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High School Exit Exams Dwindle to About Half a Dozen States

Elaine S. Povich — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 15:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Jill Norton, an education policy adviser in Massachusetts, has a teenage son with dyslexia and ADHD. Shelley Scruggs, an electrical engineer in the same state, also has a teenage son with ADHD. Both students go to the same technical high school.

But this fall, Norton and Scruggs advocated on opposite sides of a Massachusetts ballot referendum scrapping the requirement that high school kids pass a standardized state test to graduate.

Norton argued that without the high bar of the standard exam, kids like hers won’t have an incentive to strive. But Scruggs maintained that kids with learning disorders also need different types of measurements than standardized tests to qualify for a high school diploma.

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Voters last month approved the referendum, 59% to 41%, ending the Massachusetts requirement. There and in most other states, Scruggs’ position against testing is carrying the day.

Just seven states now require students to pass a test to graduate, and one of those — New York — will end its Regents Exam as a requirement by the 2027-28 school year. Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas and Virginia still require testing to graduate, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a group that opposes such mandates.

In Massachusetts, teachers unions favored getting rid of the exam as a graduation requirement. They argued it forced them to teach certain facts at the expense of in-depth or more practical learning. But many business leaders were in favor of keeping the test, arguing that without it, they will have no guarantee that job applicants with high school diplomas possess basic skills.

State by state, graduation tests have tumbled over the past decade. In 2012, half the states required the tests, but that number fell to 13 states in 2019, . The trend accelerated during the pandemic, when many school districts scrapped the tests during remote learning and some decided to permanently extend test exemptions.

Studies have found that such graduation exams disadvantage students with learning disabilities as well as English language learners, and that they aren’t always a good predictor of success in careers or higher education.

An oft-cited 2010 by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin may have ignited the trend to scrap the tests. Researchers’ review of 46 earlier studies found that high school exit exams “produced few of the expected benefits and have been associated with costs for the most disadvantaged students.”

Some states began to find other ways to assess high school competency, such as grades in mandatory courses, capstone projects or technical milestones.

“Minimum competency tests in the 1980s drove the idea that we need to make sure that students who graduate from high school have the bare minimum of skills,” said John Papay, an associate professor of education at Brown University. “By the mid-2000s, there was a reaction against standardized testing and a movement away from these exams. They disappeared during the pandemic and that led to these tests going away.”

Despite the problems with the tests for English learners and students with learning disabilities, Papay said, the tests are “strong predictors of long-term outcomes. Students who do better on the tests go on to graduate [from] college and they earn more.”

Papay, who remains neutral on whether the tests should be required, pointed out that high school students usually have many opportunities to retake the tests and to appeal their scores.

Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, a think tank and advocacy group for underserved communities, noted that in many states, the testing requirements were replaced by other measures.

The schools “still require some students or all students to demonstrate competency to graduate, but students have many more options on how they could do that. They can pass a dual credit [high school/college] course, pass industry recognized competency tests. …

“A lot of states still have assessments as part of their graduation requirements, but in a much broader form,” she said.

Massachusetts moves

Scruggs said her son took Massachusetts’ required exam last spring; he passed the science and math portions but fell 1 point short in English.

“He could do well in his classes, but if he didn’t pass the three tests, he wouldn’t get his regular diploma,” Scruggs said. “How do you go out into the working world, and you went to school every day and passed your classes, but got no diploma?”

Her son has taken the English test again and is awaiting his new score, she said.

Norton, by contrast, said the exam, called the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, gave her son an incentive to work hard.

“I worry that kids like him … are going to end up graduating from high school without the skills they will need,” Norton said. “Without the test, they will just be passed along. I can’t just trust that my kid is getting the basic level of what he needs. I need a bar set where he will get the level of education he needs.”

Students in Massachusetts still will have to take the MCAS in their sophomore year of high school, and the scores will be used to assess their overall learning. But failing the test won’t be a barrier to graduation beginning with the class of 2025. The state is still debating how — or whether — to replace the MCAS with other types of required courses, evaluations or measurements.

High school students in Massachusetts and most states still have to satisfy other graduation requirements, which usually include four years of English and a number of other core subjects such as mathematics, sciences and social studies. Those requirements vary widely across the country, however, as most are set by individual school districts.

In New York, the State Education Department in 2019 began a multiyear process of rethinking high school graduation requirements and the Regents Exam. The department decided last month to phase out the exit exam and replace it with something called a “Portrait of a Graduate,” including seven areas of study in which a student must establish proficiency. Credit options include capstone projects, work-based learning experiences and internships, as well as academic achievement. Several other states have moved recently to a similar approach.

Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, an advocacy group that works to limit standardized testing, said course grades do a better job of assessing students’ abilities.

“Standardized tests are poor ways of incentivizing and measuring the kinds of skills and knowledge we should have high school kids focusing on,” Feder said. “You get ‘teaching to the test’ that doesn’t bear much of a relationship to the kinds of things that kids are being asked to do when they go on to college or the workplace.”

Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association union, said phrases such as “teaching to the test” disrespect teachers and their ability to know when students have mastered content and competency. The high school tests are first taken in the 10th grade in Massachusetts. If the kids don’t pass, they can retake the exam in the 11th or 12th grade.

“Educators are still evaluating students,” he said. “It’s a mirage to say that everything that a student does in education can be measured by a standardized test in the 10th grade. Education, of course, goes through the 12th grade.”

He added that course grades are still a good predictor of how much a student knows.

Colorado’s menu

Several of the experts and groups on both sides of the debate point to Colorado as a blueprint for how to move away from graduation test requirements.

Colorado, which made the switch with the graduating class of 2021, now allows school districts to choose from a menu of assessment techniques, such as SAT or ACT scores, or demonstration of workforce readiness in various skill areas.

A state task force created by the legislature recently to the education accreditation system to “better reflect diverse student needs and smaller school populations.” They include creating assessments that adapt to student needs, offering multilingual options, and providing quicker results to understand student progress.

The state hopes the menu of assessment options will support local flexibility, said Danielle Ongart, assistant commissioner for student pathways and engagement at the Colorado Department of Education.

“Depending on what the student wants for themselves, they have the ability to show what they know,” she said in an interview. In particular, she said, the menu allows for industry certificates, if a student knows what type of work they want to do. That includes areas such as computer science or quantum computing.

“It allows students to better understand themselves and explain what they can do, what they are good at, and what they want to do,” she said.

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Opinion: Austin Finally Bans Windowless Rooms For College Students

Juan Miró — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 16:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

In the past few years, the city of Austin, Texas, has approved the construction of in new apartment buildings next to The University of Texas at Austin.

Most of these rooms are being leased to UT students, resulting in a .

In April 2024, the Austin City Council finally .

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As a , I see this ban as a belated but welcomed development. For 25 years, I have given my students an assignment called “My Window,” where I ask them to draw a section of the window in their bedroom. In 2021, some students started to tell me that they did not have a window in their room.

I was shocked because, as a practicing architect, I had always assumed that windowless bedrooms were illegal. Some students started to share with me photographs of their rooms and what dozens of students have described as their terrible experiences living in them.

Adverse effects on mental health

A common complaint is “messed up circadian cycles” and the development of “depression and fatigue.” They try to avoid their rooms as much as possible. One student told me about experiencing “unbearable loneliness and claustrophobia caused by the four solid walls.” Another one lamented waking up “.”

As soon as I learned that windowless bedrooms were being built in Austin, I started advocating to ban them. I have asked the City Council to act, via and . I have educated myself on the issue and shared my views with architects, professors and students in multiple venues.

Students have mobilized, too. In the spring of 2023, they ran to compare students’ experiences living in rooms with and without windows. Students who lived in rooms without windows scored lower in all the categories on a .

In a September 2023 [letter to Austin’s City Council], 762 students demanded a ban on windowless rooms. “Our city’s negligence to defend its citizens is being weaponized by developers as a means of profit,” they wrote. They also pointed out that windowless rooms are illegal in cities such as New York City and Madrid.

Not legal elsewhere

Indeed, in New York City – as in major cities around the world – windowless bedrooms are illegal. A percentage of the room’s floor area, set in each city’s building code, determines the minimum window size. In New York City, every bedroom must have a window area the size of the room’s floor area; in Madrid, 12%; and in Mexico City, 15%.

In Austin, the number has been 0% until the recent ban.

Why? There is a simple reason: Austin, like most cities in the U.S., follows the International Building Code, and this code has a glaring loophole. Its states: “Every space intended for human occupancy shall be provided with natural light by means of exterior glazed openings in accordance with Section 1204.2 or shall be provided with artificial light in accordance with Section 1204.3.”

The code then goes into great detail on the specific requirements for each situation. But the word “or” leaves the door open for some developers to interpret the code to mean that natural light is optional.

To protect themselves against those developers, cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., have closed the loophole by simply replacing “or” with “and” in their adopted codes. Austin is finally doing precisely that. The recently approved bedrooms when it takes effect on May 20, 2024.

Putting profits first

Unfortunately, developers have already exploited the loophole and built thousands of windowless bedrooms that soon will no longer be legal to build but will be legal to continue to be leased.

Windowless rooms for students in Austin. Moreover, during my two-year campaign to ban windowless rooms, no developer has spoken in their favor in front of the Austin City Council.

They have been quietly building them for as long as they have been able to because student housing is , and more so when windowless rooms are allowed.

How come? Because a bulky building, with interior rooms away from the facade, can capture more interior space with a smaller ratio of exterior walls, which are more expensive to build than interior walls.

A vulnerable population

Namratha Thrikutam, a UT architecture student, sums up the predicament of her peers living in windowless rooms: “Students are a population that developers know they can take advantage of.”

A University of Texas at Austin student’s windowless room. (Juan Miro)

“We don’t have as much money. We don’t have as much standing in the world. We don’t have as much experience about things that we’ve been through, so it’s very easy to take advantage of us,” she , UT Austin’s official newspaper.

Lured by the proximity to campus, students in windowless rooms with abundant room decoration, circadian rhythm LED lighting, mental therapy or medication.

For example, an who had unknowingly leased a windowless room contacted me asking for help. She told me that, being illegal in her hometown of Barcelona, it never crossed her mind that the room she had leased before arriving in Austin could be windowless.

She described her anxiety and deteriorating mental health after just a few days in her unit. When I wrote on her behalf to her building manager requesting a room with a window, they responded: “We do not promise windows in any of our rooms. Like other buildings in the Austin area, windows are not promised.” Shockingly, their leases do not disclose the absence of windows either.

Much like immigrants in New York City’s , UT students have been left to fend for themselves. Austin has failed them by approving the construction of thousands of windowless units.

UT, a , has failed them by and by remaining silent during the campaign to ban windowless rooms. The university’s position is based on the fact that West Campus “falls under the city of Austin’s jurisdiction,” according to a statement obtained by The Conversation.

My position is: Yes, but these are your students asking for help.

And architects have failed students by willingly designing windowless rooms. In doing so, architects have ignored one of the of the American Institute of Architects: “to consider the physical, mental, and emotional effects a building has on its occupants.”

Some UT students walk this hallway in a new building in West Campus to access their windowless rooms. (Juan Miro)

Changes sought

The experiences of students living in windowless rooms in Austin should serve as a cautionary tale for authorities who control building codes. If windowless rooms are already illegal in your city, keep it that way. If they are not, ban them as soon as possible. If not, students and other vulnerable populations such as immigrants, seniors and low-income people would always be a potential target for developers.

In the meantime, and to protect these populations, I am working with other concerned architects across the U.S. in closing the loophole at the source, by directly modifying the International Building Code instead of assuming that each city will close it by amending their codes locally, as Austin just did.

It is a slow and bureaucratic process, but, ultimately, the message should be clear: Having natural light in buildings should be a human right, not a developer’s choice.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

How an Internship Program Hopes to End ‘Brain Drain’ in Texas’ Permian Basin

Carlos Nogueras Ramos — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 17:00:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Katelan Crowder woke up in her childhood bedroom. Her dog, Daisy, was still snoring.

A year had passed since she graduated from high school, and the University of Texas student returned to her West Texas home for an unexpected reason: a summer internship.

The rising sophomore’s passion for design could have kept her in the ever-expanding metropolis of Austin or sent her to either coast. But living in those larger cities is expensive. And as much as she wanted to escape Odessa, a program that reconnects UT-Austin students with businesses for summer internships in their hometown appealed to her.

“We used to bond over hating Odessa,” Crowder said, referring to her high school friends. “But being here made me realize the good. I bonded so well with the people during the internship.”

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Crowder, who is ending a nine-week research internship at the Ellen Noël Art Museum, is one of four UT students who returned to the Permian Basin this summer as part of the university’s Home to Texas program. It’s the third year businesses in Odessa and nearby cities have partnered with UT to bring students back to the blue-collar region known for high school football and oil fields.

Smaller industrial cities and rural towns in Texas and across the nation have long struggled to attract talent, much less retain bright-eyed students. To combat the phenomena of “brain drain,” organizations from rural chambers of commerce to school districts and universities have worked to establish programs that encourage young people to keep their talents in their backyards.

UT-Austin piloted an earlier version of the program in 2019, aimed at diversifying internship opportunities for undergraduate students. The program — which includes a $5,000 scholarship — attracted roughly 100 applications that year, said Dustin Harris, the program’s coordinator. Four years on, the program has only grown. This year, 420 students applied. Sixty-seven were placed in more than a dozen Texas towns, including nearby Midland and Big Spring.

“It’s never been more competitive to be a homegrown student,” Harris said during a recent reception for the West Texas interns.

At the museum, Crowder worked on several marketing and research projects. She even helped curate an exhibition.

Megan Baeza, director of internships and employer relations at UT-Permian Basin, said these internships are a boon for rural communities with limited access to a deep talent pool.

Sheila Perry, the executive director of Ellen Noël, said having summer interns reinvigorates her faith in the future.

“Katelan taught us to have a fresh perspective,” Perry said.

UT-Austin’s program has included more placements in the state’s largest cities, but Harris said he hopes the success in Odessa, Midland and Big Spring will inspire other smaller cities and towns.

“The idea of return migration has been around for a long time,” said Josh Wyner, executive director of the college excellence program at the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit think tank that works across various sectors including education, health and business.

To keep students in their hometowns, colleges and businesses need a strong relationship that produces relevant coursework during the fall and spring semesters and practical on-the-job training during the summer, Wyner said.

Wyner stressed for return migration to work, business leaders must take an active role in partnerships with higher education institutions.

“Employers have to lead,” Wyner said.

The formula UT-Austin and the Permian Basin businesses have established appears to be working. Several of the students who returned home this summer said they’re seeing their hometowns in a new way and are considering returning full-time after earning their degrees.

In Big Spring, William Cole interned this summer at the city attorney’s office. He’d never have the same up-close experience at a big-city law firm, he said.

“It really opened my eyes on being deadset about coming back,” he said.

Elizabeth Aguilar was offered a window into work-from-home life. She spent the summer living in her hometown of Midland but working on a project for the Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice, a project based at UT-Austin studying different issues affecting Texans, including the criminal legal system and the mental health field.

Aguilar learned about available mental health providers in the Permian Basin by compiling information on the region’s hospitals and treatment centers.

Aguilar and her family moved to Midland in 2012. Like Crowder in Odessa, Aguilar grew up thinking there would be no professional opportunities after college. Now she wants to help break the stereotypes of the Permian Basin.

“This internship caught me by surprise,” Aguilar said. “I want to help build a place ‘little me’ would want to grow up in.”

Still, area business leaders admit they need to do more to make coming home inviting.

“There needs to be more to do,” said Debbye ValVerde, executive director of the Big Spring Area Chamber of Commerce. “A lot of rural communities may not have what they want to do in life.”

Reneé Earls, president of the Odessa Chamber of Commerce, said cities, especially those like Odessa, known widely for a singular industry, must reinvent themselves.

“We can’t do what we’ve always done. We want people invested here,” she said. “The saying in Odessa is that there’s nothing to do, and that’s just not the case.”

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Plurality of Texas Voters Say They Support School Voucher-Like Program

Patrick Svitek — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 11:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

A new poll sheds light on how Texas voters feel about one of the most hotly debated proposals of the legislative session so far: letting parents use tax dollars to take their kids out of public schools.

The , released earlier this month, found 46% of voters supported the idea, while 41% opposed it. The 5-point margin was unchanged since the pollsters last asked the question in April 2022, but the political landscape has shifted significantly since then.

Gov. has thrown his weight behind the proposal and is traveling the state to pitch parents on it, particularly in rural communities. The idea has historically faced opposition in the Legislature from Democrats and rural Republicans who are fiercely protective of public schools in their districts.

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The latest survey was conducted in mid-February and included 1,200 registered voters. Notably, it did not find any rural divide; a plurality of rural voters — 46% — backed the proposal, compared to a plurality of 49% of urban voters. Suburban voters were more split, with 44% supporting and 45% opposing.

While that is good news for Republicans like Abbott, the poll also found the idea is not a high priority for voters when it comes to education this session. Sixty-four percent of voters said it was an important issue for the Legislature to address in the K-12 public education system, ranking eighth among 10 issues provided. The No. 1 issue was school safety, which 94% of voters called important, followed by “teacher pay/teacher retention” at 89% and “curriculum content” at 85%.

Abbott has named both “education freedom” and school safety as emergency items for the session, designating them as top priorities that lawmakers can pass off the floor immediately. But he has put the most effort into promoting “school choice” legislation lately, crisscrossing the state to try to show lawmakers the public support it enjoys.

Abbott regularly cites the 2022 Republican primary proposition on the issue, which passed overwhelmingly, including in rural Texas.

“In rural areas, if a Republican representative votes against this, they’re actually voting against their own constituents,” Abbott said in a recent TV interview.

Abbott is specifically championing education savings accounts, where the state would deposit funds for parents to subsidize the cost of educating their children outside the traditional public education system. The UT-Austin poll asked respondents whether they support “redirecting state tax revenue to help parents pay for the cost of sending their children to private or parochial schools.”

Oftentimes, school choice is framed around support of “vouchers,” which is similar to an educational savings account, except that the money from the state goes to the school instead of the parents.

When it came to voters’ overall priorities for the Legislature this session, the No. 1 issue was immigration and border security. Twenty-four percent of respondents said that should be lawmakers’ top priority, and no other issue registered double digits. The runner-up was inflation and the cost of living, which got 8%.

In other poll findings, Abbott’s approval rating declined slightly, with 46% of voters approving his job performance and 43% disapproving. In December, the survey found a 49-41% split.

For the first time, the pollsters tested how much Texas voters like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential candidate who to be the nation’s most conservative governor. Forty percent of Texas voters said they had a favorable view of DeSantis, while 38% said they did not. That was not too different from how voters view Abbott — 47% favorably and 43% unfavorably.

But among Texas Republicans, Abbott is more popular, with an 85% favorability rating compared to 75% for DeSantis.

The poll also looked at how supportive Texas voters are of President Joe Biden running for reelection — and of his predecessor, Donald Trump, running against Biden. Wide majorities of voters in solidly red Texas agreed that Trump should run and Biden should not. But Texas Republicans were more supportive of Trump running than the state’s Democrats were of Biden running. Republicans said by a 23-point margin that Trump should run, while Democrats said by only a 7-point margin Biden should run.

The survey was conducted using an online panel from Feb. 10-21. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.83 percentage points.

Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

University of Texas at Austin – ����Ӱ��

High School Exit Exams Dwindle to About Half a Dozen States

Massachusetts moves

Colorado’s menu

Opinion: Austin Finally Bans Windowless Rooms For College Students

Adverse effects on mental health

Not legal elsewhere

Putting profits first

A vulnerable population

Changes sought

How an Internship Program Hopes to End ‘Brain Drain’ in Texas’ Permian Basin

Plurality of Texas Voters Say They Support School Voucher-Like Program

University of Texas at Austin – ��Ӱ��