Without proficiency test, how to measure if state’s students learn?

Connecticut tests its public school students for academic proficiency each year in Grades 3 through 8 and again in Grade 11 but not when they are about to graduate from high school. So why not?

The short answer from the state Education Department is that a proficiency test for high school seniors is not required by state law.

Asked the other day whether the department would favor a proficiency test for high school seniors and even to require students to pass a proficiency test to advance from grade to grade, the department’s chief performance officer, Ajit Gopalakrishnan, did not reply directly but implied opposition. He said there already may be too much proficiency testing in Connecticut’s schools.

Asked how, without annual proficiency testing in every grade, Connecticut can know whether its schools are reversing the sharp declines in learning during the recent virus epidemic, or, indeed, whether there is any learning at all, Gopalakrishnan declined to answer.

But in effect this was to say that despite the $12 billion or so Connecticut spends on lower education every year, the Education Department doesn’t really want to know how it all turns out as students are delivered to the world — and, presumably, that the department doesn’t really want the whole state to know either. Any summary measure of academic performance at the end of 13 years of public education would invite accountability.

The problem isn’t just educators. Connecticut’s elected officials don’t want to know either. Otherwise, as indicated by the Education Department’s reply to the question about a high school graduation test, the General Assembly and governor would enact law requiring such a test, as some other states have done. Connecticut’s neighbor, New York, may have the best known graduation test, the exam provided by the New York State Education Department’s Board of Regents.

The problem isn’t just elected officials either. As Connecticut already has done, New York and other states are retreating from objective standards of learning for public school students, having been overwhelmed and demoralized by declining student performance. So many students now are failing that they can’t all be held back. Declining student performance is increasingly regarded as normal, and having already lowered its regents test standards, New York soon may drop the test altogether.

If educators and elected officials don’t want any conclusive evaluation of public education, do parents? Education is mainly a function of parenting, just as most measures of societal health are, and parenting long has been crashing, with about a third of the country’s children being raised in single-parent households. If there is any constituency among parents in Connecticut for reinstating academic standards in public schools, it has not yet manifested itself. Nearly everyone seems content with public education’s most basic policy — social promotion — and inclined to think that, as in Lake Wobegon, all their children are above average. Who in authority in public education will ponder the rationale for even going to school when students who are chronically absent and learn little know they will be promoted from grade to grade and given a high school diploma anyway?

When society itself is so demoralized, when so many children come to kindergarten already far behind in learning, having not gotten at home the stimulation that used to be common, and when teachers often find they cannot reach parents whose children are having trouble, educators may get demoralized too.

Society’s demoralization can’t be fixed overnight but small changes might be made quickly. Education might become a little more meaningful to indifferent students and parents by administering a high school graduation test and affixing to diplomas and transcripts a notation of the student’s test score, which prospective employers could ask to see — a mechanism of accountability for students and parents alike even as educators and elected officials keep striving to avoid accountability for themselves.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)