Saving K-12 | Reform #5: Comprehensive End-of-Course Exams

Wherein a veteran teacher calls on school leaders to enact five common-sense reforms to address head-on K12's failure to educate.

This is my final post in this series. It’s brief and to the point. I hope it resonates enough with you to reach out to your local school board member and ask a few questions:

• Are teachers in middle and high schools required to give a final exam?

• If so, how are students held accountable for their performance on the final exam?

• Under what conditions are final exams administered? Are they open-book? open-note? objective test items or subjective test items?

• Have you audited the local high school’s final exams?

• Can we see a sample final from each core class from previous years?

• Do the finals align with the Board-adopted and tax-revenue-funded curriculum?

• What are the average scores on each final from previous years? (Yes, this data exists, and you can ask for it with student names redacted.)

Start asking questions. If the Board comes back with, “It’s up to the teacher” you’re going to have problems. End of course exams are important for accountability across all school-related groups. Making them optional is cover for malpractice.

Think about it this way: if your kid doesn’t know much about math, but has gotten As in his math courses, the final exam might be the only way you’d find out before he signed up for a 6-figure debt-load at a university. You do not want your child starting a STEM major but changing to a soft major with weak job prospects when she realizes she can’t do the work.

The lack of accountability with regard to what students actually know and can do has major implications for students, their families, and our nation as a whole. We MUST test for it.

And we have to start holding the paid employees we entrust with our children accountable for testing our kids honestly. Only then can we begin to address the systemic failure common to America’s “free” public schools.

---

Step 5: Districts will administer comprehensive, objective final exams across all subject-specific classes.

Elected school board members must begin their tenure with the end in mind.

They must hire a superintendent who they believe is well-suited to that end.

They must develop a system of accountability for the superintendent, principals, and teachers; the paid stakeholders, i.e. District employees, must develop and follow policy to serve that end.

I've outlined four policies thus far that I believe communities can implement at any time (though it's easiest if you begin planning in summer for the ensuing school year):

1. The Majority of the Class Must Come First on the necessity of removing incorrigible students from the classroom to defend academic opportunity for the majority of learners.

2. The Principal on Patrol places a school leader where he most needs to be, in and around classrooms, supporting teachers.

3. The What, Why and How of Universal Manual Note-taking because a learner isn't learning until they do something with the information delivered by the teacher.

4. The use of Regular Gradebook Audits to hold teachers accountable for maintaining an instruction-practice-feedback-assessment cycle that scales.

Now we move on to something that used to be obviously necessary to teachers and the community but which, at many schools, has fallen by the wayside, largely, I suspect, to protect administrators from accountability for student learning outcomes.

The Comprehensive Final Exam

Final exams are non-negotiable. They should be comprehensive, objective , quickly-scorable multiple choice exams. They should never be a project or essay completed at home and graded subjectively.

Over the course of my 20-year career in conventional public high schools, I watched as teachers quietly dropped the final exam. Teachers were permitted --at times, subtly encouraged-- to drop their comprehensive final examination and give instead a test only on the final unit covered in class or worse, in my opinion, a final project that freed up the final two weeks of school for the teacher. The kids would spend a week doing "group-work" and the final week of school was reserved for project presentations.

Of course, there were also teachers who had fully given up and showed movies for the last week of school so they could catch up on the grading they had put off for many reasons, not the least of which is the pointlessness of grading student work given the prevalence of Equitable Grading Policies that fully train students against effective work habits and undermine the cycle of learning facilitated by full-class instruction, in-class practice, feedback, additional practice as necessary and regular low-stakes assessments. The lie of equitable grading is that the teacher can do that on 30 different timelines, each individualized to every student.

Students deserve the opportunity to show exactly what knowledge they held on to in a year. Yes, they gripe. OF COURSE they gripe. But I'll tell you what: when you don't test the kids, you're saying that what they learned doesn't matter and nothing is more de-motivating than that.

We tell them learning is their job then withhold the final job review. That's cruel. It serves only the adults in the system who can then pretend everything's just fine, even though national and state tests (and, increasingly, alarming reports of student incompetence even in elite universities) increasingly reveal massive failures across K12 nationwide. Yes, I recognize that California is a particularly poor performer, but it's not alone. And for all the Eduspeak about equity and justice for marginalized communities, the students in that category arguably suffer the most under the reign of the Feelings-First dogma of the education establishment.

The Test

To be clear, I am not talking about standardized, state-mandated tests. I am talking about a cumulative final specific to every middle and high school course offered in the school district, aligned to the curriculum adopted by the school board. The test should be on paper, completed by hand on a quick-to-grade answer sheet. There are plenty of apps like ZipGrade now available to make this possible even for a team of parent volunteers with a handful of cell phones.

I hate to have to say this, but it should probably be written and scored by a third-party contractor. Districtwide cheating on standardized tests to protect adult jobs/pay is an unfortunate reality, the Atlanta and Chicago public school districts being notable examples. All District employees having anything to do with handling or proctoring the test should sign a document clearly outlining security and ethical requirements for the administration of the test, with the penalty for cheating being immediate dismissal.

The test should be written at a level of basic knowledge of the material in the adopted curriculum. In other words, we should expect a C student to pass the test with a C or better. It should not be a test of the ability to think; it should be a test of what students should reasonably be expected to know after a year of instruction using materials approved by the school board.

The final test should count for 10%-20% of a student's final grade so the students have skin in the game too.

Test data should be delivered within 24 hours of scoring (which should happen within 48 hours of the test date) and made available to all stakeholders: students, parents, teachers, and principals. All stakeholders need to see what knowledge students are retaining.

The administration, from the District level down to the site principal, should shoulder the weight of accountability for test results. They have the most power to ensure teachers employ solid instructional practices, require training for them if they do not, and to protect the learning environment from disruption. Frankly, Superintendents should be held contractually to maintain the baseline in well-performing districts or marginally improve district-wide results where the student body performs poorly.

Teachers need end of year test data to reflect thoughtfully on their teaching practices and shore up areas of individual weakness, approaching lead teachers and administrators for specific training that ultimately supports all of their students.

Parents need end of year test data so that they have full awareness of what their children know and can do. Sadly, grades no longer communicate achievement because there's far too much lying happening there now too, incentivized by backward educational policy. Parents are also the ones most likely to be able to influence the Board -- which controls the Superintendent-- to make necessary personnel and policy changes for the benefit of their children and, again, ultimately ALL the children in a community.

Content area teams should spend one of the teacher-only days after the close of the school year debriefing the results of the test, looking at where their teaching was weak and making plans to support each other to more effectively teach course material. If the data coming back demonstrates significant student weakness, that should signal to leadership that big changes need to be made, possibly at the lower elementary levels. In other words, the data will often back up what the teachers in the District are quietly saying but which, right now, administrators may plausibly deny when parents rightly ask why these weaknesses are not being directly addressed.

Administrators should use the data to weigh the efficacy of policy. The data should drive careful scrutiny of the District's allocation of scarce resources, including personnel and funds spent on consultants and outside training.

The Benefits of a Comprehensive Final

Our world is dominated by data. Humanity is doing everything it can to manage information in ways that allow individuals to make better decisions. The human race is taking enormous risks right now with AI in order to try to benefit from all the data everywhere at once.

And yet in the one place where it really matters, the place where we send the people most precious to us for what is arguably the most important period of their lives, the time when their brain is capable of the most growth, we aren't using data at all or rely on metrics that can be heavily gamed and, all too often, are.

Schools must reimplement well-defined touchstones for parents and children to understand how well and how much they are learning so families can take corrective action if they are unhappy with the results.

Teachers need to see if what they think is working is actually working and given the agency to make changes in the best interests of the majority of their students.

Principals need to be forced to look at hard data and held accountable for doing the very difficult work of changing school culture so that it prioritizes excellence as opposed to one that simply exists to minimize friction for site and district leadership.

Communities must be able to measure the efficacy of the adults —often very well-remunerated adults— to whom they have entrusted the future success of the community.

Until then, our schools will continue to under-serve all students, resulting in nearly unimaginable opportunity cost that is hidden from parents and rarely discussed by anyone with the power to address it.

It doesn't have to be like this. Truly. Still, turning this ship around is a huge undertaking. It's going to take each one of us, prioritizing our own children, and leveraging all the pressure we can bring to bear on a system that, for too long, sees sources of revenue where it should see the shining faces that are the future of our nation and of human liberty.

---

If you appreciate this and believe that my essays, podcasts, and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control over their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing whatever you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.