Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 27, 1993 TAG: 9306270175
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHEL MARRIOTT THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
But before Charisse was backed into a seemingly lightless tunnel between dropping out and being pushed out of school, her mother took a well-intentioned gamble. She enrolled her daughter in a program that essentially would allow her to skip high school by taking classes for a General Educational Development diploma.
"It's easier than high school," Charisse said, adding that she is never given homework after her two-and-a-half-hour school days. "The teachers try to help you more."
Nationally, the number of people taking the GED declined slightly last year, primarily because of sharp drops in Florida and New York state. In Florida, the decline is attributed to the disruptions of Hurricane Andrew, while in New York state officials cite a new $25 testing fee. But in New York City, where public school administrators have been aggressively persuading dropouts to resume their educations, as well as helping needy students get fee waivers for the examination, GED testing continues to increase, said Shelia Evans-Tranumn, director of the city's Auxiliary Services for High Schools.
Some supporters of the GED say that attaining the diploma - which requires passing a test that includes sections on English, reading, science, social studies, and math and generally takes students months to prepare for - can greatly improve a student's scholastic skills and pave the way for college. But detractors argue that a GED diploma is far less valuable than a conventional high school education and that having a back-door route to graduation can distract some students who should be in high school.
"I wouldn't want my child getting a GED," said Lester Golden, director of high schools for the Council of Supervisors and Administrators, the union for New York school administrators. It is obvious, Golden said, that a GED diploma is "not on the same level as a city diploma or state Regents diploma."
For more than 50 years, GED has represented a second chance at getting a basic education for nearly anyone who was unable to obtain a conventional high school diploma. Introduced in 1942 by the Veterans Testing Service, the program was designed primarily for Americans who interrupted their high school years to serve in World War II.
The GED Testing Service, which administers the test nationwide, does not allow anyone under the age of 16 to take the test to prevent students from leaving school too early.
But today, nearly one in seven diplomas is a GED. It is increasingly being seen by some - particularly those who feel trapped in poor, inner-city schools - as a shortcut out of a troubled high school experience.
In the last four years, the number of students in the New York school system's GED program rose to 15,000 from 6,000, said officials for the Board of Education's Auxiliary Services for High Schools, which operates the GED preparation classes.
Susan Porter Robinson, director of outreach for the Center for Adult Learning, said it is "disturbing" if students are indeed leaving schools in favor of GED diplomas. The center is part of the American Council on Education, a nonprofit group that administers GED with each state department of education.
"We don't want GED ever to be a lure for students who belong in school," she said. "This is an opportunity for adult learners who did not complete school to earn a diploma."
Nonetheless, Raymond Domanico, director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Educational Innovation, said the potential benefits of earning a GED diploma are clear for students who have trouble with conventional high school settings.
"Students leaving with a GED are better having one than not," he said, adding that some go to college.
Domanico, a former director of data analysis for the New York City Board of Education, said he found that in the mid-1980s about 30 percent of the city's high school students had extreme difficulty handling the demands of traditional classroom instruction. For many of those youths, GED is a "better option than just dropping out."
But several recent studies suggest that someone with a GED diploma tends to do no better financially than someone with no diploma at all, and significantly worse than those with high school diplomas.
"It amounts to nothing in labor-market earning," James J. Heckman, a University of Chicago economist who co-wrote a series of research papers on GEDs last year. Referring to the test itself, he said, "it is not a challenging examination."
And the Army, the last branch of the armed services to accept GED graduates, last year stopped accepting recruits with GED diplomas because, it said, they failed basic training at twice the rate as recruits with traditional high school diplomas.
But GED officials discount the Heckman studies, contending that their sample group of less than 150 all-male GED graduates was insufficient to properly represent the benefits of the diploma. The value of a GED should not be "determined solely on a person's income," said Janet Baldwin, director of policy research for the GED Testing Center in Washington.
Despite the debate, the program is increasingly being viewed as an attractive alternative to high school in some neighborhoods, like the South Bronx. Many students, like Charisse Dangerfield, who have squandered their chances to graduate with their classmates, view a GED diploma as a safety net to rebound them into a productive future. And New York school officials count most young GED graduates as "successful completions," thus lowering the system's drop-out rates.
A student who reads at the eighth-grade level can take three to six months of preparation for the test, GED officials in New York said.
Evans-Tranumn attributes the sharp rise in GED students to several factors. As the number of dropouts has increased, schools have become better at tracking them and helping them find other methods - such as alternative schools and GED - of getting diplomas, Evans-Tranumn said.
In addition, new waves of immigrants settling in New York have helped to create a pool of slightly older high school students with special needs who have turned to the GED, Evans-Tranumn said.
And there are, she said, students with growing impatience who want "to get in college right away."
About half of the city's GED candidates are 16 to 19 years old, officials said. Every year, more than half a million people take the GED tests in the United States and its territories. About 33 percent of them are 16 to 19.
It is the largest single group of students taking the test, according to 1992 statistics complied by the American Council on Education.
Baldwin, of the GED Testing Service, which is also part of the American Council on Education, said a recent survey by her office found that nearly a quarter of students who drop out do so because they feel "disengaged from school." They are bored or unhappy, cannot adjust to school routine, or just don't like school, she said.
"This cuts across racial and social lines," Baldwin added.
by CNB