WASHINGTON – The first standardized sex education and health test in the nation will be rolled out next spring in Washington, a city struggling with an unusually high teenage pregnancy rate. It’s an attempt by lawmakers and school officials to find out what their 5th, 8th and 10th grade students don’t know about sex.
“If you don’t know the basics then you’re not able to protect yourself,” said Mary Cheh, Washington council member (D-Ward 3).
Cheh sponsored the Healthy Schools Act last year — legislation that requires schools to provide the Board of Education with an assessment of students’ knowledge of overall health. Cheh said she hopes her bill will improve the health of both public and charter school students in the District.
The tests assess students’ knowledge of contraceptives, sexually transmitted infections, sexual behavior, alcohol and drugs, and overall health. Lawmakers and school officials alike hope they will shed some light on what students know, and what they’re not getting from their education.
Washington currently experiences high percentages of unhealthy behavior. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 2,200 teens in the 15 to 19 age groups got pregnant in 2005 – that 3.1 percent of pregnancies nationally for that age bracket. In 2009, the D.C. Department of Health found that 15 to 19 year olds comprise the largest population of Chlamydia and Gonorrhea cases in the city.
Cheh said the tests were designed to make sure the district’s schoolsare educating “the whole student” as an effort to help curb these rates.
“Students will still be having sex,” Cheh said. “We don’t want them to be ignorant.”
But can these standardized tests help bring down the high rates of STI’s and teen pregnancy?
“We’re not sure of that,” said Sandy Schlicker, director of Wellness and Nutrition Services for the District’s superintendent’s office.
Schlicker said the data will provide schools insight into areas of the curriculum that they may need to alter. The tests fall under the umbrella of the District’s No Child Left Behind testing, though the results, according to Schlicker, won’t be compared from school to school. Rather, schools can take the information and try and figure out what areas of health and sexual education the need to improve.
“It’s hard to say that we’re doing everything that we possibly can,” Schlicker said.
She said she hopes the new data will help school officials answer questions about risky behavior among D.C. students.
Yet experts say straight testing or a focus on informational sexual education isn’t enough.
Doug Kirby, senior researcher at ETR Associates and a scholar on sex education, said the standardized test is a good start, “but it’s also true that the programs that change behavior need to do more than just increase knowledge.”
Kirby said schools in Washington and across the country for that matter, should focus more on teaching students about changing attitudes, and helping prepare them for actual situations.
“Young people have a distorted impression of the percentage of their friends and peers who are having sex, because the wild stories get told and the non-stories get told and don’t get remembered,” Kirby said.
Cheh agrees, and thinks teachers in D.C. aren’t being frank enough.
“If I were teaching health classes or sex education classes, I would try to make it important to them in their everyday lives. I’d say look, you girls in the room, there’s going to come a time, and you guys in the room, there’s going to come a time for you too – so what are you going to do? Are you ready?”
“If we’re going to teach this, we ought to be effective,” she said.
D.C. public school students will take the test in April 2012.