Word: exit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That's what happened to Lee Hicks, Paris High School should've-been class of '93. Had he lived 14 miles away in Oklahoma, which has no statewide exit test, he'd have received a diploma and would now be serving his country in the Navy. Instead Hicks serves customers in a Paris supermarket; he won management's Aggressive Hospitality Award for 1996. "He's a great employee, a bright young man--extremely hardworking," says store director Larry Legg. "He has the capability to go as far as he wants." But how far can one go without a high school...
...bullet designed to cure all that ails public education, and accountability is the vocabulary word of the day. High schools, it is widely believed, are graduating too many kids who haven't mastered basic skills. Solution: all students, even after passing their courses, must also pass a statewide standardized "exit test" to graduate. And the test scores can then be used to gauge how well teachers and school administrators are doing their jobs...
Already 18 states have high school exit tests. National tests, endorsed by Bill Clinton and George Bush before him, will begin in 1999 with fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. The tests are supposed to serve only as a benchmark to assess educational progress, but they could one day lead to nationwide graduation standards. Now Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and IBM chairman Louis Gerstner Jr., co-chairs of last year's Education Summit, are adding to the pressure, enlisting companies to pledge that they will look at young applicants' academic records, including exit-test scores, rather than rely only...
Texas is a national leader in high-stakes testing, having instituted a statewide high school exit exam in 1985 at the urging of a committee chaired by Ross Perot. Since then scores have climbed. In 1993, 51% of Texas 10th-graders passed all three sections of the TAAS--math, reading, writing--on the first try. This year 67% did. (Students get eight tries over three years...
...income and minority students, often trapped in inferior schools, fail at a disproportionate rate. About 9% of the state's black and Hispanic seniors--7,380 last year--fail the exit test; less than 2% of whites do. The Texas N.A.A.C.P. has complained to the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights that the TAAS has a discriminatory impact. A ruling may be announced this week. "We're not against testing," says state N.A.A.C.P. president Gary Bledsoe, "but testing should be used as a diagnostic tool, not for punitive purposes...