High school graduates walk at their commencement at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. Louisiana is among the half dozen states that still require exit exams to graduate from high school. Most states have dropped exit exams, with Massachusetts being the latest. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Jill Norton, an education policy adviser in Massachusetts, has a teenage son with dyslexia and ADHD. Shelley Scruggs, an electrical engineer in the same state, also has a teenage son with ADHD. Both students go to the same technical high school.
But this fall, Norton and Scruggs advocated on opposite sides of a Massachusetts ballot referendum scrapping the requirement that high school kids pass a standardized state test to graduate.
Norton argued that without the high bar of the standard exam, kids like hers won’t have an incentive to strive. But Scruggs maintained that kids with learning disorders also need different types of measurements than standardized tests to qualify for a high school diploma.