Other states watch challenge on bias in school exit test
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AN ANTONIO - Two days before her high school graduation, Kelly Martinez got the news from a guidance counselor: ''You are not graduating.''
Martinez didn't want anyone to know. But by second period, she learned that almost half her senior class at John Jay High School wasn't graduating, either. They had all failed the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, the state's exit exam. In the halls, students sobbed as teachers tried to console them.
Eight months later, after taking the exam for the eighth time, she received the results: a 69, one point shy of passing. Without a diploma, Martinez can't get into a four-year college or land a decent-paying job.
''I don't know what I'm going to do,'' said Martinez, who remains determined to pass. ''My first job was McDonald's. That's not going to be my last job.''
Throughout Texas, thousands of young people each year wind up in the same situation. And a familiar pattern is emerging: Latinos and blacks are failing the exam at twice the rate of whites.
A federal judge is set to rule today on whether the exam discriminates against minorities, a decision that could affect state-mandated exams throughout the country. Education officials and academics here and across the nation have used Texas's high-stakes approach to education reform as a model.
The Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which sued Texas in 1997 on behalf of minority students, wants the state to do away with the exam because it says schools aren't preparing minorities well enough to pass.
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Two years after the test became a graduation requirement in 1991, the percentage of Latinos and blacks graduating on time fell from 60 percent to 49 percent. Since then, about 100,000 students have been denied diplomas, most of them Latinos and blacks.
The exam has created a firestorm of complaints from critics, who say underfunded schools in poor districts are not properly educating their students.
The state, however, argues that without the exam, students would continue to be passed from grade to grade without learning the basic skills they need. Although minorities failed in large numbers when the test was implemented, the gap has narrowed, school officials said - proof that the exam has forced districts to expect more from their students.
Leticia Saucedo, a lawyer for the Mexican-American fund, said the group is aware that the case is important to people outside of Texas as well.
''People are watching it all over the country,'' Saucedo said. ''It'll have implications in Massachusetts, where people are going to see the effects that these tests have.''
As the Bay State looks toward 2003, when passing the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System will be a graduation requirement, critics here point to Texas with worry.
Civil rights organizations say Texas has taught the nation to expect some casualties in the name of education reform, and the majority of them will be minorities. For example, on the 10th-grade exam in 1998, Latinos and blacks failed at a rate of about 35 percent, while whites failed at 15 percent.
The reform effort did away with social promotion, an assembly-line approach that produced mediocre students. Now, critics of the Texas exam say, students in poor communities - most of them minorities - are being cheated out of real schooling.
Because Texas school districts come under strict penalties if their students fail the test, they have devised quick solutions for helping students in poor communities pass. In many of those schools, critics say, teachers spend hours drilling students on the exam instead of teaching them critical thinking.
''It's robbing these children of an education in the name of administrative accountability,'' said Linda McNeil, director of the Rice University Center for Education.
Ricky Ramon, a sixth-grade teacher at Pearsall Junior High School, a working-class town 50 miles south of San Antonio, said his students hate the test.
''There's not a day that goes by that they don't hear us talk about TAAS,'' Ramon said. ''There's so much emphasis placed on it.''
One of the biggest fallouts, say civil rights leaders, has been the surge in dropouts. It has prompted criticism of the state's new definition of a dropout.
Before the exam, the percentage of Latinos and blacks who graduated on time held steady at 60 percent. For whites, it was 78 percent. After the test began, the percentage of Latino and black students who graduated on time fell to 50 percent. For whites, it dropped to 75 percent.
Walter M. Haney, a professor of education at Boston College, who has testified on behalf of the Mexican-American group, believes the exam has led to a larger number of dropouts in Texas.
But the state denies that assertion.
Joey Lozano, a spokesman for the Texas Education Agency, is confident that US District Judge Edward Prado will rule in the state's favor. He said that when the NAACP complained about the exam to the US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights several years ago, state officials opened an investigation.
''They made no findings of it being discriminatory,'' Lozano said.
In 1998, he said, just 2.3 percent of Latinos dropped out, compared to 2.1 percent of blacks and .9 percent of whites.
One reason for the lower dropout rates is the state redefined what constitutes a dropout. It no longer considers those who leave and later get a GED as dropouts.
Nor does it count people like Martinez, who has a certificate, not a diploma, but who continues to take the math portion of the state exam, hoping to pass.
On the west side of the city, where concrete ranch homes stretch across tiny lots, Martinez, 19, sits curled on a red sofa, watching the Gen X drama ''Party of Five.''
During the day, she works part time at a boutique. At night, if she's not at a math-tutoring class, she's at home with her mother. The two talk constantly about the test.
''When I saw she didn't pass TAAS the first time, I yanked her from the pep squad,'' said her mother, Mary Martinez. ''She's worked so hard. She was a good student. I feel like the school failed her.''
Although she said most of her math teachers in high school gave busy-work assignments and didn't really teach, Kelly Martinez blames herself for not passing.
''I should've gone to someone else for help,'' she said. In her senior year, she scrambled to learn algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and statistics, her scores rising each time she took the exam.
Martinez's counselor told her, ''Just get your GED and get it over with.'' But her mother doesn't want her to give up.
Kelly says the next time she takes the exam, in March, she'll pass. Until then, she's keeping her class ring tucked in a drawer.
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 1/7/2000.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.