An Ounce of Prevention...

I believe that it was on New Year's Eve 1999 when a Russian friend made an observation regarding Germans (the details of that night are a bit fuzzy, but I vaguely recall that the world did not come to an end at midnight). The observation stemmed from a flight-delay problem in Berlin or Frankfurt a few weeks earlier, but the friend generalized to the culture as a whole to the effect that Germans would rather that there be no rule than make an exception to a rule. This is a fairly accurate observation in my experience and I do not take it as a disparaging remark. I should qualify my concurrence by noting that this applies in an institutional setting. The reason why this springs to mind is that it's that time of year again when high school seniors (and their parents) complain that they cannot participate in graduation ceremonies because they did not pass one or more of the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) tests and, thus, cannot receive a diploma. If you are not from Texas, you may be scratching your head over this, but you can search for "commencement" or "graduation" at the sites for any of the major newspapers in the state to find relevant articles (Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Austin American Statesman, El Paso Times, etc.).

For those of you not from Texas, it works like this. Each year, all students in grades 3 through 11 are tested in Reading and Math. Writing, Science and Social Studies are tested two or three times, but not at each grade level. Testing takes place in April so that results can be returned by early to mid-May. In order to receive a diploma, a senior must have passed all of these tests. Juniors who do not pass one or more of the exit-level tests have four or five additional chances to take and pass the exams before the end of their senior year. This year there are approximately 40,000 seniors in Texas who are ineligible for a diploma because they have not met this requirement. This comes out to something like 15% of the seniors, state-wide. At the local high school it's about half of the senior class, although that number also includes students who have not earned sufficient credits to graduate.

I cannot speak for other states, but in Texas the problem goes back 15 or 20 years to a time when our high schools were handing out diplomas to students who couldn't read or write well enough to fill out an employment application, much less have any chance of success in post-secondary education. So the state adopted a series of standards (currently known as the "Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills" or TEKS, though they have gone by various names over the years, some of which are even repeatable in polite company) which said students must demonstrate particular levels of knowledge and the ability to use certain skills in order to receive a diploma from a publicly funded school. I first encountered this when I went back to get my teaching certificate starting the semester after I had received my bachelor's degree. The College of Education required that I take and pass a basic literacy test before I could enter the program. My initial thought was that if the university had awarded me a degree less than a month earlier and now wanted to make sure that I could read and write, it did not speak well of their confidence in the quality of the education they were providing to their undergraduates. But I digress.

To return to my initial point, something in one of the articles (I believe it was the El Paso Times) struck me as being so outrageous that it could not pass without comment from me. Some parents of seniors who were not being allowed to participate in graduation ceremonies were complaining that they had spent hundreds of dollars on invitations, announcements, caps, gowns, and so forth for a ceremony in which their child could not participate. Remember, this is after their child was given four or five opportunities to meet the graduation requirements, which were known in advance, and failed to do so. Perhaps I was German in a prior life, but my reaction was, "you know, if you had taken the money you spent on all of this and invested it in books or other educational resources a few years back, this might not have been a problem." If you want something, then you have to do what's necessary to make it happen. That's not being a hard-ass; that's life. And if these seniors haven't got that message by this point in time, they certainly are not ready for real life. So why should they be told that they are ready, which is kind of the whole point of the graduation ceremony in the first place.