and destroyed its nests, before it could take hold and begin its mission from Satan.
But now, it has shown its hideous face. Yes, the State Board of Education has acknowledged that it is considering (dare we say the words?) high school exit exams.
The horror. The horror.
Your kid has read Moby Dick. She can say “open the door” and “where is the library?” in French. He can dissect a frog with the speed and confidence one might use on a Boston Market half-chicken.
Your child has absorbed the sermons about the horrors of “bullying.” Your kid knows how to place a condom over a banana with the gentle accuracy one might use to do brain surgery.
And yet…and yet, there are political appointees, threatening to inflict an exit exam on your kids, to force them to jump through one more hoop; just as you are ready to sell the house, move to Florida, and play lots of golf.
Fat Chance
In truth, Connecticut will be the last state to ever require exit exams. The vast, suburban middle class has found just the right school district in just the right town – and has been willing to pay hefty property taxes as a subtle form of tuition—to guarantee that the kids will prosper and not grow up to be newspaper columnists.
These parents aren’t interested in an independent review of the goods and services.
And the ugly truth is that the exit exams would indicate the failure of the urban schools to educate poor children. We already know that – and the powers-that-be aren’t inclined to mandate yet another confirmation of the racial gap.
“Title I,” the multi-billion-dollar federal boondoggle left over from the 1960s’ War on Poverty, has lavished resources on schools with poor students, with little to no effect on bringing them up to snuff. They “graduate,” if they graduate, and move on, without the embarrassment of a high school exit exam to confirm what we already choose to ignore.
Don’t ask questions if you aren’t willing to respond to the answers. Few states are more hostile to mandating competition or reform or change in education than is Connecticut, in its fat, happy, labor union kind of way.
School choice? Vouchers? No, the teacher unions already own the state legislature. We wouldn’t respond to a school nightmare, no matter what the exit exam showed.
Connecticut is cranky and stingy with its charter schools; Connecticut plops down magnet schools in Hartford, only to fend off more drastic desegregation remedies. We won’t provide robust choice to families trapped in lousy schools. Why should we mandate yet another confirmation of our indifference?
The track record for high school exit exams is what one might expect: if, in fact, the exit exams hold back an embarrassing number of students, then parents pressure the hapless school officials to lower the bar. Harvard Professor Nathan Glazer offered up this scenario for “standards” in public education: “We know that the level of the standard will be set either too low, to accommodate more failing students, or too high, where there will be enormous pressure, which will be hard to resist, to reduce the standard.”
Beyond the psychological and political stress that comes with exit exams, the more practical obstacle is the lack of clarity about what, exactly, we expect the standard to be for the product pushed out the high school door. Would we insist on philosopher/ kings? Or dreamy theoretical physicists? Or package handlers at the Federal Express warehouse? A Pew Charitable Trust study last year found that many college graduates lack sophisticated literacy skills. Would exit tests demand literary skills from the high school cannon fodder, if they are not required at college?
What would become of the public-school fluff; the anti-bullying, safe-sex, diversity-loving propaganda classes, if the exit exams were designed to measure reading, writing and arithmetic?
Exit exams in Connecticut? It won’t happen, but it would be entertaining to watch.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
