Via Shutterstock.

D.C. is the only jurisdiction in the nation that currently has standardized tests for health and sex education in its school system. Some advocates, however, are skeptical as to the quality of those tests and the health and sex education program, and are pushing for more transparency in what’s being tested.

Adam Tenner, executive director of Metro Teen AIDS, is calling for a national independent expert to review the quality of the test and the health and sex education program. “Most of us got sex education at a deficit,” Tenner tells DCist, “and there’s no measure to tell whether or not children are learning enough from these questions.” Tenner says he’s worried that these tests aren’t covering the proper information and thus children aren’t receiving as much education as they could be.

Tenner’s organization, Metro Teen AIDS, helps to train teachers in health and sex education, and says that they need to know which schools need more help in training teachers. This past year, “11,000 fifth- and eighth-grade students from traditional and public charter schools took the exam, answering 64 percent of questions correctly,” WAMU reports. But the data breaking down how each individual school performed on these tests isn’t available for Tenner’s organization to see. “We don’t know how individual schools did, parents don’t have information about how schools are doing,” he says. “We really want to make sure that this data is accurate.”

Tenner says that he requested information on this from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, but was rejected, because that data is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. (A request for comment from the OSSE was not immediately returned.) “We need to know this information because we’re not sure if we’re following the best practices,” he says. Tenner says he’ll appeal to OSSE for more information on taking the proper channels to get that information.