Accommodate, don't exempt the disabled
California's 2-year-old exit exam requirement for high school graduation provides an incentive for individual students to prepare, puts pressure on schools to help struggling students and assures some consistency in the high school diploma.
A sensitive issue, however, has been how to handle about 40,000 of 430,000 students in the senior class, the ones who have various disabilities. Many have little difficulty with the exam — such as those who spend 80 percent or more of the day in regular classroom instruction or who have vision, hearing or speech disabilities that easily can be accommodated.
As a temporary fix in a lawsuit involving a dyslexic student, the governor and Legislature exempted from the exit exam students with disabilities who graduated last year and this year — if they took the exit exam at least three times, took remedial instruction and still failed to get a passing score. In last year's graduating class, about 7,300 students with disabilities were exempted.
But now we're back to ground zero. That exemption ends Dec. 31.
It should not be renewed. A better policy is the one recommended by Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, approved by the State Board of Education on May 10 and sent to the Legislature for action: Require all students, including students with disabilities, to take the exit exam and pass it. The state board also recommended some reasonable ground rules. Legislators should continue to allow students with disabilities to use accommodations -- such as Braille, oral presentation of the test, a little extra time or separate rooms for the testing.
There is also a question about how to handle approximately 1,900 disabled students in the senior class who take the exit exam with certain modifications, such as using a calculator on the math portion. For these students, the state board recommended that the Legislature continue to allow a waiver process — so long as the modifications are spelled out in the student's individual education plan.
Although such modifications alter what the exam measures, this involves relatively few students and has proven to be a reliable alternative for students to show they have mastered reading and math. If these students get a passing score, principals file waiver requests with the district superintendent. If the request is denied, the district must file an appeal with the State Board of Education.
The issues are now in the hands of the Legislature. A policy requiring all students to pass the exit exam (with a waiver system for fewer than 2,000 disabled students a year) maintains the integrity of California's high school diploma, unlike a blanket exemption from the exit exam for students with disabilities. Diplomas should not go to students who fail to pass the exit exam.
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