Background
Since 1999, when the Legislature enacted the legislation on the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE), Public Advocates has been working to ensure that all students have the opportunity to learn the content mandated in California’s rigorous content standards and tested on the exit exam, and to demonstrate their mastery of the standards on an alternative fair and valid assessment.
While the high school exam bill, SB 2X, was making its way through the legislative process during the 1999-2000 legislative session, Public Advocates argued that the legislation should include alternative forms of assessment. This helped to compel the Legislature to adopt a 1999 California Education Code § 60856, which required the State Board of Education to study alternatives to the CAHSEE after the adoption and initial administration of the exam.
Since 1999, Public Advocates has used both legislative advocacy and coalition building in the Campaign for Quality Education (CQE) to raise awareness of the harmful effects of the CAHSEE, particularly for students in under-resourced schools. As an active member of the CQE, we participated in CQE’s 2003 statewide bus tour and rally in Sacramento to publicize inequitable school conditions and resources and protest the punitive nature of the CAHSEE for students trapped in under-resourced schools, as well as organized testimony before the State Board of Education requesting a delay of the exam until the necessary resources could be provided. The CQE’s numbers and testimony visibly influenced members of the Board as they discussed and agreed to delay the exam for two years.
By the fall of 2005, while the State prepared to impose the CAHSEE requirement on the Class of 2006, it had still failed to study alternatives to the exit exam for all students as required by Education Code § 60856. Public Advocates sent a letter to the State Board of Education in November 2005 demanding that the State Board study alternatives to CAHSEE, as it was required to do by law. Due in part to this letter, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction held a public hearing on alternatives in December 2005. Public Advocates, in conjunction with many of our community partners, participated in this hearing and advocated for an assessment system that uses multiple measures to assess whether or not a student is ready to graduate from high school, rather than a single, high-stakes, standardized test such as the CAHSEE.
On March 8, 2006, just eight days before seniors in the class of 2006 would have their final opportunity to take the CAHSEE in time to receive scores by June and graduate on time, the State Board adopted the Superintendent’s recommendation that there was no “practical” alternative to the exit exam in time to benefit the class of 2006. Based on the State Board’s egregious five year delay in complying with their statutory obligation to study alternatives, Public Advocates filed suit, on behalf of Californians for Justice, to halt implementation of the diploma penalty (Californians for Justice v. State Board of Education) While the trial court agreed that the State was indeed late in conducting the study of alternatives, it declined to issue a remedy, and our appeal was unsuccessful.
Public Advocates and our allies in the CQE continued to advocate for a more fair alternative to the CAHSEE, including support for AB 1379 (Brownley) (2007), a bill that would have required the Superintendent to conduct a more rigorous study of alternatives by October 2008. AB 1379 was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger.
We hold strong to the principle that California should have a two-way system of accountability: the State should be held accountable for providing all students with the opportunity to learn the content tested on the CAHSEE before holding individual students accountable for passing the exam. To this end, Public Advocates filed an amicus brief, on behalf of 11 community organizations, as well as United Teachers Los Angeles and the Campaign for Quality Education, in Valenzuela v. O’Connell , a suit challenging the CAHSEE on equal protection grounds. In the summer of 2006, the California Court of Appeals agreed that many students may well have been denied the opportunity to learn the material tested on the CAHSAEE, but declined to halt implementation of the diploma penalty for the class of 2006.
