more shenanigans from government schools

From today's C-J, an article from the Indy Star's Andy Gammill on schools in Indiana who have been abusing the exception policy for those who fail the state's "required" standardized graduation tests....

State education officials plan to crack down this year on 15 schools that allow more than 20 percent of their students to receive diplomas without passing the state's "mandatory" graduation exam.

Some school leaders worry that such high numbers suggest abuse in a system designed to help successful students who founder on test days. And business leaders counting on state schools to improve one of the least-educated workforces in the country see the waivers as a step backward.

Statewide, the Department of Education said, the rate of students graduating because requirements are waived has grown from 5 percent in 2004-05 to about 6 percent last school year, or about 3,300 students out of 58,000. Most of the 15 schools with the highest rates of waivers are in the Gary and Indianapolis districts.

At Arlington and Northwest high schools in Indianapolis, more than one in four students graduating received a diploma despite having failed the Graduation Qualifying Exam at least three times. In Gary, the percentages are higher.

The increase in waivers comes more than a decade after states started adding high school exit exams, a move embraced in Indiana as a step to turn out more talented employees. Indiana ranks 46th for the education level of its workforce.

If workers are seeking jobs with diplomas but without the ability to do the work, it weakens the value of the diploma, hurts the state's economic-development efforts and creates problems for employers, said Derek Redelman, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce's vice president for education and workforce development.

Deciding when to grant waivers has been left to local school administrators, but state Superintendent of Public Instruction Suellen Reed is promising to take a closer look at those decisions.

"In granting the locals the opportunity to grant the waivers, the idea was they would be self-policing," she said.

Waivers were meant to help students who have the skills to graduate from high school but don't take tests well or who have extenuating circumstances that would explain their repeated poor performance.

What do you expect when you have a government-run entity with tremendous monopoly power? Why do you think that efforts to regulate them will be all that effective? How about some competition and private sector activity with students who aren't being well-served or efficiently-served by government schools?