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AIMS games

The AIMS passage gap between Latinos and non-Latinos could be a disaster

Not leaving our children behind is getting harder all the time.

It’s been a few years since Arizona jumped on the high-stakes, high school exit-exam bandwagon. It’s high stakes because without it a student can’t graduate. A number of states use the tests. Ours is called AIMS.

The goal of the exam, say supporters, is to better gauge the year-to-year academic progress of students enrolled in public schools. The tests also are meant to tell us if we’re graduating students with the basic skills they need to succeed in what is undeniably an increasingly competitive job market.

While those seem like reasonable goals, things aren’t always what they seem.

One of the complicating factors is that federal funding is now directly tied to the success or failure of our local public schools. Unless an “underachieving” school shows progress, federal funds can be cut and education officials can even shut a school down. The trouble is that it pretty much negates how these presumably lousy schools got so lousy in the first place.

The fact is that the federal government has not provided the funding needed to help state and local school systems implement President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” education reforms. Therefore, a lot of people think the idea of using a single, uniform test to measure whether any given student on any given day is qualified to graduate from high school is, well, ignorant.

If nothing else, it defies common sense by ignoring the reality that not every child has had the same opportunity to learn the same set of academic skills needed to pass the test. The one-test-fits-all approach discounts whether a potential graduate happens to have been unlucky enough to attend one of those infamous underachieving schools along the way.

HORNE’S OPINION

One of the most troubling aspects of AIMS testing involves the State Superintendent of Education Tom Horne’s stated belief that essentially everyone who’s qualified to graduate from high school in the Class of 2006 has already passed the test.

On its face, you’d think that sort of statement would be cause for celebration. But consider that less than two-thirds of all students statewide have passed the exam. Meanwhile, more than 50 percent of Latino students and more than 80 percent of non-English speakers – most of whom are Latino – have not passed AIMS, though seniors have a couple of more shots before the end of the year.

And in case I didn’t make it clear: the test is mandatory. Students who do not pass do not get a diploma.

Some look at the gap in passage rates for AIMS between Latinos and non-Latinos (more than 75 percent of White students have passed the test) and they see a disparity. I see a looming train wreck.

So what’s the state doing to avert this potential disaster? Actually, not much.

Last year, Horne and Gov. Napolitano trumpeted a $10 million tutoring program to help students who needed help passing AIMS. By the end of the school year, only 6 percent of the funds had been used. State and local school officials have no good explanation for why the money didn’t get used. Horne blamed students for not taking advantage of the program. Napolitano, who doesn’t even like the AIMS test, hasn’t said a lot about the failed tutoring program, though she was certainly willing to take to the airwaves when it was announced last year.

In an interview in August, I asked Horne if the state, in administering the exit exam, takes into consideration whether groups such as Latinos or Native Americans, are at higher risk of failing the test given the documented systemic inequities that exist in our public schools systems.

Horne was adamant. Every student, he said, is tested as “an individual,” and it’s irrelevant whether they happen to be Latino, Black or Native American. This, of course, is an extremely shortsighted reading of history.

For better and for worse, it’s in large part thanks to a history of discrimination in this country, that Latinos lag so far behind in level of educational achievement compared to our non-Latino counterparts. To deny that will doom us to repeat our mistakes. Or maybe we’ve never quite stopped making them.

A final point: You know that number I cited about how 80 percent plus of non-English speakers who took the AIMS test last year failed? Not surprisingly, a key reason the failure rates are so high for these students is this: the test is administered in English.

But immigrant students who are determined to graduate, but who’ve not yet mastered English, have at least one powerful ally on their side. Consumer rights attorney Tim Hogan says he’s set to sue the state to keep them from forcing students to take the AIMS test who’ve yet to pass the state’s English-proficiency test. Hogan hasn’t yet made good on his threat to pursue litigation, but those who know Hogan well say he doesn’t bluff.

By the way, if you think disaster is too strong of a word to describe the potential consequences of keeping the mandatory AIMS test in place, imagine an Arizona 20 years from now in which half the adults of the largest ethnic group have not earned a high school diploma.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take that long for us to figure out who in this era of so-called education reform is getting left behind.