Council Rock High North and South’s Class of 2019 will be the first in Pennsylvania to have to pass the Keystone Exams as a mandated high school graduation requirement.
Senate Bill 880, which was signed into law Wednesday by Gov. Tom Wolf, pushed the implementation of the requirement back two years from 2017 to 2019. The bill was recently unanimously passed by the House and Senate.
Wolf’s office said the delayed implementation of the Keystone Exams to “allow more time to evaluate the best options of measuring student success.”
“While we should have high academic and educational standards in the commonwealth, there have been issues with the implementation of the Keystone exams, which is why I am signing a bill to delay their use as a graduation requirement,” Wolf said in a statement. “My administration is currently engaging teachers, administrators and students, community leaders, stakeholders and advocates from around the state to develop a comprehensive school accountability system that will support schools and help Pennsylvania students succeed.”
The rationale for a delay in applying Keystone Exams as a statewide graduation requirement is as follows:
• Significantly higher numbers of students are failing to demonstrate proficiency on one or both of the two modules available for each Keystone Exam (Algebra 1, Biology, English/Language Arts) even after a retake.
• School Districts are required to offer “supplemental instruction” to students who fail one or both Keystone Exam modules.
• The alternative method for demonstrating proficiency in the standards is the Project Based Assessment (PBA).
• The PBA was intended and designed primarily as alternative for students who had difficulty with the Keystone testing format, not necessarily for students who had failed to master content.
• Both Supplemental Instruction and the administration and scoring of the PBAs are expensive and time consuming and the high volume of students in the Supplement Instruction/PBA pipeline is overwhelming the capacity of both PDE and school districts to respond.
“As it currently stands, students who fail the exams twice are entitled to supplemental instruction and have the option of taking a project-based assessment under a teacher’s supervision. However, the state has yet to provide clear guidelines for the process,” an article from the York Dispatch said, citing a central Pennsylvania school official.
The state Department of Education will also begin to look into alternative methods for high schoolers to demonstrate proficiency for graduation.
State officials plan to meet with education officials to get input.
