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Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda
Senate of Pennsylvania
Session of 2015 - 2016
Regular Session
MEMORANDUM
| Posted: | April 22, 2015 02:17 PM |
|---|---|
| From: | Senator Andrew E. Dinniman |
| To: | All Senate members |
| Subject: | Moratorium on use of Keystone Exams and project-based assessments as a graduation requirement |
| Beginning with the class of 2017 (current sophomores), students in the Commonwealth will have to pass Keystone Exams in three subject areas (Algebra I, Biology and Language Arts) in order to earn a diploma. However, to date, there hasn’t been any assurance that all school districts are being provided the proper resources for meeting the rigorous standards of Common Core that are measured by the Keystone Exams. High standards are commendable and the need to test for them is important. However, it is fundamentally unfair to deny graduation to students in schools that lack the adequate resources that would enable them to pass the tests. Some of these students do not even have access to textbooks aligned with the standards being tested! We, as legislators, admitted this resource inequity when we said we needed a new and fairer funding formula which the Basic Education Funding Commission and the General Assembly are currently in the process of designing. Based on that admission, we can’t say all students must pass three high stakes tests to graduate. My bill will establish a moratorium on the use of the Keystone exams as a graduation requirement while the Basic Education Funding Commission continues its efforts to make recommendations to the General Assembly for a fair funding formula. The moratorium will continue while the General Assembly reviews the recommendations and designs a fair funding formula for enactment, then for a period of time afterwards so we can to ascertain the impact of that formula. The Federal Government only requires accountability to be measured in the three current areas. It does not call for any of the exams to be used as the sole determinant of graduation. For Pennsylvania to enact high stakes exams without providing the much-needed funds for students to prepare for them is unfair. It simply is not educationally productive or fiscally feasible to continue a $300 million unfunded mandate on our schools and the current deadline that would base graduation starting with the class of 2017 on passing three high stakes exams or the project assessments. My bill calls for accountability and the best methods for that accountability to be determined by the Department of Education and the Legislature during the period of the moratorium. Throughout the period that the moratorium is in place, the Department of Education will be responsible to continually review and ascertain any and all approaches for accountability so that it will be prepared to make recommendations on the different methodologies for accountability and assessment when the moratorium ends. It may well turn out that there are more effective approaches to assess students for the world of work and higher education than the current graduation exams. |
Introduced as SB838