HARRISBURG, Pa. — A requirement that students pass a series of state exams before being allowed to graduate from Pennsylvania’s public high schools was unanimously approved Thursday by the State Board of Education.
The requirement faces a yearlong review process involving, among other groups, the state House and Senate Education Committees. If the measure survives, Pennsylvania will join 22 other states with similar requirements, according to the Center on Education Policy, an advocacy group in Washington.
Four additional states — Arkansas, Maryland, Oklahoma and Washington — will require graduation exams by 2012, two years before the Pennsylvania requirement would take effect. Connecticut is debating the idea.
Policy makers like the requirement because “communities are telling them that American kids are leaving high school without adequate skills,” the education center’s president, John F. Jennings, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
“Report after report shows that American kids are not competing with kids in other industrialized countries,” Mr. Jennings said. “They don’t know as much; they don’t graduate as often.”
But statewide groups in Pennsylvania that represent teachers, administrators, school boards, minorities and the disabled say they think such a requirement will not improve performance but will take time away from important classroom instruction.
“We see mixed results with graduation exams improving performance” in other states, said Thomas J. Gentzel, executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. “The Department of Education says that those states haven’t put in all the supports Pennsylvania will, but we don’t know exactly what those supports will be.”
State officials here said they were driven by the number of high school graduates who had scored poorly on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams, the tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
In 2006, for example, 57,000 of the 127,000 seniors who graduated from Pennsylvania’s 501 public school districts had not achieved proficiency on the assessment tests, officials said.
“As a former principal and superintendent,” the state education secretary, Gerald L. Zahorchak, told the Board of Education on Thursday, “I know I shook the hands of a number of students at graduation who were really receiving an empty diploma.”
In an effort to address that, the proposal approved by the board would require students to pass 6 of 10 course-specific competency tests to receive a diploma.
A test would be given as soon as a student finished a course. Those who failed would be able to retake the test an unspecified number of times and be eligible for extra tutoring.
Three tests would be in math (algebra 1, algebra 2 and geometry), three in social studies (American history, world history and civics), two in language arts (English 11 and English 12) and two in science (biology and chemistry).
Students who pass some Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams can get credit for the appropriate state exam, as can students who achieve proficiency on the reading and math portions of the current state assessment exams.
The regulation would allow individual school districts to create their own exams, as long as an independent review found they were as rigorous as the state’s, although only a few wealthy districts would be expected to do so.
Business groups and some school administrators around the state have expressed support for the proposal, including the superintendent of Pittsburgh’s schools, Mark Roosevelt. Mr. Roosevelt sponsored legislation that led to a graduation exam requirement in Massachusetts in 1993, when he was a state legislator there.
“If you’re trying to convince a kid to do summer school or get into tutoring, it’s very helpful to be able to tell them that they’re not on line to get a diploma,” he said.
Esther L. Bush, a member of the Pennsylvania board, cast a “guarded” vote in favor of the proposal. Ms. Bush noted that last year a state study found that Pennsylvania public schools were already falling $4.3 billion a year short of the minimum amount needed to provide a quality education.
Ms. Bush, president of the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh, said that no one seemed to have any idea how much more it would cost to provide support services, like additional tutoring, called for in the exam requirement.
“If we’re truly serious this time, we need to make sure that every single student gets the same support,” she said. “But history has proven it has not been implemented that way.”