Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

This year's high school seniors are the first class to have the high school exit exam be a requirement for graduation.  But a group of ten students and their parents have filed suit in San Francisco Superior Court, seeking an injunction to suspend the exam, which had already been put off since 2004.

"The students have not been given a fair and equal opportunity to learn the material on this test," said San Francisco attorney Arturo J. Gonzalez.

Excuse me?  Twelve years of schooling isn't a "fair and equal" chance to learn the material on the test?  How low have we set the bar when an exam that contains eighth-grade level mathematics and ninth/tenth-grade level English is deemed "unfair" or "too tough?"  What is that saying about our educational system and about the students themselves?

Adding to the absurdity of remarks like those of Gonzalez and of the suit itself, is the fact that students can take the exam multiple times and can pass it with a score of roughly fifty percent.  Half.  The students have to answer about half of the questions correctly to pass.  And that's unfair?  That's too tough?

"Basically, this test stands for, `Go to school for four years, work hard, stay out of trouble, get passing grades, but by the way, if you don't pass, all your efforts stood for nothing,'" said parent Nora Sellman.

Ummm... Nora?  That is exactly the kind of attitude that will ensure the continued decline of education in America and is probably the reason your own son has repeatedly failed the math portion of the exam.  Oh, by the way, did I mention that the math section is set at an eighth-grade level?

Silly me, I thought that the mission of our schools was to educate the students. I didn't realize that our schools essentially functioned like prisons; you do your time and at the end of your sentence, you get a shiny new diploma.

When did a diploma become an entitlement and not something you had to earn?  When did our standards and the expectations of our graduating classes fall so low?  An independent study predicts that nearly 50,000 seniors, statewide, will fail the exam.  In the LAUSD alone, nearly 6,000 students still have not passed the exam.

Schools supposedly exist to educate the students, to prepare them for the future, not to simply be diploma mills.  But so long as attitudes like those espoused by the Nora Sellman's of the world continue to prevail, we'll continue turning out students that are all but illiterate.  So long as the belief exists that a diploma is a right, an entitlement and that an education is secondary to that, other countries will continue to pass us by.

A diploma is something to be earned, it's a mark of achievement.  If we continue enabling the belief that an education isn't important, that doing your time is enough, we'll continue turning out kids barely qualified to work at McDonald's.  Assuming they can read the menu anyway.