High Stakes on the Home Front
© Stefan Klein/iStockphoto
An Alaska town with strong military ties provides extra support for high school students struggling to pass the state’s exit exam.
NORTH POLE, Alaska—Despite the year-round Christmas decorations, the candy cane streetlights, and the Elf’s Den restaurant, life in North Pole, Alaska, has very little to do with jolly old St. Nick. Yes, you can visit the Santa Claus House, with its live reindeer and Mr. and Mrs. Claus (who live next door in a trailer), but North Pole really owes its existence to two military bases: Eielson Air Force Base, 12 miles to the southeast, and Fort Wainwright Army Base, about 10 miles to the northwest. Fairbanks, the largest city in the Alaska interior, lies just a few miles beyond Fort Wainwright. After World War II, North Pole developed into a bedroom community for military families who didn’t want to live on either base and didn’t want to commute all the way from Fairbanks.
The town has grown and diversified, but military life—and the pressures that come with it—still predominate. The phrase “high stakes” has added meaning here.
North Pole High School Principal A.C. Woolnough makes that point when talking about Alaska’s High School Graduation Qualifying Exam. “A lot of our kids are from military families,” he says. “They know all about high stakes.”
Starting with the class of 2004, North Pole High students, along with their peers throughout the state, have had to pass the exam to receive a diploma. Often referred to as “exit exams,” such tests are designed to ensure that all high school graduates have reached a certain level of proficiency. Without such tests, proponents say, a diploma ceases to have meaning.
To opponents, however, exit exams are the ultimate in high-stakes testing. Withholding a diploma based on a single test, they argue, is unfair and unproductive. And multiple studies point to just how high the stakes can be. Compared to high school graduates, students without a diploma will earn lower wages and have higher crime and incarceration rates; poorer health; a shorter lifespan; and a greater likelihood of ending up on public assistance, living in public housing, and receiving publicly funded health insurance.
Woolnough offers neither a positive nor a negative opinion of Alaska’s exit exam. He’s not interested in talking about something he has no control over, he says. At North Pole, exit exams and adequate yearly progress take their place beside other external pressures. From August 2005 to December 2006, for example, soldiers from Fort Wainwright’s 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team were deployed in Iraq, participating in some of the most fiercely contested battles of the war. The brigade lost 26 members and had another 353 seriously wounded in action.
As any educator knows, those kinds of pressures don’t stay neatly outside school grounds, and North Pole High School, a 9–12 school that serves approximately 875 students, is no exception. “Deployments are tough—the absence of a parent, the worry, the stress related to that,” says Woolnough. “And sometimes equally tough are the return home issues, the transition back to normal life. Dad or mom might come back having gone through some traumatic stuff. All of these things can be really hard on a student.”
Woolnough brings up these challenges not as an excuse for poor student achievement—the school has made adequate yearly progress for the past two years and almost all of its seniors have passed the exit exam—but as context. “We’ve also had some personal tragedies here in the past few years,” he adds. “We’ve had kids get in fatal accidents. We’ve had some suicides. And all of those things cause us to ask: How can we pull together as a school community, support each other, and realize that different people need different things? We try to acknowledge the individuals within the school community. And to meet those individual needs we have to use a variety of strategies—it’s not just one solution.”
What Should They Know, When Should They Know It?
Exit exams have been gaining in popularity since at least the mid-1990s, as states tried to address the widespread criticism that America’s high schools are not preparing students for life after graduation. As of 2008, 22 states have implemented such an exam, while four more states are phasing them in. According to the Center on Education Policy (CEP), which tracks the trend in an annual report, 65 percent of all public school students in the country must now pass an exit exam to receive a diploma. By 2012 that number is expected to reach 76 percent. In the Northwest, Alaska and Idaho have fully implemented exit exams and Washington is in the process.
The Alaska Legislature first passed the statute requiring an exit exam in 1997, making it among the earliest states to do so. As in many other states, however, the exams proved to be both controversial and difficult to develop. What kind of test should it be? How should it be administered? At what grade level? Should special education students be allowed to take a modified test? These and many other questions resulted in heated debates, delays, and lawsuits. As a result, the test was not given until the fall of 2000, and true accountability—pass the test or don’t receive a diploma—was pushed back, first to the class of 2002 and then to 2004.
Such difficulties have been the rule across the country. Both Arizona and California, for example, are currently involved in lawsuits challenging the legality of testing certain groups of students, including English language learners. Washington state recently postponed the math portion of its exit exam until 2011, after 49 percent of the class of 2008 failed to pass that part of the test.
For many states, including Alaska, the debate started immediately, with controversy about the type of test to administer. The Center on Education Policy identifies three different kinds of assessments now in use across the country: minimum competency exams, standards-based exams, and end-of-course exams. Alaska’s first test, in 2000, was directly tied to state standards and required students to reach a specific benchmark or “cut score” to pass. Results of that test, however, caused a firestorm. At North Pole, for example, only 36 percent of the 10th-graders tested passed the math portion.
Donna Peterson, superintendent of the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, summarized the resulting debate in a letter to parents: “Questions arose regarding [the] intent of the test—is it a guarantee of minimum standards or a target for all students? The answer to that question makes a big difference. For example, we would all agree that adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing are needed for success beyond high school. But the question of if it is necessary to know how to do a quadrilateral equation is less clear—some people feel it is important, others don't. The question boils [down] to one of 'must know’ vs. 'should know.’”
In 2001, Alaska switched to a minimum competency, or “must know” exam, which it continues to use. That move has its own detractors, however, and goes against the national trend. Many experts point out that such exams test basic skills below the high school level. “These are tests that are looking to set a floor,” says Michael Cohen, executive director of Achieve, Inc., “but they’re not really driving kids or schools to the higher level skills that students need to succeed after high school.”
Whether standards-based exams promote those higher level skills or not is also up for debate, but most states have chosen to implement that type of “should know” exam. Of the 25 states listed in the CEP’s most recent study, 16 are now using a standards-based assessment. In the Northwest, both Idaho and Washington use standards-based assessments.
The third type of assessment, end-of-course (EOC) exams, may be the wave of the future. As of 2007, six states had implemented this type of exam, which typically tests students in core classes such as English I and II, Algebra I and II, Biology I, and a social studies course such as U.S. History or Government. As the name suggests, students take the tests immediately after completing each course, when the material is still fresh in their minds. Many experts view these exams as more accurate and more academically challenging than the alternatives, and several states are making the switch.
Texas, for example, recently passed legislation that will replace its existing standards-based exam with 12 separate end-of-course exams, beginning with students who enter the ninth grade in 2011. Within the next seven years, 12 other states are slated to begin using end-of-course exams, according to the CEP. And many more may be getting on board.
Along with the issue of how to test, states have grappled with the problem of when (at what grade level) and what subject areas to test. Alaska, Idaho, and Washington each administer the test in the 10th grade, as do most—but not all—other states with exit exams. Typically, a student who fails in a given subject area can take that portion of the test again, in most cases up to twice a year, for as long as it takes to pass. In theory, a student in her 20s, no longer taking coursework, could keep trying to pass the test each year. In reality, those who have not passed by the end of their senior year rarely return to keep trying.
The number of subjects to include also varies from state to state. Most states with either minimum competency or standards-based assessments are only testing in the core subject areas of reading, writing, and math, but the push to include other subject areas such as science and social studies is gaining ground. Idaho already includes science, for example, and Alaska and Washington each have plans to follow suit within the next four years.
These issues are only the tip of the iceberg. Across the country, opponents have objected to the exams on several grounds: the cost, the lack of remediation efforts for students who fail the test, the negative effect on dropout and/or graduation rates, and a lack of sustained support at the state level. Others argue that the tests do not go far enough, that they dumb down the curriculum and are not aligned with the knowledge and skills students will actually need to succeed in college or the workplace.
All this controversy points to the extreme difficulty states are having determining the best way to assess what high school graduates should know and be able to do. Meanwhile, teachers and administrators in places like North Pole try to focus on the immediate problem: How do you provide support for students who fail to pass the exam?
One Student at a Time
“We don’t use one approach, one strategy, to address those needs,” Woolnough says. “Like most public schools we’ve got students who come from a wide variety of backgrounds—a variety of parent support, a variety of skill levels and motivational levels. We’ve got kids who are going on to a four-year college, kids going to trade schools, kids going into the military, and kids going into the workplace. And as such I believe that we have to treat each one of them as an individual, to the extent that we can. And remediation is no different.”
For many schools “to the extent that we can” is the key phrase. So far, state grants and a consolidation of resources have helped the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, and by extension North Pole High, keep its remediation efforts personal. In math, for example, students can take a refresher math course, which typically has 15 or fewer students. “They get a lot of one-on-one with me,” says Hope Swoffer, who teaches the refresher class. “I’m trying to find their individual weak spots. And at the same time, this is a test-prep class, no question about it. This is showing them how to read the directions, how to work without a calculator, how to avoid making stupid little errors that aren’t about whether they know the material.”
To pinpoint those individual weaknesses, all English and math teachers get a copy of the student report for each student who fails to pass the exit exam. The report includes an item analysis for the standards for reading, writing, and math. Teachers like Swoffer use those reports in combination with the exit exam practice books available online.
Opponents often point to increased dropout rates as a negative consequence of exit exams. The connection between the two is not clear at North Pole, but the efforts to prevent dropouts and to help students who have failed to pass the exit exam are closely linked.
For example, the school’s dropout prevention program offers both after-school tutoring and three credit-recovery classes that use Plato software to provide self-paced instruction. Using Plato, students can recover as many as two full credits per semester. The classes are limited to fewer than 20 students, which allows the instructors to offer one-on-one assistance.
“It’s a small cluster of kids,” Woolnough acknowledges, “but again, we deal with kids one at a time. Our goal was to increase the number of students who graduate on time.”
Although credit recovery does not directly address the exit exam, it’s interrelated, says school counselor Rob Ott. “We find that students who are failing the qualifying exam are also failing classes. There’s typically some kind of indicator even before they fail the exam, and we’re trying to home in on that.”
Carol Warbelow, a counselor who previously directed the Dropout Prevention Program, shares Woolnough’s commitment to a personalized approach. “There are a lot of people working together here in order to make that happen,” she says. For example, as dropout prevention specialist, Warbelow looked at all 875-plus students in the school using four “at-risk” criteria: grades, attendance and tardies, low test scores, and discipline records. Based on those criteria she identified and prioritized all the at-risk students in the school. “We decided that our four counselors would work one-on-one with every single at-risk senior we identified,” says Warbelow, “and that was because of the qualifying exam and the likelihood that these students might not graduate.”
Along with individualized counseling, tutoring, and credit recovery, at-risk students can also draw on the support of a career guide, an Alaska Native Education coordinator, and an English language learner tutor. “Everyone is coordinated,” says Warbelow. “We try to provide every kind of support we can to those students.”
Part of that support is remediation for students who don’t pass the qualifying exam, says Warbelow, but the larger effort is on keeping kids in school. And the numbers explain why.
At the beginning of the 2006–2007 school year, Warbelow targeted 425 students in grades 9–12 as at risk of dropping out. By that spring, 70 of those students had withdrawn from school. Today, only seven students in the current graduating class have failed to pass the exit exam. Those seven, of course, do not include the students who dropped out before passing the exam. As Warbelow says, “If they don’t stay in school, the exit exam is the least of their worries.”
An Evolving Process
Have exit exams succeeded in making the nation’s high school diplomas more meaningful? According to most observers, the jury is still out. Like Alaska, most states that have implemented an exit exam have faced a rocky beginning, complete with lawsuits and abrupt changes in direction. Some of those states faced extremely low pass rates in the first few years, but managed to raise those rates using a variety of state and local supports. Others have continued to struggle.
According to Achieve’s Michael Cohen, “In the less positive examples the support was not there at the state and local level. Maybe the state didn’t provide the resources to give kids the help they needed. Or the local school systems didn’t rise to the challenge and undertake any fundamental reforms to bring about significant improvements. Sometimes the state leadership vacillated on whether the test should really count or they delayed putting it into effect. It depends a lot on those things.”
In the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Schools Wayne Gerke calls the state’s exit exam “an evolving process.” Since the test was first given in 2000, frequent adjustments have made it difficult to provide effective support. “The cut scores have changed, the publisher who develops the test has changed, different versions have come out,” he says. “All we can do is take the data they have for us and work with them from there. Our job is to educate students, and if the state says they have to pass this exam in order to get a high school diploma, then we’re going to do whatever we need to do.”
For Woolnough, that remains an issue best approached on a student-by-student basis. “Every person here has his or her own needs,” he says, “and we want to accommodate that and be sensitive and empathetic, while at the same time maintaining high standards and high expectations. It’s not just about test scores. It’s about helping kids succeed and achieve and get what they need to be successful in life. And that means something different for every single student.”
For more information about the Center on Education Policy’s annual study of state exit exams, visit their Web site at www.cep-dc.org 