The use of a standardized test to determine graduation from Texas public high schools raises important concerns about its impact on minority students but falls short of being unconstitutional, a San Antonio federal judge ruled Friday.

In a 32-page opinion released nearly 11 weeks after the trial's end, U.S. District Judge Edward. C. Prado said lawyers for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund presented better evidence than the state on the social and educational challenges African-American and Hispanic students face but did not prove requiring the exit-level Texas Assessment of Academic Skills for graduation denies their right to due process.

"The Court has carefully considered the claims that Texas schools still offer widely diverse educational opportunities and that, too often, those opportunities depend on the color of a student's skin or the financial resources of the student's school district," the opinion reads. "To some degree . . . the Court must accept those claims. But that finding, alone, is an insufficient basis for invalidating this examination."

MALDEF lawyers filed the lawsuit in 1997 on behalf of two civil rights groups and seven African-American and Mexican-American students who passed all their classes but were denied a high school diploma because they didn't pass the TAAS, in some cases by just a few points.

They argued that minority students, generally clustered in low-income schools with few resources and poorly qualified teachers, disproportionately fail the test.

Throughout the five-week trial in San Antonio, state lawyers argued the graduation exam is a critical component of a larger structure that holds schools accountable for student learning based on test scores, attendance and dropout rates.

They pointed to the shrinking gap between the TAAS passing rates of Anglo and minority students as evidence that African-Americans and Hispanics have benefited most from the system. On this, Prado agreed.

"The Court has had to weigh what appears to be a significant discrepancy in pass scores on the TAAS test with the overwhelming evidence that the discrepancy is rapidly improving and that the lot of Texas's minority students, at least as demonstrated by academic achievement, while far from perfect, is better than that of minority students in other parts of the country and appears to be getting better," he stated in the opinion.

The evidence presented during the trial, he added, suggests that the state was aware of the educational disparity between races and that it designed the accountability system "to reflect an insistence on standards and educational policies that are uniform from school to school."

While he credited the state's testing experts with offering more sound testimony on the development of standardized exams, Prado was less flattering about their familiarity with minority educational concerns.

"TEA's (Texas Education Agency) experts were not so qualified, the Court finds, to speak on the wisdom of the use of standardized tests as they apply to ethnic minorities in a state educational system that has had its difficulties providing an equal education to those minorities," his opinion reads.

Students first take the TAAS in grades three through eight, and have up to eight opportunities to pass the exit-level version first administered in the 10th grade.

Texas is one of 22 states in the country that require students to pass an exam to graduate, and has been held up as a national model of how curriculum standards and tests can drive student learning.

Beginning in 2003, third-grade students will have to pass the reading portion of the TAAS to be promoted to the next grade. TEA officials also are developing a tougher exit-level test to be offered to juniors that same year.

In 1995, the Texas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed a complaint similar to MALDEF's with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. The complaint was dismissed in 1997.

The opinion is available online at www.txwd.uscourts.gov.