OCR Probes Bias Complaint Against Texas Exit Test

By Lonnie Harp

Federal civil-rights officials are weighing a complaint that the test all Texas students must pass to get a high school diploma unfairly discriminates against minority youths.

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights said last week that the complaint, filed in December by the Texas branch of the NAACP, remains open, and officials in the agency's Dallas regional office hope to resolve the dispute without launching a full-fledged investigation.

On the firing line is the nation's largest high-stakes examination system for high school students--a reading, writing, and mathematics test that annually determines how many of Texas' nearly 200,000 high school seniors...