High school graduation options will get tougher

State education leaders voted today to make it tougher for students who can’t pass required exams to earn high school diplomas.

The State Board of Education eliminated one alternative test, the Post Secondary Education Readiness Test, dubbed PERT, as an alternative option for students who don’t pass the state exams. And it made the scores needed on the ACT or SAT higher. It also added the PSAT, a preliminary version of the SAT, into the mix.

The new rule kicks in for students in the class of 2022, or those who will start high school in August, so it does not affect current high school students.

Educators and students asked the board not to make the changes, saying they will keep some teenagers from graduating. But the state board voted unanimously to adopt the new rules, saying state law required it.

Two years ago, the state board adopted new tougher state exams and more challenging passing scores, setting a higher bar for high school graduation. Florida law required that once those new tests — part of the Florida Standards Assessments or FSA — were in place, the board needed to adopt new alternative tests that also could be used to meet graduation requirements.

The goal of the alternative tests is to offer another option for students to show they have met state academic standards, officials said. But the current alternative tests and “concordant scores” are too easy to meet the FSA requirements put in place in 2016, they added.

Education Commissioner Pam Stewart said the board’s vote means districts will have to offer students better instruction and more options to relearn material but can no longer let them “get through the system through a loophole.”

The key issue: the scores on alternative tests students can use if they cannot pass the two FSA exams — one in algebra and one in language arts — required for a diploma. More than 35,000 Florida students in the class of 2017 graduated using alternative exams, figures from the Florida Department of Education show. That’s about 20 percent of the more than 168,000 teenagers who earned diplomas last spring and summer.

The new rule was proposed by the education department with help from the Buros Center for Testing at University of Nebraska — which has served as Florida’s testing consultant for more than a decade — and a group of Florida teachers and administrators. They looked at student performance on the two FSA exams and then on the other tests to come up with equivalent scores.

PERT was eliminated because it didn’t cover the “rigor, complexity and breadth” of Florida’s math standards, and the recommendation was that it not be used “to satisfy any assessment requirements for high school graduation,” the department said.

Under the new rule, students who didn’t pass the algebra exam would need 16 out of 36 on ACT math, 420 out of 800 on SAT math or 430 out of 760 on the PSAT math section.

Those who didn’t pass the FSA language arts exam would need a 480 on the SAT or an average score of 18 on ACT reading and English