PANEL URGES SUSPENSION OF EXIT EXAM CRITICS CALL FAILING STUDENTS VICTIMS OF FAILING SYSTEM.

Byline: Helen Gao Staff Writer

With a majority of poor minority students failing the California High School Exit Exam, a group of parents, teachers and students is calling on the Los Angeles school board to suspend the test as a graduation requirement.

The Coalition for Educational Justice, a leader of the district's Task Force on Alternative Assessments, wants the Los Angeles Unified School District to petition the state to put a moratorium on the exit exam.

Coalition members assert the more than 70 percent of black and Latino students who are failing the exit exam statewide attend overcrowded schools that lack adequate resources and credentialed teachers.

``To withhold their diploma at this point is really blaming the victims of a system that is very inadequate,'' said professor Jeannie Oakes of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Oakes is a member of the Task Force on Alternative Assessments, which was convened by the board last year to study new ways of measuring student achievement.

The statewide goal is for all high school seniors to pass the exit exam starting with the class of 2004. However, since the test was first given in 2001, only 49 percent of LAUSD students have passed the English portion and 30 percent the math portion.

School board member Genethia Hudley Hayes, who co-authorized the motion last May to study alternative assessments, agrees that standardized tests should not have any penalties attached to them.

However, she argued they should not be scrapped but used as diagnostic tools to help students improve.

``There was a point in time when I, too, was absolutely against any kind of high-stakes standardized testing, because I felt it was not giving us as much information as we need to label children,'' she said. ``Now, I am beginning to have a different view.''

In place of standardized testing, Alex Caputo-Pearl of the coalition said the district should evaluate student achievement through alternative means, such as portfolios of work over a period of time from different classes.

Furthermore, the coalition proposed that the district create a so-called Opportunity to Learn Index, which would provide information on resources available at each school, such as whether textbooks are up to date and how many teachers are credentialed.

The index is intended to show the public where resource inequities exist in the district and how to fix the shortcomings.

``You have to give quality resources before the kids can learn,'' said Susan Way-Smith of the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, another member of the task force.

In addition to Los Angeles, the San Francisco school board also passed a resolution last year to study alternative assessments. The Oakland school board is reportedly also mulling the issue.

The state board is expected to reconsider the exit exam as a graduation requirement in a July meeting. The coalition plans to rally 350 students, parents and teachers at the Feb. 25 LAUSD board meeting to advocate a moratorium on the exit exam.