THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Thursday, June 6, 1996                TAG: 9606060003
SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A14  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Editorial 
                                            LENGTH:   41 lines

FEW FAIL PASSPORT LITERACY TEST MASTERING BASIC SKILLS

You hear stories on talk radio about high-school and college graduates who can't read their own diplomas. A parent can get to wondering if schools teach anything.

Obviously schools are teaching something. As staff writer Jon Glass reported Sunday, fewer than 10 South Hampton Roads seniors taking regular education classes have failed a basic-skills test that all Virginia high-school students must pass to graduate.

It's called the Literacy Passport Test. To pass its three parts, students must possess at least sixth-grade-level skills in reading, writing and math. The math part, for example, requires working with fractions and decimal places. The writing part, as you might imagine, requires writing.

Virginia students begin taking the test in the sixth grade, and many pass all three parts then. Other students continue taking the part or parts they failed until they pass. Students who continually fail are given extra help.

That high-school seniors have passed a sixth-grade-level test is not cause for handsprings. Still, many doomsayers predicted when the test was instituted in the 1989-90 school year that thousands of seniors would be blocked by it from graduation. The doomsayers were wrong. The people who said Virginia high-school graduates can't read their own diplomas were wrong.

This is the first school year in which passing the test is required for graduation, and in Portsmouth and Suffolk not a single senior was blocked from getting a diploma.

With students doing so well, it is time to raise the achievement bar, and the state Board of Education probably will do that. It is discussing requiring high-school juniors, by the year 2001, to pass a tougher academic-skills test. Makes sense to us. If more is expected of students, most will rise to the challenge.

For now, congratulations are in order for the teachers who helped students, many from horrendous home situations, master basic skills. Hats off, as well, to the students. Entering today's job market without basic skills is akin to going off to war unarmed. by CNB