Keystones exams graduation requirement delayed

High school juniors and sophomores are breathing a sigh of relief at Pennsylvania’s approval to delay the Keystones for two more years. Pennsylvania House of Representatives on Monday, February 18 unanimously approved a bill that would delay the requirement for students in the class of 2017 and 2018 to pass Keystone Exams before graduating. The State Department of Education will now have six months to come up with a new high school graduation requirement for students. Reasons for delaying the Keystone includes failure rates, state funding, to allow time for all districts to prepare their students for the rigorous expectations of the graduation requirements. And time of trying to help students passed the “project-based assessment.” Under the former mandats, Pennsylvania students had to pass the Keystone in algebra 1, biology and literature as graduation requirements. And if they fail the test twice, they will have to successfully complete a project under the counsel of a teacher to show that they understand the material. Math teacher and Keystone remediation teacher Diane Lutz said, “[The project-based assessment in math] is like a giant application problem that the students must work through on their own.” They can receive assistance on the topics assessed on the project, but not directly in the project itself. She said that some students actually “finished” the project, but she is not sure if the students received feedback from the state yet, informing them of their successful completion. Lutz said that to ensure that everyone passes the test, schools need to offer remediation and the project-based assessment. “We attempt to do this during flex, but it has many drawbacks,” said Lutz. She believe student success could improve, adding that she thinks we could have additional courses to help scaffold the material and provide assistance to the students who need it. Lutz said, they are already a “bare-bones” math department; many courses have 30 students or more. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the staff to offer additional courses and we don’t have the money to fund additional staff members,” said Lutz. Finding staff to supervise student work on the projects has created a burden on the districts with already limited sources. They tried to complete the project-based assessment during Flex last year with a diverse group of staff members involved. However, it did not work well. They created an actual course for the project this fall, but it required losing a math teacher for one period of the day to supervise the project, which leads to higher class sizes for everything else, as well as fewer course offerings. According to Lutz, the project is a great alternative for students who do not find success on the test. However she said, “It is challenging for the state to create projects that are the correct level of challenge, easily understood and feasible for students to complete.” When a student takes the project-based assessment, he/she has to sacrifice one of your course selections, which means losing an opportunity to pursue something that they may not have another chance to take. Although this is no longer a graduation requirement, Lutz absolutely feels that they should be placed into remediation. “We do everything we can in class to help students prepare, but if they need additional assistance, I think another course would be much more beneficial than flex periods when students are exhausted, need to make up work for other classes and cancellations are imminent” said Lutz. English teacher Tara Goodrich said that it’s important to support her students in all subject areas, regardless of what a test result says. “As teachers, it is our duty to prepare all students for their for their future lives,” said Goodrich. Goodrich said she hasn’t seen the English project-based assessment in action yet. She says a two-year moratorium would be helpful in giving districts more time to prepare students for the test, but according to Goodrich, she does not think it would would help with other issues; “Fixing education and student achievement is more than a test.”

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