ARKANSAS
Exit Exam Bill Defeated
On March 15, 1995, the Arkansas Senate Education Committee voted 4 to 2 to kill Senate Bill 583, which would have required home school students in Arkansas to take the high school exit examination beginning with the 1996-97 school year. Sponsored by Senator Bill Lewellen, the language of the bill appeared to also require that home school students pass the examination in order to be admitted to any public college in Arkansas.
The high school exit examination is designed to determine whether public school students in Arkansas have successfully completed the curriculum being taught in the public schools. It is not a nationally-normed test, such as home school students are currently required to take in Arkansas beginning at age seven. Because home school families utilize a great variety of curricula in teaching their children, it is fundamentally unfair to require them to take and pass a test on materials they have not been taught.
Home School Legal Defense Association attorney Dewitt Black traveled to Little Rock on March 8, 1995, and testified before the Arkansas Senate Education Committee in opposition to this legislation, as did a number of other Arkansas home school advocates. Mr. Black pointed out that this legislative proposal violates the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. HSLDA supported this position with a 1981 federal appellate court decision from Florida known as Debra P. v. Turlington. In this case, the court found that an exit examination was fundamentally unfair in that it may have covered matters not taught in the schools of the state, saying, "the state is obligated to avoid action which is arbitrary and capricious, does not achieve or even frustrates a legitimate state interest, or is fundamentally unfair."
