Graduation Requirements

"Children will rise to the level of their expectations" was a common refrain after the movie "Stand and Deliver." This box-office hit chronicles poor, inner-city Latino kids who came from math-impoverished homes yet managed to pass the rigorous Advanced Placement calculus test through sheer guts and will. Notwithstanding the power of this movie, it did not originate the concept of high expectations. The idea of expecting more has accounted for greatness throughout our history.

The plight of immigrant students dominated discussion over proposed statewide high school graduation standards Wednesday at the first of two Southern California hearings on those standards--with the state's two largest advocacy groups for bilingual students taking dramatically different stands.

Community college Chancellor Philip Westin is considering shelving a faculty-proposed reading comprehension standard for graduates that some instructors argue does not measure a student's ability to read at the college level.

Freshmen who enter Santa Ana high schools next year will have to take three years of laboratory science and 3 1/2 years of social science instead of the current two years each if they want to graduate in 2005.

They are everywhere, wheeling patients out of hospitals, assisting teachers in the classroom, even building homes in Mexico. Countless high school students across the nation spend an untold amount of time performing community service. Students and teachers say being involved with community service helps students as much as those they serve--so much so that many schools have made it mandatory, and others, such as Moorpark High School, are considering such a requirement.

As high school students scramble to meet increasingly rigorous science requirements, one South County school will throw out a lifeline next year with three proposed courses that offer traditional science credit for surprisingly nontraditional classes. The courses at Trabuco Hills High School will train students to track weather conditions through computer-linked satellites, identify plants in Trabuco Canyon and teach basic science to elementary school children.

Cal State Fullerton may require undergraduates to take a class online in order to graduate, which would make the school only the second in the country and the first in California with such a prerequisite. The only school in the country with a similar requirement is Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, which starting this fall with freshmen will require students to take an online course each year.

The Los Angeles Unified School Board voted unanimously Tuesday to oppose the state's requirement that students pass an exit exam before graduating from high school, a move that some educators hope will influence the state to postpone or drop the test. "We should be working with the State Board of Education so that this whole thing gets stopped," said board member Genethia Hudley-Hayes, who co-sponsored the motion with board member Jose Huizar.

As executive director of the National Geographic Society's Education Foundation, I was distressed to learn that the Oxnard Union High School District is considering eliminating geography as a graduation requirement. Geography as a curricular discipline was badly neglected in American schools for several decades. A 1988 Gallup survey showed that one out of seven Americans could not identify the Pacific Ocean on a blank world map.

His Ventura College buddies may be sweating this spring as they wait to hear whether they have been accepted for transfer to a University of California campus in the fall, but not chemistry major Armando Hernandez, who secured his scholastic future months ago. In August, Hernandez, 20, signed a contract with UC Santa Cruz that guarantees him admission if he maintained a 2.8 grade point average and took certain classes.