Designed for failure?

Say you are a sadder-but-wiser high school dropout, now lamenting your misspent teenage youth. The standard advice is to “get your GED” (take a general educational development test) as the equivalent to a high school diploma. You register for classes to brush up your knowledge, and within a reasonable length of time you will take four tests designed to measure proficiency in reading, writing, social studies, and math skills. Feeling intimidated? Go to yourged.org for a series of pep talks delivered by B-list celebrities who will urge you to “skip the drama” and persevere, because you can do it.

But what if you can’t?

Jody is a Midwestern homeschooling mom whose first four children passed their GED tests with no drama and went on to college. Her fifth child enrolled in the program in April 2014, after the new GED came to town. Implemented in January 2014, the new program is supposed to measure “college and career readiness.” That phrase will sound very ominous to anyone who’s been following the Common Core controversy, and no wonder: The GED is now administered under the Common Core State Standards umbrella.

Jody’s daughter took 10 weeks of classes instead of the five required for her siblings without even taking one of the four tests. The study materials her daughter was given contained so much wrong information most teachers ditched it, but not hers. Jody signed her up for two weeks of tutoring, naively thinking that she would be done. After many setbacks, tears, and determination, the girl finally passed. What took her siblings less than five weeks took her almost 10 months of “general educational development.”

“The GED is set up to fail students,” Jody flatly stated. Given that pass rates promptly dropped 80 percent in Washington state after implementing the new test, she’s probably on to something.

“Set up to fail” seems to be a pattern. When New York implemented Common Core standards in 2012, the 30 percent drop in overall student test scores made news. It wasn’t generally reported that those scores were determined before the test results were in, by a complicated matrix of statistical sleight-of-hand and “standards” developed by Pearson (the textbook publisher that has somehow become the arbiter of “college and career readiness” in New York). The pass-fail ratios were predetermined and “cut scores” assigned on the curve. Something of the same process appears to be going on with the GED, only it’s even more insidious.

“My heart breaks for the students I have seen coming to get their GEDs,” Jody wrote. Not just homeschoolers and dropouts, but grandmothers who must get back in the work force and competent workers whose employer is now requiring some kind of high school equivalency to stay on the job. Suddenly they are asked to determine probabilities and volumes, and those online pep talks ring hollow.

If students are deliberately “set up to fail,” the next question is why? That’s a complicated answer for another column, but for now it appears that GED standards are “rigorous” beyond reasonable expectation. It’s not that you’re stupid, but the system is.