The diploma divide

Second in an occasional series on the California High School Exit Exam and its impact on the class of 2006

Larissa Aguilar started her education the way so many students do: with a kindergarten teacher who emphasized the letters of the alphabet and snapped her fingers when it was time for the class to quiet down.

Throughout the mid-1990s, Larissa remembers some teachers who brought cookies, some who taught vivid lessons on the dangers of smoking and some who played with the children outside.

But things changed drastically in fifth grade. That year, Larissa and her mother say, class was a scene of daily chaos. Students acted out. Lesson plans were rarely in place. Parents never knew who would be teaching.

"That whole year was just a mess," said Larissa's mother, Jennifer Almanza. "It was different teachers every week, and they weren't learning anything."

Over the years, some classes went better for Larissa. Others brought more of the same: strings of substitutes, whole semesters with minimally qualified teachers. Larissa says she played around too much and didn't pay enough attention.

Now she attends Hiram Johnson High School. And the consequences of her educational past loom: She is at risk of not graduating because she is behind in credits and has not passed the California High School Exit Exam. The class of 2006 is the first required to pass the test to graduate.

The exam is the latest in California's decadelong effort to standardize education and create more equality among the schools. But this time the approach is different. Unlike previous steps that pressured teachers and administrators, the exam puts the burden squarely on the shoulders of the state's roughly 450,000 high school seniors.

The result: a heated debate that has divided educators, civil rights advocates and the very families who soon will live through the exam's consequences.

By withholding diplomas from students who have received a substandard education, critics argue, the state is punishing the victims of an unjust system. Exam supporters are just as adamant that the test, which holds all students to one clear standard, is a step toward achieving an American ideal: equality for all.

For the seniors who haven't passed the test - more than 90,000 across California and 182 at Sacramento's Hiram Johnson High School - the debate raises a troubling question: Who is really failing - the students, or the system?

The answer depends on whom you ask.

Students split on blame

Linda Nguyen remembers caring teachers who helped her learn English. Brandon Reynolds recalls an elementary-school teacher who visited his house to remind his mother of the night's assignments.

Now seniors at Johnson, they blame themselves for failing the exam in 10th and 11th grades. Brandon, 18, says he was lazy and never did his homework. Linda, 17, says she spent much of her first two years in high school cutting class and getting into fights.

"Then I found out, end of my sophomore year, that it's really important for me to pass (the exam) to make my parents happy and for me to have a good future," she said, sitting in the living room of her Rosemont-area home.

The realization, Linda says, turned her behavior around. She started taking school seriously and stopped hanging out with troublemakers.

In that way, exam supporters say, the test is doing what it's supposed to: holding students accountable for their learning and their behavior.

Still, students like Juan Calderon feel they simply haven't been taught enough to succeed. He recalls an eighth-grade math teacher who showed movies every week.

"Monday through Thursday we would do work and then Friday it was always just like kick-back and free time," said Juan, 18.

That was at Will C. Wood Middle School, where just 36 percent of current teachers are considered "highly qualified," according to the Sacramento City Unified School District. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, all teachers must become "highly qualified." That means they must have a bachelor's degree, a teaching credential and subject-specific expertise.

The teacher quality gap

But some of Sacramento's lowest-performing schools haven't met the requirement. At Larissa's middle school, Kit Carson, 36 percent of teachers now are highly qualified. When Larissa was there, a string of substitutes in eighth-grade math came to an end with a long-term sub on an emergency credential.

"He wouldn't really teach us," said Larissa, 17. "He would mess around with the students a lot. Like goof off, play around."

Superintendent Maggie Carrillo Mejia said she has heard the "horror stories" of Sacramento schools in the 1990s, but says they have improved. She said she is determined that the lowest-performing schools not be filled with the least-prepared teachers.

"We have to take responsibility for making sure that doesn't continue to happen as a practice in Sac City," Mejia said.

Research shows students failing the exit exam are much more likely to attend schools lacking fully credentialed teachers with expertise in the subjects they teach. At Hiram Johnson, for example, half the student body is enrolled in at least one class where the teacher is not considered highly qualified.

And across the state, the high schools with the most students failing the test have the greatest numbers of untrained math and English teachers - the two subjects tested on the exit exam.

For test critics, these facts show how unfair the exit exam is.

"If there's bad meat out on the market, we don't punish the people who consume the meat. We punish the people who produce the meat," said Pedro Noguera, a New York University professor who specializes in urban education and served on the Berkeley school board in the early 1990s.

The schools Noguera considers "bad meat" largely serve students from poor and non-English-speaking families. That puts the American dream in jeopardy, he says, for millions who would especially benefit from a good education.

Waiting for utopia

Russlynn Ali believes in the exit exam. A civil rights lawyer before she became director of Ed Trust-West, an Oakland-based group that advocates for students of color, she says the state can't wait for perfect conditions before imposing higher expectations on students.

"I wish we lived in utopia," Ali said. "I wish we could get a qualified teacher in every classroom. ... I wish we could get a rigorous curriculum taught to everybody. (But) it is going to be really hard to get that utopia without the spotlight that testing brings."

Juan's parents say the American dream compelled them to leave Mexico and work hard so their children could go to school in this country. The idea that her son might not graduate because he hasn't passed the math part of the exit exam causes Maria Calderon great pain. "I want (my children) to have something better than we have," she said.

Yet Calderon doesn't blame the state for creating strict criteria for graduation. "How can you pass someone if they don't know the information?" she said.

Test supporters say the exit exam will help schools restore the dream Calderon believes in. Students who have yet to pass are offered extra classes, more time with teachers and additional math and English workbooks. Many have shown they can pass the test by working at it.

That means they're learning skills they otherwise might not have learned, says Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of public instruction who, as a state legislator in the 1990s, created the exit exam.

"That's why we need to have a high school exit exam, to make sure we're challenging the system," O'Connell said. "I knew that we would challenge the system and I knew that it wouldn't be easy. But I also knew it's in all of our students' best interest."

Schools already are making changes. Larissa's eighth-grade math teacher no longer works in education, largely, he said, because of the effort to put fully credentialed teachers in every class.

Reached by phone at the resort his parents own near Truckee, Michael Waasdorp said he enjoyed the five years he spent at Kit Carson. But he said he was asked to leave in 2004 because he had an emergency credential and wasn't interested in becoming a highly qualified teacher.

"I was more into the coaching and the sports aspect than I was into the teaching," he said.

Feeling left behind

Despite poor middle school grades, Larissa advanced to Sacramento High School. Again - for the third time in five years - she was placed in a math class without a permanent teacher.

"We had different teachers the whole year," Larissa said.

Almanza pulled her daughter out. For 10th grade, Larissa enrolled in Hiram Johnson. She has taken Algebra 1 for three years, never earning higher than a D-plus.

Larissa has always lived in Oak Park and Tahoe Park, and her mother, a secretary for the state, feels Larissa would have received a better education if she could have afforded to raise her in a different community.

"The schools where there's more minorities ... it seems like here the teachers don't care," Almanza said. Student enrollment at Johnson is roughly 20 percent each white and African American and 30 percent each Latino and Asian American.

Johnson's principal disputes Almanza's contention, saying her teachers work hard for the students. But teaching those from low-income areas is challenging, Lynne Tafoya said, because problems with health care and housing create instability.

And the exit exam alone won't even things out, she said. Instead, Tafoya wants parents to discipline children for poor grades and teachers to inspire students to value education.

"The teacher is the single deciding factor, and if I don't have teachers who are showing up every day with thoughtful, well-planned instruction, then I'm failing my kids," she said.

Determined to succeed

Kevin Muhammad says he has had good teachers, but his early school years are a blur. Because of family illness and his mother's unstable employment, he has moved many times in his 17 years - so much so that Kevin can't remember where he started elementary school. At one point, things grew so dire that Kevin, his sister and their mother slept in the family's Ford Taurus.

"We used to (park) in front of the school, with clothes in the trunk and everything," Kevin said.

Now Kevin has his own child and divides his time between his mother's Sacramento home and his girlfriend's. He has been taking classes to prepare for the exit exam because he sees a high school diploma as his surest route to financial stability.

Darleen Reynolds, whose son Brandon attends Hiram Johnson, believes success rests on a student's desire to learn, not a family's income. Her older sons attended West Campus, where 99 percent of seniors have passed the exam. At Johnson to date, 63 percent of those in the class of 2006 have passed.

But both schools serve large numbers of students who come from low-income families - 64 percent of Johnson students and 40 percent of those at West Campus qualify for subsidized lunch.

Reynolds doesn't blame educators for the differences in the schools' passage rates. "There's got to be a school for the kids who don't want to learn anything, who just need to get through the system," she said.

For some, getting through the system is an accomplishment on its own. Linda's mother came to the United States as a teenager and has little formal education. She hopes her daughter will pass the test and graduate. But she says Linda's years in school have been valuable no matter what.

"If Linda cannot reach high, it's OK if she only achieves at the low level," Ly Nguyen said in Vietnamese. "My thoughts about Linda will be the same."

In the kitchen of the family's Rosemont home, Nguyen points to a wall where Linda's kindergarten class picture hangs. She said she wants to hang Linda's diploma there so visitors will see how well she has done.

Time is running out

That outcome remains to be seen. Seniors at Johnson took the exit exam again last month and will learn their scores in January. Juan and Brandon feel confident. Linda and Kevin aren't so sure.

They will get two more chances - in February and May. But only if they pass by February will they be allowed to walk the graduation stage in June.

Larissa doesn't see that happening. She thinks she has failed again. One section asked students to write an essay about a boomerang, and Larissa said she couldn't think of a thing to say.

And there's another barrier: She is about a semester behind in credits. Larissa's counselors have lightened her course load and told her she can graduate after summer school if she passes the exam and all her classes.

But the idea of not graduating with her class in June is so humiliating to Larissa that she says she would rather just drop out.

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What is the exit exam?

The California High School Exit Exam consists of two parts, math and English, given on consecutive days. Each part usually takes students less than four hours to complete. But the exam is untimed; students may take as long as they need during each of the two days. Math: The math section tests students on sixth-and seventh-grade skills, plus Algebra 1, typically taught in eighth or ninth grade. This section includes 80 multiple-choice questions. Students must get 55 percent right to pass. English: The English language arts portion tests students on ninth-and 10th-grade reading and writing skills. It consists of 72 multiple-choice questions and one essay question. Students must get a 60 percent score to pass.

About the writer:

• The Bee's Laurel Rosenhall can be reached at (916) 321-1083 or lrosenhall@sacbee.com. Bee staff writers Thuy-Doan Le and Erika Chavez provided Vietnamese and Spanish translation for this report.