Lawyers for the students who sued California schools Superintendent Jack O’Connell to stop the use of the state’s high school exit exam say they will ask the state supreme court to review the latest ruling in the case.
Earlier this month, a three-judge panel of the California Court of Appeal, First District, upheld the exam and threw out a lower-court ruling that would have removed the testing hurdle for this year’s graduating class.
The judges ruled that Alameda County Superior Court Judge Robert B. Freedman had overstepped his authority when he sided with the plaintiffs in Valenzuela v. O’Connell and granted an injunction, which suspended the exam requirement for this year’s seniors as long as they met all other graduation requirements.
The appeals court also said it sympathized with the roughly 40,000 students who failed to pass both the mathematics and language arts portions of the exam, but it emphasized that a variety of options for those students to pass the exam remained.
