I was recently sent a copy of a New York State Regents' exam, and I was glad to see that Regents' are alive and well, though somewhat diminished from when I took the exams in the 1940s.
The Regents' embody an old -- and sound -- idea: that students should be expected to master a certain body of knowledge and that they should be tested on it to show their mastery. In the case of the Regents' exams, the standards for what students should know are set by the state of New York. But you can find tests embodying a similar principle in industrialized countries with successful education systems -- France, Germany, Japan.
The Regents' exam I looked at -- one in U.S. history and government --asked students to answer questions that ranged from the beginning of the United States to the day before yesterday. It was a three-hour exam made up of 47 multiple-choice and three essay questions, with the multiple-choice counting 55 percent and the essays 45 percent, and it required students to show some basic knowledge about important events and trends in our history and how our government works. For example,
6. Which action is the best example of checks and
balances?
1. President Ronald Reagan ordering a military attack on Libya
2. the Supreme Court ruling that President Richard Nixon must surrender the Watergate tapes
3. the 26th amendment giving 18-year-old citizens the right to vote
4. the House of Representatives voting to censure one of its members
Other multiple-choice questions asked students to make active use of what they knew by interpreting the significance of a cartoon, a group of headlines, a couple of pie charts or a graph.
The essay questions called for brief, straightforward discussions of important subjects:
11, 1 . The Constitutional Convention of 1787 used compromise to address conflicts over major issues facing the new nation. Some of these issues [were:] representation, states' rights, slavery, tariffs, civil liberties, taxation. Choose three of the issues listed and for each one chosen: Describe a conflict that arose over the issue at the Constitutional Convention. Explain how that issue was resolved through the use of compromise.
Now, neither of these questions requires a subtle or profound knowledge of U.S. history or government. Like the other questions on the exam, they call for the basic knowledge that all citizens need. Could top high school graduates -- which is what the kids who take the Regents' are -- achieve at a higher level? Certainly. All we have to do is look at the school-leaving exams that comparable students in other industrialized countries take -- tests like the German Abitur and the French baccalaureate. However, these are high-stakes exams. German and French students need to pass them in order to get into university. If New York colleges and universities required a high level of preparation as evidenced by passing tough Regents' exams -- and they once did -- then New York students, too, would perform at higher levels.
But as they stand, the Regents' exams offer a useful perspective on some of the current controversies about standards in education -- for example, the battle over outcomes-based education (OBE). The big problem with OBE is not that it bases education on outcomes. After all, the New York State Regents' exams are based on "outcomes" -- on how well kids have mastered and can use a basic body of knowledge about our history and government. The problem is that the outcomes adopted by some of the states are so vague. Compare the "outcome" illustrated by the Regents' questions on the Constitution or the separation of powers with the corresponding Pennsylvania citizenship outcome:
3. All students describe the development and operations of economic, political, legal and governmental systems in the United States, assess their own relationships to those systems and compare them to those in other nations.
This standard offers no guidance as to what students should know. It is so broad and open-ended that kids meeting it could know everything there is to know about U.S. history and government -- or next to nothing.
The standards embodied in the Regents' exams also provide a useful perspective on current struggles to establish the national standards called for by the Goals 2000 legislation. Standards do not have to be overstuffed, like the world history standards that were recently released. And they do not have to be controversial. The New York State Regents' exams pay an old-fashioned homage to the value of solid, straightforward information, and they should be revisited by everyone who is thinking about how to devise standards for what our students should know and be able to do.