Word: diplomas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This is the way the world ends--not with a bang but a high school diploma. If you went to South Tahoe High School, in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., you grew up in a place so beautiful, placid and secure that you can make the extraordinary statement of Cinnamon Roach, Class of '97: "I've never known conflict." It can't be easy to put a place like that behind you, but something tells you, "Go, girl...
...classmates, she could not pass Texas' statewide high school exit exam. Cockrell had enlisted in the Army, having passed its qualifying test, and was getting ready to ship out the week after graduation. But without passing the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, she could not get a diploma, and without a diploma, her enlistment was void...
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...
...insist that the TAAS is race neutral. But even if a test is fair, it can be put to uses that are not. Low TAAS scores, for example, have not been shown to correlate with the inability to do any particular job, but the lack of a high school diploma does correlate with the inability to find work. Should students poorly educated by substandard teachers be further penalized when they can't pass a test? What about good students who just don't test well? Argues Linda Darling-Hammond of Teachers College at Columbia University: "The use of tests...
...tutorial. "We realized we can identify the individual needs of all learners and do a better job--that's what I like about TAAS," he says. Still, Wade laments the denial of graduation to hardworking students and believes "there ought to be another way" to earn some sort of diploma...