Public HighSchool Students of the U.S. ought not be required to take a standardized exit exam to g

Note: I've removed my citations as I've been burned by noobs stealing cases and forfeiting all rounds. If my opponent steps up, I'm more than happy to post them in the comments. Definitions. Though we could discount them entirely as he is the neg, he doesn't give meaningful definitions anyway. I will define "standardized exit exam": Any state-wide assessment that must be passed prior to receiving one's public high school diploma. V: Justice. Justice (defined by Aristotle as giving each citizen his/her due) as related to education requires equality of distribution, as every citizen is due a culturally mandated education in order to succeed within society, otherwise the concept of a meritocracy is fundamentally compromised. C: A legitimate system of education. In order to have a meaningful debate on education reform, we cannot neglect the system that the test is directly linked to. The affirmative contends that exit exams fail to provide a legitimate system of education: one that provides each citizen with his/her due education. My sole contention is that exit exams not only test a biased system, but reify its flaws, which invalidates the test. A. US school systems are socio-economically stratified by resources, materials, & personnel. It is widely acknowledged in countless educational studies over the years that the education system in the United States, like all other human institutions, is rife with disparities. Unfortunately, as it is in most cases, the poor bear the brunt of the burden, receiving less qualified educational instructors and less overall resources than districts with more available funds. This inequality oftentimes manifests itself in the form of standardized exam results, as detailed by ----: "The detrimental effects of the new policy were harder on girls…than on boys. Girls experienced a 19-percentage point drop in graduation rates after the Californian High School Exit Exam… was implemented, while the graduation rate for boys with similar academic profiles decreased by 12 percentage points over the same period. Likewise, graduation rates among…black, Hispanic, and Asian-American students declined by 15 to 19 percentage points following the enactment of the exit exam policy. The comparable graduation-rate drop for white students in the same achievement quartile was 1 percentage point." (--) Since a standardized test assesses one's competency within a set of standards, if all of those standards are disparately taught, the test cannot be valid. B. Results of this invalid exam withhold diplomas unjustly, and even prevent student mastery and success. Exams, in their inability to solve for inequalities in education, simply entrench already disadvantaged students further by labeling them falsely as failures. The psychological effect of being branded a failure is described as ---- continues: "Even though students have plenty of opportunities to retake the exam—and most do—poor, inner-city students who just missed the passing cutoff in 10th grade are...less likely to graduate on time than demographically similar students who just barely passed, even though both groups scored at roughly the same levels on the 10th grade exam. Failing or passing the tests seems to have no statistically significant effect, though, on the probability of graduation for wealthier, suburban students." (--) The stigma of failure, even though that failure is one of the institution and not the student, is enough to significantly reduce the chances of a poorer student graduating. Students who are mistreated by the system, and who do not graduate as a result, are much less likely to succeed, and will even become a social liability. ----- explains: "High school is where economically disadvantaged young people...make it or break it educationally...High school is also where educational reformers' efforts to improve how much students learn face the acid test. If students do not finish high school with their cohort, they are likely to be marginalized from the mainstream and to become a social liability." (--) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ A quick neg review: Standards: 1) Utilitarianism isn't an actual value. 2) Utilitarianism is nothing more than the ends justifying the means; it's tyranny of the majority. Justice outweighs as it achieves good for *all* students, not just a majority. 3) His criterion isn't a criterion, and he assumes that the test has benefits, which is what we are debating. 4) If I can prove that the test doesn't achieve justice at this point, I defeat his criterion anyway. Case: 1) Cross-apply the entire Aff case. Neg is actively marginalizing an entire segment of US citizens, which is patently unjust. Since not only 90% of the population is due a legitimate, equal education, you can vote Aff on that alone. 2) Neg has no warrant for his only offensive argument. In fact, 1/2 the states show 70-80% passing. (website in comments)