Here’s a shocker. The Asbury Park Press’s Diane D’Amico reports that most kids who took the Special Review Assessment, an alternative test given to those who can’t pass the standard 11th grade test required to get a high school diploma after three tries, are taking college prep courses, including Algebra II, biology, and honors or AP English.

The prevailing wisdom was that kids taking the SRA were in remedial courses, struggling to pass the most basic concepts in language arts and math. D.O.E. Assistant Commissioner Jay Doolan remarked,

Our thought was that students (who failed the graduation test) were not taking college preparatory courses, but more general education classes. So we were surprised.

Doolan is confident that the State’s High School Redesign will fix the problem since specific content will be required for each course, but others are not so sanguine. Derrell Bradford of Excellent Education for Everyone, a pro-voucher and charter school organization, wondered, “Is what the students take not really algebra? Or does the person teaching it not know what they’re doing? This is saying that nothing that happens to these kids in the classroom amounts to anything.” Stan Karp of the Education Law Center said “the state should worry less about the tests and more about what and how students are learning.”

State-wide curricula should help. But only if something changes in the classroom, and that’s going to take a lot more than more mandates and regulations from the D.O.E.