Standardized Exit Exams: Lincoln-Douglas Format

Though I will readily admit that this is possibly one of my least favorite LD topics of all time, I want to run my cases for blocking purposes. Plus, I feel as though I have been long absent from DDO. :) I ask that my opponent use LD format, but I'm not going to be a huge stickler about it. In other words, the purpose of running this is two-fold: I want a good debate, but I also want to be able to run it in such a way that helps my kids block out my arguments and a decent neg case. This requires LD format. I also ask the the rounds mimic competition slightly in that RD 3 is reserved for voting issues only (i.e. please no new arguments). --------------------------------------------------------- I affirm, resolved: public high school students in the United States ought not be required to pass standardized exit exams to graduate. Observation 1: Definitions Standardized Exit Exam: any state-wide assessment that must be passed prior to receiving one's public high school diploma. The affirmative acknowledges that some states choose not to assess a student's potential to successfully exit high school using the stereotypical multiple-choice test. Observation 2: Standards. V: Justice. Justice, defined by Aristotle as giving each person his or her due, is precisely what education is about. Justice as related to education requires equality of distribution, as every citizen is due a culturally acceptable education in order to succeed within society, otherwise the concept of a meritocracy is fundamentally compromised. Therefore, the affirmative will strive to achieve this due for all US public education students. 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 not only fail to indicate mastery within the educational system, but entrench the inequality of education distribution to the detriment of student success. 1.My first contention is that exit exams test a deeply biased system of education, which makes the exam invalid. 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 Viadero: "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." (2009) 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. Since the educational standards of a given state cannot be equally represented in every classroom in that state due to these deep-seeded disparities, the students who are most underserved are more likely to fail those exams. The psychological effect of being branded a failure is described as Viadero 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." (2009) The stigma of failure, even though that failure is generally 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. Carnoy explains: "High school is where economically disadvantaged young people—many of them African Americans and Latinos—make it or break it educationally. High school determines how these students will be incorporated into work and social structures. 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. Reforms aiming to improve educational quality must ultimately be evaluated in terms of improving high school completion rates." (2005) 2. My second contention is that standardized exit exams offer no academic benefits to those who pass them. Even if the system itself weren't inherently damaged, the test itself, in both material and form, do not correlate to a student's mastery of important skills or future success. Considering that high school is a preparatory institution for college and the workforce, as well as the final stop in a 12-year quest for what society deems as crucial cognitive skills, if the exit exam cannot prove mastery or indicate a readiness for graduation from this institution, it must be abolished. Warren & Grodsky published a comprehensive study of exit exams in 2009 which spans the last 30 years of educational data regarding the exams. Over that 30 years, they discovered the following: First of all: "We found no evidence for any effect of exit exams…on reading or math achievement at the mean or at any of several cut-points of the achievement distribution. These results hold for 13-year-olds and for 17-year-olds and don't vary across racial/ethnic or social class backgrounds, undermining claims of disparate impact." Second of all: "Young high school graduates who obtained their diplomas in exit exam states fared no better in the labor market than their peers who obtained their diplomas in other states. These findings held in states with minimum competency exit exams and in states with higher competency exams. They also held for students from different racial/ethnic backgrounds." In other words, Warren & Grodsky found that exit exams not only do not test a student's competency accurately in reading or math, but that they also have no bearing whatsoever on a student's employability in the US workforce. As exit exams have proven themselves as illegitimate measures of academic achievement, they cannot be used to provide legitimacy to the education system. Have at me :)