Education Week: Remediation for Exit-Exam Failure Proves Daunting

This article provides information on states with high-stakes and the provisions they have (or have not) made for remediation. The beginning and ending paragraphs are excerpted here, but the whole article is informative.

Education Week: Remediation for Exit-Exam Failure Proves Daunting
States vexed in helping students who stumble on tests for graduation.
By Catherine Gewertz

Nearly half the states require high school students to pass exit exams to graduate, but they often lack reliable ways of helping those who fail. Facing the prospect of legions of nongraduates, educators are feeling the pressure to figure out how to assist teenagers who have stumbled at the high-stakes gate.

Few studies have been done on the best approaches to remediation for students who have failed their exit exams. But the clues emerging from those studies, and from other experiences in the field, are yielding early guidance."

....

Lauress L. Wise, who oversaw a 2005 evaluation of such programs in California for the Alexandria, Va.-based Human Resources Research Organization, said his group found “quite a variation” in effectiveness, and scant data to bolster educators’ anecdotes of what did work well.

“There’s not really a clear pattern yet of what is effective,” he said. “That would be very helpful to a lot of schools struggling to try different things.”