In Texas there is the TAAS, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, which students must pass to graduate from High school. In my daughters’ senior year of high school, she made casual mention to me one evening that she had to take the TAAS that day – this after the local newspaper had been filled with lamentations about the unreasonableness of the demands that the TAAS placed upon teachers and students, and the cruelty of not letting seniors who flunked it attend graduation ceremonies. She shrugged and looked at me with mild astonishment and said, “No problem”.
Of course, she went to a Catholic school, which paid strict attention to a certain level of academic standards, and it was not a school in the best part of town, either; Hispanic working class, on the south side of San Antonio, who paid tuition and demanded the very best of their children and the teachers who taught them. I’ve always rather laughed at the people who whined that the TAAS was too hard, that some kind of hardlined assessment of what their children had learned in school was some kind of unbearable, horrible and discriminatory hardship.
