Center on Education Policy
May 2004
The Center on Education Policy is the source of this 130-page report, which says that high-stakes exit exams from high schools are not a low-cost education reform even if the tests themselves don't carry fat price tags. The point is that it costs money to provide extra academic help to students to boost the odds of their passing the exams. And that's surely true so long as one takes a remedial model for granted, i.e. assumes that the schools can't or won't do it right the first time around and will thus continue to let lots of kids make it to the stage of exit test-taking without having been properly educated. At that point, states and schools will indeed incur remedial costs-which this report takes for granted-or will face what may be politically and morally unacceptable levels of exam failure and diploma denial. The report is based on studies of the costs of exam preparation in three states: Indiana, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. These costs turn out to vary greatly-from $171 per student per year to $557, though even the high figure strikes me as a bargain if it means diplomas will (finally) begin to connote real achievement. The CEP authors also extract some (fairly obvious) lessons for policy makers, including starting out with as tough an exam as one wants to end up with rather than raising the bar along the way, and (of course) focusing on early detection and remediation of student problems. You can find it online here.
