Joanne Jacobs

Georgia’s high-stakes tests for third, fifth and eighth graders are aren’t really high stakes, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The law says students will be retained if they can’t pass the third-grade reading test and the fifth- and eighth-grade reading and math tests in two tries. But nearly all are passed anyhow, even if they flunk or the retest or don’t bother to take it.

State Superintendent Kathy Cox defended schools’ use of the appeal process, which allows promotion if the principal, parent and teacher agree. When she worked on the bill as a state representative, she said, she believed it would be used mainly to identify and help struggling students — not to retain large numbers of them.

She said retention “should be a last resort.”

“I don’t think that just holding a kid back and putting them back through the same content, the same grade … with in many cases the same set of teachers, is necessarily in the best interest of the child,” Cox said. “They don’t necessarily need to repeat the entire year.”

Why not design an alternative program — different teaching strategies, different teachers — for students who have fallen behind?

Some 38 percent of Georgia’s eighth graders failed the math test on their first try.

Are you smarter than an Indian 10th grader? Two Million Minutes has created the Third World Challenge, a shortened and simplified version of the test 10th graders in India must pass to gain admittance to 11th grade.

The test is here. The English questions are very easy for a native speaker. I had more trouble with the history, which had two questions about the date of UN declarations. Don’t know, don’t care. I didn’t try the other subjects, so others will have to report.

Eight years ago, Granger High in Washington’s Yakima Valley was a typical high-poverty, low-performing school, writes Karin Chenoweth of Education Trust in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Only 20 percent of students met reading standards; only half graduated. Gangs were active; graffiti marred the campus. Nobody expected more from the children of farmworkers: 80 percent are Latino, 10 percent American Indian and 90 percent are poor. But a new principal, Richard Esparza, believed Granger’s students could do better.

More than 90 percent of the Class of 2008 — almost all of whom are low-income — graduated from high school on time. Another couple of students will be graduating this summer.

That’s not all — a whopping 90 percent of the 62 graduates are going on to some kind of post-secondary education. Thirty-seven percent are going directly to four-year colleges, 14 percent to technical schools and more than a third to two-year colleges.

Most Granger students start ninth grade with poor reading, writing, math and science skills, Chenoweth writes.

To tackle the students’ low reading skills, Granger uses a locally grown program that begins by providing students with very short passages posing an ethical dilemma, allowing students to grapple with serious topics while learning new vocabulary and gaining fluency. Eventually students graduate to longer passages and, after a while, serious literature that allows them to enter the life of the mind — “Huckleberry Finn,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Even students who enter reading at fifth-grade level or below are meeting state reading standards by 10th grade.

Unlike at most schools, failure is not a final outcome. Students who fail quizzes and tests are given the opportunity to retake them after tutoring, allowing them to develop an academic work ethic.

That reminds me of Downtown College Prep, which I wrote about in Our School: Start where students are, even if it means teaching elementary skills in ninth grade. Treat failure as useful feedback: You need to work harder, go at it a different way, try, try again.

Chenoweth is the author of It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools.