Proposal to help teens graduate needs fixing

The Texas Legislature, in response to parents’ concerns about the number of standardized tests needed to graduate from public schools, two years ago reduced end-of-course exams from 15 to five.

Despite that reduction, high school students still fail one or more of those exams at an alarming rate, even after taking them multiple times.

About 28,000 seniors this year are in danger of not receiving their diplomas because they have not passed one or more of the EOC tests, according to state Sen. Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, who has filed a bill to address that issue.

Seliger’s Senate Bill 149, designed to help those failing students graduate, would allow school districts and open enrollment charter schools to to set up an individual “graduation committee” to determine if a student who has not passed all the tests should graduate.

The committee, made up of the principal (or a designee), teacher of the course failed, the student’s school counselor and a parent or guardian, would take into account other factors besides the exam scores, including grades in relevant course work, overall attendance rate and scores on college entrance exams.

In order to qualify, the student must have passed all courses, have a minimum 2.0 grade-point average and have unanimous approval by the committee.

Seliger, chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee, justified the need for the bill by arguing: “Without a high school diploma, a student cannot attend college, cannot join the military and in many cases will not even qualify for a minimum wage job.”

That is true.

But lawmakers should realize that this proposal will add more work to school administrators and teachers, and it, in effect, will award some students diplomas who did not meet all the requirements for graduation that most of their classmates successfully achieved.

It would seem appropriate that their individual diplomas somehow recognized that fact, giving prospective employers and colleges added information when analyzing the qualifications of a graduate.

Such designations also would be distinguishing factors for those students who did measure up to the state-required standards for graduation.

This story was originally published February 19, 2015 at 5:51 PM with the headline "Proposal to help teens graduate needs fixing."