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Unacceptable Is No Longer Acceptable

May 25, 2005

Fourteen Cedar Hill High School students won’t be graduating with their friends this year because they could not pass the TAKS test.

This is the first school year in which seniors must pass the TAKS test to graduate. Fourteen of the district’s 447 seniors fell short. This represents 3% of this year’s seniors. Compare that with the percentage of failing students in DeSoto (1.7%), and Duncanville (2.8%), and you can see our numbers are higher than they should be.

A little background on the TAKS test. Students take the test as sophomores. If they pass, they never have to take it again. The failing students are required to take it again as seniors, but they can also voluntarily sit for the test three times before their senior year. So the 14 students who failed either failed the test numerous times or chose not to take the test until the very last moment. Either way, the students were given many chances to pass.

Despite the unfortunate academic performance, I applaud the CHISD’s response to the students’ situation. The district is not allowing the failing students to participate in the graduation ceremony with the graduating students. In my opinion, the graduation ceremony should be a reward for those that graduate, not a consolation prize for those who don’t.

I’m not dispassionate to the struggles faced by some of the children in our school district. Some of our kids have little or no emotional support at home — no encouragement to perform well academically. The parents of some of our children are not around much and the kids are left to raise themselves and their siblings. All these things certainly affect academic performance.

But even among this group of kids, there are those that succeed. There are some who overcome many obstacles to be successful in school. They succeed in school when everything around them is telling them they should fail. They beat the odds. They are the exception rather than the rule. These are the children we should celebrate. These are the ones we honor on graduation day.

Had the failing students been allowed to pretend they had succeeded, we would diminish the accomplishments of the students who did indeed graduate. Participation in the graduation ceremony is a reward. Rewarding those who failed perpetuates failure and betrays the very essence of accomplishment.

Let us aim for a higher standard for our children. Let us not call a failing performance acceptable, even for a moment. For once we begin to accept the unacceptable, we lose the reward of the achievement.

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