WASL Woes

There is a lot of discussion today about ways to fix the WASL, a standardized test that students in Washington State have to take in order to be promoted to new grades or even graduate high school. The test is being taken today, so the discussion today is even more intense than usual. For those of you unfamiliar with the discussion, here's a quick recap ...

• It's "discovered" that students in Washington schools are graduating without basic skills.
• The blame is put on the teachers for "failing" these students.
• To provide accountability, a "high-stakes" test is devised that will give a quantifiable way to determine if kids are learning what they need to learn.
• In its first few years, more and more students are failing the WASL exam, despite teachers spending an inordinate amount of time teaching to the exam.
• The proposed solution? Waive the more difficult parts of the exam for a few years.

Now, if you got lost in the logic there towards the end of that recap, so did I. It's absolutely asinine that this is way they've decided to solve the problem in the short term.

Look, the problem isn't the exam. Having an exam that can quantifiably determine if a kid is prepared for real life is a good thing, so long as you control for kids that suffer from test anxiety. (A fair amount of that anxiety comes from knowing that you won't do well, which is a whole separate issue.) The problem is that the burden is put on the teachers, and relatively little on the students and/or parents, and that they feel that burden too late to really do anything. It's a cumulative exam, and you can't catch a student up on five years of learning in just a month or two.

By waiving parts of the exam, it suggests that the problem is with the exam. It isn't. The problem is that the WASL comes all at once, and not at the end of every year. Teachers should never have been given the authority to promote a student past a grade without the skills they were supposed to have learned, dodging responsibility for those failing students. Break the WASL up into individual exams, and administer them at the end of every school year, and if a student fails, you can see what they failed on and put them in a summer school class to reinforce those particular skills. If they can't pass the WASL by the end of the summer, the student is held back. I'm sure that my solution would be a fairly expensive one, but that could probably be mitigated with logistics and technology. The important thing is to put the focus back where it should be, which really isn't teacher accountability but on whether or not our kids are learning anything.