Engineering an exit exam

Re “Don’t drop the exit exam,” Editorial, June 10

The Times is correct to insist that the governor veto or the state Legislature stop the suspension of California high school exit exam. While the exam is not state of the art, it does not test even high school knowledge but rather junior high skills where students only need to get roughly 60% correct to pass. We should expect our teachers and students to succeed.

Sacramento, the big school board up north, often swings the pendulum of curriculum and assessment too much, and we end up with years of no measurement tools to gauge our efforts on behalf of student learning.

Shifting to the new Common Core emphasis on rigor and deeper assessments of knowledge should not mean we suspend testing whether students know when James Madison lived or in which states the Civil War was fought.

Architects still need to measure, and lawyers need to be able to read.

David Tokofsky

Los Angeles The writer was a member of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education for 12 years.