The Washington Post ran an article today on how students in Montgomery County, Maryland did on the state's High School Assessment (HSA), which for the first time is being used as a high-stakes exit exam for this year's sophomore class. The good news is that the school system plans to implement special programs at low-performing schools, and that the evidence suggests that such programs can be greatly beneficial. But those plans also raise the question of whether some students will be short-changed because, paradoxically, they have what every parent wants for their child: a place in a high-performing school.
In 2005, only 26.5% of students at Kennedy High School passed algebra. After a year of interventions, including extra instructional time before and after school and at lunch, and a $150,000 program designed specifically to target algebra, that rate jumped dramatically, to 67.6%, the schools’ highest scores since 2002. The moral being that there is hope in intensive interventions and additional resources for students who need them. High school exit exams don’t necessarily have to result in low-income and minority students missing out on a high school diploma.
At Walt Whitman high school, by contrast, the 2006 passing rate in Algebra was much higher, 80.7%. Scores for most specific groups of students were strong: 70% of Hispanic females passed, as did 100% of Asian females. But the African American passing rate at Whitman was 33.3%, a decrease from 2004 and 2005.
A spokesman for the school system said that "special programs will be put in place at schools where significant numbers of students failed to pass the exams." Let's hope those programs are also extended to students at schools like Whitman where high averages mask huge achievement gaps. The numbers at Kennedy High School suggest that interventions work. Students shouldn't miss them simply because they're lucky enough to be in a "high performing" school.
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