Anti-Anti-WASL Media

[David Blomstrom <GeoBear@GEOBOP.COM>]

Here's the latest Seattle Times editorial, with my comments in brackets:

Monday, December 04, 2000, 12:00 a.m. Pacific
Editorial
Don't abandon tests in Seattle schools
Starting with the class of 2008, each student in the public schools will
have to pass the four Washington Assessment of Student Learning tests
--reading, writing, listening and math - to graduate from high school. This
year, only 20 percent of Washington's 10th-graders passed all four tests.

The Seattle Education Association, the teachers union, has proposed a
solution: Junk the test. Wrong. That doesn't solve the problem; it runs
away from it. [Nor does the WASL solve the problem of crappy public
schools, the legacy of crappy school officials, derelict teachers unions
and corporate media.]

The tests were imposed for a reason. Academics had been watered down. Test
scores showed it, and everybody knew it. The state of Washington decided
there would be standards for each grade, and ultimately, for graduation.
Standards are useless without measurement, so tests were designed for
fourth, seventh and 10th.

The union argues the test may be inaccurate. Tests are graded on an
assembly line in Iowa, and scorers, paid $10 an hour, average two and a
half minutes on each mini-essay. All that can be made to sound bad, but for
a trained grader two and a half minutes should be enough to score a
schoolchild's answer. Experience shows that two scorers will assign the
same score to an essay answer at least 96 percent of the time.

"No test is a perfect instrument," says Joseph Olchefske, Seattle's
superintendent of schools. "We've got eight years to improve it. But we are
deeply committed to being a standards-based school district where a
high-school diploma has value." [Gee, I'm SO impressed by Joseph Olchefske,
a monumentally incompetent and corrupt school official with no background
in education.]

When the tests are required for graduation, each student will take it in
the 10th grade. That gives those who fail two years to raise their
abilities and take the test again. That is fair to students, and reasonable.

The real issue bothering the union may be its discomfort at the use of
student test scores to evaluate teachers. The Seattle Schools already uses
WASL to help decide whether to retain teachers, and whether to grant
tenure. Under the current contract, it does not use them in the granting of
pay but some time in the future, it could. [Huh? You mean if a teacher's
class does poorly on the WASL, the district is going to let that teacher go
- when were in the grips of a record teachers shortage? And do they think
they're going to solve the teachers shortage by warning applicants that
they may be shortchanged if their classes perform poorly on the WASL?]

Standards can be threatening. But students need them. [Not as much as they
need decent schools staffed by adults with independent thinking skills and
backbone.] The system needs them. [Screw the system.] Parents expect them.
[Right, because the media have brainwashed them into expecting them.] The
WASL should always be open to review, but the state should not throw it out
until it has something demonstrably better. [That's like saying don't get
rid of cancer until you've found a better disease. What ARE the limits to
these people's stupidity?]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the ARN-L list, send command SIGNOFF ARN-L
to LISTSERV@LISTS.CUA.EDU.