Why I Opppose the WASL as a Graduation Requirement
April 19, 2010
Disclaimer: Senator Pridemore’s commentary is used with permission and for information purposes only.
As with all the articles on this website, CURE does not necessarily endorse the author’s other views or organizations with whom he is affiliated.
Why I Opppose the WASL as a Graduation Requirement
A commentary by State Senator Craig Pridemore, 49th Legislative District – Vancouver.
Click to skip to the following sections:
- FORWARD: Let’s have an open debate
- INTRODUCTION: WASL is based on false assumptions.
- BACKGROUND: Education Concerns led to Education “Reform”.
- One Size Does Not Fit All.
- The WASL is NOT High Standards.
- The WASL does NOT Test Higher Order Thinking Skills.
- The WASL is NOT a Motivational Instrument for Most Students.
- The WASL will NOT Keep Us Globally Competitive.
- Who Will Be Missing from Graduation 2008?
- End of Education Reform?
- We Need Genuine Education Reform.
- CONCLUSION: Let’s Begin Anew.
Forward
I want to explain why I’m opposed to using the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) as a high school graduation requirement. More broadly, however, I’d like to return us to a more fundamental, less politicized and more open debate about what genuine education reform should really be about. I’d like to take education reform outside the realm of political and professional rhetoric, outside our modern educational system, and return it to a more honest discussion between citizens about what our generation really needs to do to help the next generation succeed, not just in an unpredictable, indefinable and largely fictitious “global economy,” but in life.
The educational reform effort this state began in 1992 propelled us down the wrong road toward truly helping kids. Despite that, I eagerly acknowledge that much of it pushed public education toward making much-needed improvements, and that most of the rest, while perhaps a waste of taxpayer money, at least didn’t make the situation any worse for the kids it is presumed to serve. Using the WASL as a graduation requirement, however, not only makes the situation worse but puts the cause of education reform on a path that will inevitably lead to, at best, the end of the education reform movement itself and, at worst, the end of public education in Washington.
For all my efforts, every time I try to talk about this issue I am instantly assailed by proponents of the WASL, on both the left and right, on two bases. First, they claim I don’t believe in high standards, and second, they say I don’t care about kids learning. Sometimes, people’s beliefs and efforts in support of an ideal become so entrenched and their investments in them so profound that if anyone disagrees with them, they feel the need to go on the attack.
For several years now, I’ve been trying to talk about meaningful education reform and my most profound critics are people who “grew up” within the educational system itself. If I make any statement about it at all, they instantly chime in with, “Well, I’ve been in the system for XX years…” implying that they know what is best and the rest of society should just go away. That perspective is largely the one that got us into this predicament to begin with.
The fact is that educators have been incessantly pounded on by politicians who have successfully held them to blame for everything that has happened to change our society since 1960. They have endured such intense criticism for so long that they’ve come to agree with their critics: They actually believe that they were the ones who caused all the problems that exist in our society and that they are responsible for fixing them alone. They’re not and they never were.
I don’t have all of the answers but a lot of honest, capable people who do have been politically and professionally intimidated from speaking out in recent years. If nothing else, by speaking out myself, I hope these people will again step forward and risk “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” to help put this state back on the path toward helping all our children achieve their full potential and their dreams. They deserve nothing less from any of us.
Introduction
Every now and then, an idea so overtakes the political world that it becomes almost impossible to challenge it. At the very least, any politician who attempts to challenge it risks losing his credibility if not his job. Without doubt, he will be assailed and reviled in the public arena, particularly in the press. It’s little wonder that few politicians choose to “rock the boat” anymore. Once a predominant system of thought has established itself, most politicians decide that it’s best and wisest just to let it be. They may – and do – try to work surreptitiously around it, but rarely do they choose to take it on overtly and publicly.
Just as in the natural sciences, the social sciences (including public policy) live in a world of axioms, hypotheses, and theories. Both sciences are dominated by accepted processes of challenge and refinement in order for predominant ideas to rise to become the accepted theories of their day.
Unlike the physical world, however, the axioms of the social sciences aren’t subject to the kind of rigorous intellectual standards that are demanded by the natural sciences. If you’re proposing a hypothesis to explain the physics of the upper atmosphere and begin with the axiom “the sky is orange,” your idea will immediately be dismissed by the scientific community. The natural sciences accept the rule that if you begin with false axioms, you cannot possibly produce a viable hypothesis, much less a dominant theory.
That’s not the case with the process of creating hypotheses related to public policy where the axioms are too often created based on personal beliefs, prejudices, political processes and emotions. The most effective politicians are the ones who can use people’s fears, prejudices, hopes or dreams to manufacture a political environment where axioms that support their future hypotheses are held to be true by a majority of people. Where the natural sciences demand that the truth be proved, the social sciences require only that the truth be believed.
Because of this difference, the dominant theories in public policy differ considerably from their counterparts in the natural sciences. A genuinely new idea in the natural sciences almost always encounters stiff resistance from adherents of the existing dominant theory who close their eyes to the facts and refuse to hear anything that challenges their firmly held beliefs. In the public policy arena, however, the prospect of a new idea frequently encounters the opposite reaction as people and politicians eagerly jump to the latest fad in thinking, whether or not it’s rooted in factual ideas. [This isn’t always true. Many a poor politician has introduced a new idea into the public environment before creating the publicly accepted axioms necessary to support it. In such cases, they always encounter very stiff resistance.]
If you watch the political world closely, you’ll see the best politicians cause wholesale shifts in public attitudes and priorities. In some cases, the impacts are relatively minor even when they’re based on false arguments. Yes, maybe they result in government spending money on things that can’t possibly produce meaningful or even rational results, but apart from waste, no one’s life is irrevocably harmed and the world keeps turning as it always has. In some cases, however, tremendous damage can be caused.
The WASL is one such public policy, one that is based on false axioms that will inflict tremendous damage on many of our citizens and on our society as a whole. No, it won’t lead to the destruction of the planet, but it will create a great deal of misery and resolve none of the challenges its proponents claim that it will.
Education Reform and the Rise of WASL Theory
The modern rush to revamp the American public education system has roots tracing back to the beginnings of universal, comprehensive public education in the 1930s. It began gaining genuine political traction, however, in the 1980s. Ironically, the people who began creating the political axioms that led to the attacks on public education were largely within the public education system itself. In the hopes of generating more support for public education, they began trying to increase citizen awareness about the challenges they faced. It is a time-honored technique in the political world, similar to law and order professionals constantly warning about rising crime to get more money directed to law enforcement. It usually works – people who are afraid frequently resort to many things, including higher taxes, to address their fears.
In the 1980s, public education advocates attempted the same thing by regularly decrying how various educational areas were suffering. One year, it would be the state of literacy, the next geography, then mathematics, science…on, and on, and on, year after year. American kids were not as good as Russian kids during the Cold War, then Japanese kids and German kids; today, they’re not as good as Chinese kids. Against that backdrop, politicians began stepping forward to offer solutions, as politicians have done for time immemorial. Most of the proposed solutions, however, were unlikely to have been the ones supported by the people who created the impression of the “new” and “growing” crisis to begin with. An anti-tax paradigm was dominating the country’s psychology and skilled politicians (not all of whom are elected officials) built on the manufactured crisis by turning the attacks on the public educational system itself. On that, they found fertile ground.
Charter schools, vouchers, privatization and high stakes testing all began to rise as the dominant themes of public education reform. The ideas all sprang from two axioms that had achieved preeminence in the collective mind of the public and that were constantly reinforced by politicians: that teachers either could not or did not want to teach, and that school children were not sufficiently motivated to learn.
In the early 1990s, Washington jumped onto the politically-inspired reform bandwagon by passing House Bill 1209. It mandated specific academic standards and an assessment system to measure whether kids were meeting those standards.
The full impacts of those decisions are just now starting to become clear to the citizens the reform movement was presumed to serve.
Why Don’t Kids Learn?
To understand the challenges we face and create an environment where we can productively talk about the issues again, let’s peel back the political veneer and go back to the initial problem education reform was trying to address.
But first, to succinctly answer the question above: Kids DO learn. In most instances, they learn more now than they ever did before and are far more competent and far more capable than any of us were when we were their age. Dropout rates, while still abysmally high and in much need of attention, are the lowest they’ve been in 50 years and more children have access to quality education for more years of their lives than was the case in the 1950s. We must begin to seriously and honestly address the problem of school dropouts, but we should begin with a more truthful assessment of the problem than we’ve had in recent years. When we hear that some ridiculously high percentage of our kids can’t point out where Washington, D.C., is on a map, we should also understand that they never could. It’s not that the public education system is getting worse. It’s just that we’re publicly aware of what kids actually know for the first time.
To more completely answer the question of why many kids don’t learn as much as we want them to, a great deal of work has been done in an effort to correlate student achievement with many factors. Of all these factors, the one that consistently shows direct and strong correlation is poverty.
Modern reformers of public education don’t like to hear that. They say publicly and privately that even saying it is detrimental to the effort to improve education – it sends the message to teachers that they needn’t bother holding poor kids to high standards and sends the message to poor kids that they needn’t try. This is a legitimate concern and no one should want either teachers or students to adopt either belief. For those who develop public policy proposals to ignore the facts, however, and to attempt to remove them from the development of solutions can only make real progress impossible. I think we need to take the risk if only so we can honestly address the problem.
More than trying to ignore the facts, many reformers have attempted to make it impossible for anyone to even discuss them. Poverty, they say, is just a euphemism for race, suggesting thereby that anyone who says that poverty is a problem is really saying that the races that are most subject to living in poverty are really the problem. Such politically manipulative efforts are false and pejorative. The data clearly shows that it is poverty itself, not race, that gives rise to educational challenges. People who seek to defend the WASL from opponents on these terms suggest that they are more afraid of addressing economic disparities than they are racial ones.
Recognizing the effects that poverty has on a child’s ability to learn is far from an educational death sentence for that child. Every year, thousands of children from poor families defeat the odds and rise to the top. At the same time, thousands of children from affluent communities don’t achieve as much as the average student in their cohort does. Such examples defy the rule but they don’t disprove it. We can find many examples of children who beat the odds and can talk about them until the sun goes down but it doesn’t change the fact: If a child is raised in an economically challenged environment, her odds of success in an academic environment are correspondingly more difficult than if she had been raised in a more affluent environment.
Additionally, statistics establish that poverty in and of itself does not lead to academic failure and is not, in and of itself, a barrier to educational success. Rather, it is the social ills that too often are attendant on poverty. Drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, over-worked parents’ inability to provide adequate support and encouragement, lack of health care or adequate nutrition, a lack of educational expectations within many homes, all conspire against the child unfortunate enough to be born in such circumstance.
Today, it is politically incorrect to suggest that there is any difference between people of differing economic backgrounds. Because it is politically incorrect to talk about the one factor that directly bears on a child’s ability to learn, it has also become politically impossible for most people to develop those proposals that are most likely to lead to progress. So politicians fall back on politically popular and politically expedient solutions. That’s what the WASL is. For decades, educators provided a “one-size-fits-all” educational package. Rich, poor, smart, challenged: Here is our package, if you succeed with it, great; if you don’t, we’ll pass you on regardless. The result was an end-of-education diploma that established nothing about a child’s actual ability, and a system that didn’t encourage or permit educators to improve or innovate at all. In fact, all of our efforts to reform the system, including the WASL, have served to straightjacket our educational system to support, encourage and reinforce mediocrity. Rather than creating the kind of educational system we need (a flexible and vibrant one that reacts to the needs and abilities of each and every student), we have strengthened the bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all mentality that reformers thought they were striving to eliminate.
What the WASL Is NOT
Proponents of the WASL have created such a myth around it that it’s almost impossible to have an honest discussion about it anymore. The following are some of the myths that should be instantly dismissed if only because even WASL proponents routinely admit that they’re a lie, sometimes only inadvertently.
1. The WASL is NOT “high standards.” If an opponent of the WASL has the courage to publicly say that he opposes it, a proponent will inevitably say, “Well, I believe in high standards.” The rhetorical implication, of course, is that the WASL represents high standards and that if you oppose the WASL, you oppose high standards. Nothing could be further from the truth and, if you listen long enough, proponents will tell you that: When an opponent says that the test is unfair to those who face the greatest challenges to learning, proponents will immediately say, “Well, it’s only an eighth-grade level test! How tough could it be if we’re expecting 12th-graders to do eighth-grade level work?!” Proponents need to decide whether they support high standards or just want to sound like they support them.
In fact, the WASL is an extremely low standard for the most capable kids in our school system. For those who, in 10th grade, are already doing 12th-grade or even college level work, we quite literally are telling them that we only expect eighth-grade work from them. These are “A” and “B” level students. Via the WASL, we remind them that we only expect them to get a “C” to graduate. [In fact, we’ve historically told them we only expect a “D.” That needs to change.] On the surface, it doesn’t really matter: Most of these kids and their families decided long ago that being “average” wasn’t enough for them and most are unlikely to lower their standards just to get down to where WASL proponents wish they would be. Going a little deeper, however, you realize what many of these kids already realize: It’s unlikely that school districts will continue to offer advanced calculus classes for them when the state-mandated education reforms will demand that they offer more introductory algebra classes to below-standard students instead. There is no reward for teaching high-performing kids college level calculus, after all, while there are substantial public and financial penalties for failing to teach ALL kids that x+2=6 means the same as x=4.
For students who face the greatest challenges, the “D” and “F” students, the WASL may well represent an unrealistic hurdle that many will never achieve. The WASL may have a positive influence on the “C” student and on some of the “Ds.” As the state and districts inevitably pour more and more resources toward trying to get these kids to pass the WASL, they may finally start to get the attention and resources they deserved all along. With a great deal more individual attention (and test-coaching quite honestly) and hard work on their part, they can achieve something they might not have thought themselves capable of achieving before – passing this particular test. For everyone else, however, it’s meaningless at best, and creates a feeling of wasted effort at worst.
While there are a great many things we could and should be doing to advance the other “D” and “F” students to greater academic achievement, the effort to do so thus far has utterly distracted the public education system from providing them with the tools they could use to lead happy and productive lives. There is nothing inherently wrong with young people who do not choose to go to college. Despite the claims of WASL proponents, there will be a great many jobs in the future that won’t demand a great deal more than the jobs available today and will not require one-on-one competition with an engineer from China. Each and every child does not have to compete globally in order to live a decent life. We should be developing and funding programs that empower these kids to develop economically viable skills even if they don’t become warriors in a national fervor for economic dominance over the rest of the world. In the interest of punishing them for not meeting our government-mandated standard, increasingly, we’re not.
2. The WASL does NOT test higher-order thinking skills. Proponents claim that the WASL is a “higher level” test because it doesn’t test knowledge of simple facts and that it doesn’t have simple techniques that students can be taught such that they can “game” the test in order to pass. Rather, proponents claim, it is a test that digs down to find out how deeply a student actually thinks, and whether they genuinely understand the principals of reading, writing and arithmetic that are being tested.
The proposition is belied by the initial strategy that proponents intend for those who will fail the test the first time. Results of the first “take” will be available in June. The first “retake” will be taken in August. During that two-month period, proponents don’t even plan to take young people from not understanding reading, writing and/or arithmetic to competence in them. Such a thing would be impossible: After 10 years of public education, how could they teach in two months what they couldn’t teach in all the preceding years? Last fall, they testified that all they will be teaching is test-taking techniques – i.e. ways for students to “game” the test. It won’t be about higher-order thinking skills. It will be about how to pass the unique structure of the WASL. If the test was genuinely so profound as to be above such skills, they could not be taught how to pass it, certainly not in two months.
3. The WASL is NOT a motivational instrument for most students. As currently employed, the WASL is still not the thing that most students are trying to obtain. Just as they have for decades, the prize at the end of the journey is a high school diploma. The WASL represents an additional hurdle to that prize, but it is not the prize itself. For decades, far too many young people have not been motivated enough to obtain a diploma. That will not change with the WASL. Some of those who genuinely want a diploma will have to work a great deal harder to get one; those who don’t care will certainly not become any more motivated by the presence of an additional barrier. They are far more likely to simply not bother trying.
Proponents will say that that’s a good thing. If a young person doesn’t care enough about their education to get a diploma then they shouldn’t be given one that has no meaning. I agree. It is silly, however, to conclude that the WASL will change that state. Rather than trying to find methods for genuinely addressing the cause of their attitudes, reform efforts like the WASL propose a “tough love” approach, washing the public educational system of responsibility for them and expecting them to solve the challenges of their own backgrounds on their own. To be sure, some small number of them will eventually crawl back to the community college or work force training systems and try to put their lives back on a positive track. The majority, however, are certain to find their eventual place in life on public welfare roles, on the streets, or in jails. It would clearly be better to deal with their needs before they leave the public education system, even if they don’t initially recognize them.
4. The WASL will NOT keep us globally competitive. Show me a politician who says “the world is flat” in his speeches and I will show you a politician who reads only one book a year. [In fact, one senator gave a speech about how the world is flat then laughed afterward and told me that s/he hadn’t even actually read the book.] In all probability, they also can’t recognize a supply-demand curve or tell you why the gold standard was an antiquated way of calculating the relative strengths of international economies. Such is the depths of understanding when government makes life-critical decisions about the lives of citizens and their children.
For many kids, passing or failing the WASL hinges on how they answer one question. If they get it right, they graduate and get a diploma. If they don’t, they do not graduate. To advocate for the WASL, proponents must argue that any one particular question literally determines whether or not that particular young person can compete in the “global economy” of the future. It doesn’t and it won’t. Whether she answers it correctly or gets agitated and doesn’t concentrate at the right moment, the world will keep turning just as it always has. As our country eagerly pursues policies to send more jobs and dollars into foreign countries, it is hypocritical and brutal for it to judge any young person based on whether she answered that one question right or wrong. For her, however, the rest of her life will be defined, judged and labeled. It’s easy to be arrogant about trying to compete with the Chinese and the Indians when you talk about it in the aggregate. It’s far more difficult when you recognize that it’s real people living real lives who will suffer in the effort. We need a more honest discussion about what the global economy means for our citizens and we need a far more rational understanding about the challenge we face than how a teenager answers one question on a test.
There are 1.3 billion people in China (1.1 billion in India). China can literally ignore the educational dreams of 75 percent of its children, pour all of its resources into the top 25 percent and still turn out more engineers and more scientists than the United States will produce even if we could get every single student to the bachelor’s degree level in the skills our government assumes will be most needed. Despite political rhetoric to the contrary, the simple reality is that the world is changing and the United States is not going to be the dominant economy that it was in the last century. That’s understandably scary for a country that has dominated the world economy for so long, but it is not the end of high living standards or of opportunity for our citizenry.
That said, we should also recognize that the state of China, India and others today is not what it will be in the future. Twenty years ago, the United States agonized over the prospect of Japan someday owning everything in our country. They didn’t and China and India won’t either. If the rapidly evolving history of the past 100 years has taught us anything, let it be that reactionary governmental actions to address immediate anxieties is pejorative. It’s politically expedient, but it usually leads to wasted expenditures and an unnecessary expansion of government authority over our lives.
If our concern genuinely is about global competitiveness for our nation as opposed to the well-being of its citizens, then we should begin to talk earnestly and honestly about the things that will really keep us competitive, not the things that are politically correct today. The WASL will not keep us globally competitive and WASL proponents should be more honest about admitting that to Washington citizens and join me in urging a more honest discussion about the future.
Graduation 2008
When I graduated from Fort Vancouver High School in 1979, there were some 420 of us sitting in folding chairs on the floor of the gymnasium. Some of us wore gold cords for graduating “with honors” and some didn’t. There were 10 valedictorians who had achieved 4.0s during their years in public schools. (A bit too distracted for that, I had to live with my 3.7.) In the uncomfortable wooden bleachers sat my parents and grandparents, doubtlessly filled with pride that another of their offspring was graduating. It meant a lot to me to have them there, particularly my grandmother, Norma Pridemore, who passed away last year at age 94. They cared about me and they were proud of me and those things meant the world to a college-bound 18-year-old kid. After all the interminable speeches that few of us listened to and none of us can remember (it was something about “as we go out into the adult world…”), our names were individually called and we took our turns walking across the stage to shake hands with the principal and accept our diplomas.
The graduating class of 2007 will be significantly larger but they will be astonishingly similar to those of us who graduated 28 years earlier. Some of them will be brilliant at math and some brilliant at literature. Some will be great at photography, drama, athletics, computer design or diesel mechanics. Some won’t be particularly great at any one thing but good enough in several and some will be stellar in all aspects of the educational system. Some will just be natural charmers and some gifted in areas of human and economic endeavor yet undreamed of by our government today. Just as in 1979, there will be a flush of new abilities, new ideas and new challenges for the world to accept or reject.
The graduating class of 2008, however, will be significantly different than either 1979 or 2007. Most significantly, there will be fewer than half the number of kids on the floor of the gym than there were the year before, fewer, even, than there were when I graduated 28 years earlier. Those who were only awesome in any one particular field of study, including math, science or literature, will be gone. So too will be those who weren’t at least average in all three of the government approved areas of study: reading, writing and arithmetic. If the greatest quarterback ever seen by civilized humanity didn’t meet the low standards of the WASL in all three of these areas, s/he will be gone as well. So too the photographer, the dramatist, the poet, the computer-aided design expert, the diesel mechanic, the architect, the political scientist, the geeky kid who just wrote his own operating system for the next generation of computers, and yes, even the charmer, unless they also met the low standards in all three areas that their government decided it wanted to mandate for every child.
Proponents of the WASL need to ask themselves where those kids will be at that moment. Doubtlessly many will be at home, playing Xbox or talking on the phone or tapping away at what remains of their new operating system. Many will be at the mall or hanging out downtown, scoping out members of the opposite sex and trying to look desirable. Many will be out with friends, out on the streets of our neighborhoods, trying to think of something “fun” to do. What else is there for them to do now? For them, what’s the point?
Just as doubtless, at least one kid will be sitting on those same uncomfortable wooden bleachers, watching as a treasured classmate he’s known since kindergarten walks across the same stage I did. Proponents of the WASL need to ask themselves how that kid will feel at that moment and what he’s going to do with the rest of his life, because he’s going to be wondering himself at that moment and for a very long time to come.
In fourth-grade, he took the fourth-grade WASL and failed. While his teachers told him not to worry and promised to spend more time with him, the message to him as a 10-year-old child was very clear and extremely simple: “I am stupid.” In seventh grade, he took the seventh-grade WASL and failed. With all the anxiety of puberty and despite everyone’s claims to the contrary, the message he, as a 12-year-old boy, felt inside was clear and extremely simple: “I am stupid.” In 10th grade, he took the 10th-grade WASL and failed. He trained for the test for two months and failed again. He took remedial classes, took the test again, and failed. He took more classes, tried the test for the final time in his life, and he failed. “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”
In 2008, he will sit on those bleachers, hear the alphabetical listing of last names skip over where his own should have been, and wonder what he is supposed to do next. As he watches the few, the precious few, walk across the stage and despite all their claims and efforts to the contrary, only one message will thunder in his head: “I am stupid.” The final message from his public education system that day will be brutally cruel and bitterly ironic: “Now go make something of yourself.”
Proponents of the WASL say that they’re not labeling kids as stupid. All they’re doing is saying that he isn’t prepared for the adult world. Such declarations are euphemisms for what the young adult himself hears. The message to him is that he isn’t fit. He isn’t qualified. He isn’t worthy. And no one, no one, cares about him anymore.
The world he will face will be different than the one I faced in many respects, but not in all. Having hired (and fired) dozens of people in my professional life, both public and private, I know how the hiring process begins. It starts with being handed a stack of applications and/or resumes, sometimes hundreds at a time. The first thing I need to do is make the pile smaller and the first filter I use is education. For jobs that our new non-graduate will be applying for, businesses will initially be looking for one thing on that first pass: Who has a high school diploma? Those who do will be placed in the pile for further analysis and narrowing down until a small handful is identified who will actually get an interview. Those who don’t have a diploma… they’re already dismissed, they’re already done, they’re already gone That will be the reward from their government for growing up in the public educational system of Washington State in the 21st century. Had his family been able to afford private school or had the time for home-schooling, it might have been different for him, but he had to rely on the public.
If there is one thing that has genuinely frustrated me about how this state has approached education reform, it is that it has never asked itself what that kid is supposed to do with his life. We hold hearing after hearing from WASL proponents, happily claiming that everything pertaining to education reform is working perfectly, and we bring in young people from affluent suburban communities with a strong community commitment to education, who come in and tell us to stay the course. Never, never, do we see the faces of those who will struggle with the lifelong pain of failing to meet our state standards in all three, soon to be four, areas our government cares to respect.
WASL proponents should be forced to answer the question of what happens to those kids before we continue further down this road. If you ask them what happens to kids who fail, they will cheerily answer that they will spend all kinds of money helping them to pass it the next time. Never, never, will they answer what they will do with the estimated 40-plus percent of kids who will never pass it as it exists today. Such people aren’t supposed to exist, thus we go to great lengths never to see them in the hope that we can convince ourselves that they don’t. Well, they do exist, a great many of them. I meet them when I walk down the sidewalk. I see them in my neighborhood, at my family gatherings for Christmas, and I see them in my county jail.
I want to see them on the floor of the Washington State Senate and I want to see them in the Senate Early Learning, K-12 & Higher Education Committee. I want our elected officials to look those kids in the eye the way I have, and personally tell them why they will spend the rest of their lives trying to make up for the inadequacy of a public education system and a society that plain and simply does not want them
The End of Education Reform?
Whether educational reformers want to recognize it or not, anyone who understands the political/legislative world and who is willing to honestly talk about it will readily admit what will happen with the reform agenda once tens of thousands of their constituents start leaving high school with nothing to show for it that matters in the real world. By 2008, the fundamental flaws in the current reform effort (as exemplified by the WASL) will be fully realized. The political climate will shift, championed by those who desired reform the least to begin with. When that occurs, weak politicians will run from “high standards” like it was the plague and what progress the current reform efforts have made will end up in the dust.
In fact, politicians have begun this process already, they’re just being less open about it than I am being. While still pathetically trying to cling to the axiom of “high standards,” they have begun to create new axioms in an effort to shore up what is, at its core, a fundamentally flawed system that will never address the needs of each and every child. The less-than-overt but politically defensible terms now being established are things like “alternative assessments,” “equal rigor” and “portfolio standards.”
The net effect of these political efforts is to increase the number of kids who will eventually graduate and get a diploma until a political equilibrium is reached, where the political clamoring for change is limited to a small enough number of the poor and politically impotent that WASL proponents can return to ignoring the voices of challenge and politicians can still be confident of reelection. Politicians will skillfully and successfully undermine the concept of high standards until only the politically powerless are left to be judged and labeled by their government. I think the children of this state deserve better. I think elected officials have a responsibility to be better.
While some of these proposed revisions will prove a vast improvement over the system that once dominated our public education system, they inelegantly sidestep the genuine discussion that we should be having now and should have been having for decades. Rather than bowing to every wind that popular and powerful political forces bring the government’s way, we should be talking about how we can genuinely improve the globally competitive lives of our children. We should be talking about how we can ensure that each and every one of our children can reach their full potential in life, whether they are “D” students or “A” students. Let’s do it based on what we know is right, what genuinely is challenging for each and every one of our kids, what helps them become better than they might otherwise be. Let’s do it for the human beings we’re supposed to be representing, not for any politically powerful interest to which we have too often sacrificed our children.
Genuine Education Reform
This state and nation have taken an honorable (for the most part) but fundamentally flawed road toward improving our public education system based on erroneous or at least incomplete assumptions. To truly fix it, we need to go back. We need to discard the politically motivated rhetoric of the past and talk honestly about what we need to do as a society to better prepare young people for life in our modern world.
The first step toward doing this is to fully and completely acknowledge that the challenges they face were not caused by the public education system and that those challenges will never be solved by trying to manipulate educators into supporting politically correct ends. The second step is to admit, with tolerance and affection, the painful reality that not all our state’s children are going to grow up at the same time as their contemporaries, that not all of them will be identical in innate skills and abilities, and that virtually none of them walk into the schoolhouse door as average. If we try, if we set aside the political rhetoric and honestly try, every single one of those children can walk out of the schoolhouse door with all the opportunity that God and America have promised them.
Conclusion
In my opinion, most of the people who defend use of the WASL as a graduation requirement are well-meaning and their goals are noble in intent. A great many, however, have never truly thought about what it means for real people or what it means in the context of a greater society.
Whether federal, state or local, the government of our country has a value to its citizenry only so long as it is advancing their individual interests. The moment that it assumes the role of proclaiming law-abiding citizens as fit, or able or worthy of competing in our society, it has gone too far. For all its noble intents, that is what the WASL is doing to our kids today and it must be passionately opposed by any free-thinking citizen in our state.
Rather than continuing to go down the slippery slope that the WASL presents us with, let’s find ways we can empower each individual citizen in our society to achieve the most they can with all the skills they’re born with and with all they can develop. To be sure, a large part of their eventual success will depend overwhelmingly on their own commitment and drive to succeed. I agree with WASL proponents that we will never be able to ensure their individual success. I just disagree about creating a mechanism like the WASL that will ensure their ultimate, individual failure.
Instead, let’s begin anew. Rather than building education reform on political rhetoric, let’s begin by frankly, honestly and apolitically identifying the barriers to success that kids of all socio-economic backgrounds face. Then, let’s systematically begin to break down those barriers. Doing that is our duty to them, to future generations and to the global competitiveness of our state and country. Failing to do it, or making the challenges they face even greater by creating obstacles like the WASL, is shameful.
Tags: Pridemore, WASL, assessments, high stakes
Disclaimer: Senator Pridemore’s commentary is used with permission and for information purposes only.
As with all the articles on this website, CURE does not necessarily endorse the author’s other views or organizations with whom he is affiliated.
Why I Opppose the WASL as a Graduation Requirement
A commentary by State Senator Craig Pridemore, 49th Legislative District – Vancouver.
Click to skip to the following sections:
- FORWARD: Let’s have an open debate
- INTRODUCTION: WASL is based on false assumptions.
- BACKGROUND: Education Concerns led to Education “Reform”.
- One Size Does Not Fit All.
- The WASL is NOT High Standards.
- The WASL does NOT Test Higher Order Thinking Skills.
- The WASL is NOT a Motivational Instrument for Most Students.
- The WASL will NOT Keep Us Globally Competitive.
- Who Will Be Missing from Graduation 2008?
- End of Education Reform?
- We Need Genuine Education Reform.
- CONCLUSION: Let’s Begin Anew.
Forward
I want to explain why I’m opposed to using the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) as a high school graduation requirement. More broadly, however, I’d like to return us to a more fundamental, less politicized and more open debate about what genuine education reform should really be about. I’d like to take education reform outside the realm of political and professional rhetoric, outside our modern educational system, and return it to a more honest discussion between citizens about what our generation really needs to do to help the next generation succeed, not just in an unpredictable, indefinable and largely fictitious “global economy,” but in life.
The educational reform effort this state began in 1992 propelled us down the wrong road toward truly helping kids. Despite that, I eagerly acknowledge that much of it pushed public education toward making much-needed improvements, and that most of the rest, while perhaps a waste of taxpayer money, at least didn’t make the situation any worse for the kids it is presumed to serve. Using the WASL as a graduation requirement, however, not only makes the situation worse but puts the cause of education reform on a path that will inevitably lead to, at best, the end of the education reform movement itself and, at worst, the end of public education in Washington.
For all my efforts, every time I try to talk about this issue I am instantly assailed by proponents of the WASL, on both the left and right, on two bases. First, they claim I don’t believe in high standards, and second, they say I don’t care about kids learning. Sometimes, people’s beliefs and efforts in support of an ideal become so entrenched and their investments in them so profound that if anyone disagrees with them, they feel the need to go on the attack.
For several years now, I’ve been trying to talk about meaningful education reform and my most profound critics are people who “grew up” within the educational system itself. If I make any statement about it at all, they instantly chime in with, “Well, I’ve been in the system for XX years…” implying that they know what is best and the rest of society should just go away. That perspective is largely the one that got us into this predicament to begin with.
The fact is that educators have been incessantly pounded on by politicians who have successfully held them to blame for everything that has happened to change our society since 1960. They have endured such intense criticism for so long that they’ve come to agree with their critics: They actually believe that they were the ones who caused all the problems that exist in our society and that they are responsible for fixing them alone. They’re not and they never were.
I don’t have all of the answers but a lot of honest, capable people who do have been politically and professionally intimidated from speaking out in recent years. If nothing else, by speaking out myself, I hope these people will again step forward and risk “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” to help put this state back on the path toward helping all our children achieve their full potential and their dreams. They deserve nothing less from any of us.
Introduction
Every now and then, an idea so overtakes the political world that it becomes almost impossible to challenge it. At the very least, any politician who attempts to challenge it risks losing his credibility if not his job. Without doubt, he will be assailed and reviled in the public arena, particularly in the press. It’s little wonder that few politicians choose to “rock the boat” anymore. Once a predominant system of thought has established itself, most politicians decide that it’s best and wisest just to let it be. They may – and do – try to work surreptitiously around it, but rarely do they choose to take it on overtly and publicly.
Just as in the natural sciences, the social sciences (including public policy) live in a world of axioms, hypotheses, and theories. Both sciences are dominated by accepted processes of challenge and refinement in order for predominant ideas to rise to become the accepted theories of their day.
Unlike the physical world, however, the axioms of the social sciences aren’t subject to the kind of rigorous intellectual standards that are demanded by the natural sciences. If you’re proposing a hypothesis to explain the physics of the upper atmosphere and begin with the axiom “the sky is orange,” your idea will immediately be dismissed by the scientific community. The natural sciences accept the rule that if you begin with false axioms, you cannot possibly produce a viable hypothesis, much less a dominant theory.
That’s not the case with the process of creating hypotheses related to public policy where the axioms are too often created based on personal beliefs, prejudices, political processes and emotions. The most effective politicians are the ones who can use people’s fears, prejudices, hopes or dreams to manufacture a political environment where axioms that support their future hypotheses are held to be true by a majority of people. Where the natural sciences demand that the truth be proved, the social sciences require only that the truth be believed.
Because of this difference, the dominant theories in public policy differ considerably from their counterparts in the natural sciences. A genuinely new idea in the natural sciences almost always encounters stiff resistance from adherents of the existing dominant theory who close their eyes to the facts and refuse to hear anything that challenges their firmly held beliefs. In the public policy arena, however, the prospect of a new idea frequently encounters the opposite reaction as people and politicians eagerly jump to the latest fad in thinking, whether or not it’s rooted in factual ideas. [This isn’t always true. Many a poor politician has introduced a new idea into the public environment before creating the publicly accepted axioms necessary to support it. In such cases, they always encounter very stiff resistance.]
If you watch the political world closely, you’ll see the best politicians cause wholesale shifts in public attitudes and priorities. In some cases, the impacts are relatively minor even when they’re based on false arguments. Yes, maybe they result in government spending money on things that can’t possibly produce meaningful or even rational results, but apart from waste, no one’s life is irrevocably harmed and the world keeps turning as it always has. In some cases, however, tremendous damage can be caused.
The WASL is one such public policy, one that is based on false axioms that will inflict tremendous damage on many of our citizens and on our society as a whole. No, it won’t lead to the destruction of the planet, but it will create a great deal of misery and resolve none of the challenges its proponents claim that it will.
Education Reform and the Rise of WASL Theory
The modern rush to revamp the American public education system has roots tracing back to the beginnings of universal, comprehensive public education in the 1930s. It began gaining genuine political traction, however, in the 1980s. Ironically, the people who began creating the political axioms that led to the attacks on public education were largely within the public education system itself. In the hopes of generating more support for public education, they began trying to increase citizen awareness about the challenges they faced. It is a time-honored technique in the political world, similar to law and order professionals constantly warning about rising crime to get more money directed to law enforcement. It usually works – people who are afraid frequently resort to many things, including higher taxes, to address their fears.
In the 1980s, public education advocates attempted the same thing by regularly decrying how various educational areas were suffering. One year, it would be the state of literacy, the next geography, then mathematics, science…on, and on, and on, year after year. American kids were not as good as Russian kids during the Cold War, then Japanese kids and German kids; today, they’re not as good as Chinese kids. Against that backdrop, politicians began stepping forward to offer solutions, as politicians have done for time immemorial. Most of the proposed solutions, however, were unlikely to have been the ones supported by the people who created the impression of the “new” and “growing” crisis to begin with. An anti-tax paradigm was dominating the country’s psychology and skilled politicians (not all of whom are elected officials) built on the manufactured crisis by turning the attacks on the public educational system itself. On that, they found fertile ground.
Charter schools, vouchers, privatization and high stakes testing all began to rise as the dominant themes of public education reform. The ideas all sprang from two axioms that had achieved preeminence in the collective mind of the public and that were constantly reinforced by politicians: that teachers either could not or did not want to teach, and that school children were not sufficiently motivated to learn.
In the early 1990s, Washington jumped onto the politically-inspired reform bandwagon by passing House Bill 1209. It mandated specific academic standards and an assessment system to measure whether kids were meeting those standards.
The full impacts of those decisions are just now starting to become clear to the citizens the reform movement was presumed to serve.
Why Don’t Kids Learn?
To understand the challenges we face and create an environment where we can productively talk about the issues again, let’s peel back the political veneer and go back to the initial problem education reform was trying to address.
But first, to succinctly answer the question above: Kids DO learn. In most instances, they learn more now than they ever did before and are far more competent and far more capable than any of us were when we were their age. Dropout rates, while still abysmally high and in much need of attention, are the lowest they’ve been in 50 years and more children have access to quality education for more years of their lives than was the case in the 1950s. We must begin to seriously and honestly address the problem of school dropouts, but we should begin with a more truthful assessment of the problem than we’ve had in recent years. When we hear that some ridiculously high percentage of our kids can’t point out where Washington, D.C., is on a map, we should also understand that they never could. It’s not that the public education system is getting worse. It’s just that we’re publicly aware of what kids actually know for the first time.
To more completely answer the question of why many kids don’t learn as much as we want them to, a great deal of work has been done in an effort to correlate student achievement with many factors. Of all these factors, the one that consistently shows direct and strong correlation is poverty.
Modern reformers of public education don’t like to hear that. They say publicly and privately that even saying it is detrimental to the effort to improve education – it sends the message to teachers that they needn’t bother holding poor kids to high standards and sends the message to poor kids that they needn’t try. This is a legitimate concern and no one should want either teachers or students to adopt either belief. For those who develop public policy proposals to ignore the facts, however, and to attempt to remove them from the development of solutions can only make real progress impossible. I think we need to take the risk if only so we can honestly address the problem.
More than trying to ignore the facts, many reformers have attempted to make it impossible for anyone to even discuss them. Poverty, they say, is just a euphemism for race, suggesting thereby that anyone who says that poverty is a problem is really saying that the races that are most subject to living in poverty are really the problem. Such politically manipulative efforts are false and pejorative. The data clearly shows that it is poverty itself, not race, that gives rise to educational challenges. People who seek to defend the WASL from opponents on these terms suggest that they are more afraid of addressing economic disparities than they are racial ones.
Recognizing the effects that poverty has on a child’s ability to learn is far from an educational death sentence for that child. Every year, thousands of children from poor families defeat the odds and rise to the top. At the same time, thousands of children from affluent communities don’t achieve as much as the average student in their cohort does. Such examples defy the rule but they don’t disprove it. We can find many examples of children who beat the odds and can talk about them until the sun goes down but it doesn’t change the fact: If a child is raised in an economically challenged environment, her odds of success in an academic environment are correspondingly more difficult than if she had been raised in a more affluent environment.
Additionally, statistics establish that poverty in and of itself does not lead to academic failure and is not, in and of itself, a barrier to educational success. Rather, it is the social ills that too often are attendant on poverty. Drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, over-worked parents’ inability to provide adequate support and encouragement, lack of health care or adequate nutrition, a lack of educational expectations within many homes, all conspire against the child unfortunate enough to be born in such circumstance.
Today, it is politically incorrect to suggest that there is any difference between people of differing economic backgrounds. Because it is politically incorrect to talk about the one factor that directly bears on a child’s ability to learn, it has also become politically impossible for most people to develop those proposals that are most likely to lead to progress. So politicians fall back on politically popular and politically expedient solutions. That’s what the WASL is. For decades, educators provided a “one-size-fits-all” educational package. Rich, poor, smart, challenged: Here is our package, if you succeed with it, great; if you don’t, we’ll pass you on regardless. The result was an end-of-education diploma that established nothing about a child’s actual ability, and a system that didn’t encourage or permit educators to improve or innovate at all. In fact, all of our efforts to reform the system, including the WASL, have served to straightjacket our educational system to support, encourage and reinforce mediocrity. Rather than creating the kind of educational system we need (a flexible and vibrant one that reacts to the needs and abilities of each and every student), we have strengthened the bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all mentality that reformers thought they were striving to eliminate.
What the WASL Is NOT
Proponents of the WASL have created such a myth around it that it’s almost impossible to have an honest discussion about it anymore. The following are some of the myths that should be instantly dismissed if only because even WASL proponents routinely admit that they’re a lie, sometimes only inadvertently.
1. The WASL is NOT “high standards.” If an opponent of the WASL has the courage to publicly say that he opposes it, a proponent will inevitably say, “Well, I believe in high standards.” The rhetorical implication, of course, is that the WASL represents high standards and that if you oppose the WASL, you oppose high standards. Nothing could be further from the truth and, if you listen long enough, proponents will tell you that: When an opponent says that the test is unfair to those who face the greatest challenges to learning, proponents will immediately say, “Well, it’s only an eighth-grade level test! How tough could it be if we’re expecting 12th-graders to do eighth-grade level work?!” Proponents need to decide whether they support high standards or just want to sound like they support them.
In fact, the WASL is an extremely low standard for the most capable kids in our school system. For those who, in 10th grade, are already doing 12th-grade or even college level work, we quite literally are telling them that we only expect eighth-grade work from them. These are “A” and “B” level students. Via the WASL, we remind them that we only expect them to get a “C” to graduate. [In fact, we’ve historically told them we only expect a “D.” That needs to change.] On the surface, it doesn’t really matter: Most of these kids and their families decided long ago that being “average” wasn’t enough for them and most are unlikely to lower their standards just to get down to where WASL proponents wish they would be. Going a little deeper, however, you realize what many of these kids already realize: It’s unlikely that school districts will continue to offer advanced calculus classes for them when the state-mandated education reforms will demand that they offer more introductory algebra classes to below-standard students instead. There is no reward for teaching high-performing kids college level calculus, after all, while there are substantial public and financial penalties for failing to teach ALL kids that x+2=6 means the same as x=4.
For students who face the greatest challenges, the “D” and “F” students, the WASL may well represent an unrealistic hurdle that many will never achieve. The WASL may have a positive influence on the “C” student and on some of the “Ds.” As the state and districts inevitably pour more and more resources toward trying to get these kids to pass the WASL, they may finally start to get the attention and resources they deserved all along. With a great deal more individual attention (and test-coaching quite honestly) and hard work on their part, they can achieve something they might not have thought themselves capable of achieving before – passing this particular test. For everyone else, however, it’s meaningless at best, and creates a feeling of wasted effort at worst.
While there are a great many things we could and should be doing to advance the other “D” and “F” students to greater academic achievement, the effort to do so thus far has utterly distracted the public education system from providing them with the tools they could use to lead happy and productive lives. There is nothing inherently wrong with young people who do not choose to go to college. Despite the claims of WASL proponents, there will be a great many jobs in the future that won’t demand a great deal more than the jobs available today and will not require one-on-one competition with an engineer from China. Each and every child does not have to compete globally in order to live a decent life. We should be developing and funding programs that empower these kids to develop economically viable skills even if they don’t become warriors in a national fervor for economic dominance over the rest of the world. In the interest of punishing them for not meeting our government-mandated standard, increasingly, we’re not.
2. The WASL does NOT test higher-order thinking skills. Proponents claim that the WASL is a “higher level” test because it doesn’t test knowledge of simple facts and that it doesn’t have simple techniques that students can be taught such that they can “game” the test in order to pass. Rather, proponents claim, it is a test that digs down to find out how deeply a student actually thinks, and whether they genuinely understand the principals of reading, writing and arithmetic that are being tested.
The proposition is belied by the initial strategy that proponents intend for those who will fail the test the first time. Results of the first “take” will be available in June. The first “retake” will be taken in August. During that two-month period, proponents don’t even plan to take young people from not understanding reading, writing and/or arithmetic to competence in them. Such a thing would be impossible: After 10 years of public education, how could they teach in two months what they couldn’t teach in all the preceding years? Last fall, they testified that all they will be teaching is test-taking techniques – i.e. ways for students to “game” the test. It won’t be about higher-order thinking skills. It will be about how to pass the unique structure of the WASL. If the test was genuinely so profound as to be above such skills, they could not be taught how to pass it, certainly not in two months.
3. The WASL is NOT a motivational instrument for most students. As currently employed, the WASL is still not the thing that most students are trying to obtain. Just as they have for decades, the prize at the end of the journey is a high school diploma. The WASL represents an additional hurdle to that prize, but it is not the prize itself. For decades, far too many young people have not been motivated enough to obtain a diploma. That will not change with the WASL. Some of those who genuinely want a diploma will have to work a great deal harder to get one; those who don’t care will certainly not become any more motivated by the presence of an additional barrier. They are far more likely to simply not bother trying.
Proponents will say that that’s a good thing. If a young person doesn’t care enough about their education to get a diploma then they shouldn’t be given one that has no meaning. I agree. It is silly, however, to conclude that the WASL will change that state. Rather than trying to find methods for genuinely addressing the cause of their attitudes, reform efforts like the WASL propose a “tough love” approach, washing the public educational system of responsibility for them and expecting them to solve the challenges of their own backgrounds on their own. To be sure, some small number of them will eventually crawl back to the community college or work force training systems and try to put their lives back on a positive track. The majority, however, are certain to find their eventual place in life on public welfare roles, on the streets, or in jails. It would clearly be better to deal with their needs before they leave the public education system, even if they don’t initially recognize them.
4. The WASL will NOT keep us globally competitive. Show me a politician who says “the world is flat” in his speeches and I will show you a politician who reads only one book a year. [In fact, one senator gave a speech about how the world is flat then laughed afterward and told me that s/he hadn’t even actually read the book.] In all probability, they also can’t recognize a supply-demand curve or tell you why the gold standard was an antiquated way of calculating the relative strengths of international economies. Such is the depths of understanding when government makes life-critical decisions about the lives of citizens and their children.
For many kids, passing or failing the WASL hinges on how they answer one question. If they get it right, they graduate and get a diploma. If they don’t, they do not graduate. To advocate for the WASL, proponents must argue that any one particular question literally determines whether or not that particular young person can compete in the “global economy” of the future. It doesn’t and it won’t. Whether she answers it correctly or gets agitated and doesn’t concentrate at the right moment, the world will keep turning just as it always has. As our country eagerly pursues policies to send more jobs and dollars into foreign countries, it is hypocritical and brutal for it to judge any young person based on whether she answered that one question right or wrong. For her, however, the rest of her life will be defined, judged and labeled. It’s easy to be arrogant about trying to compete with the Chinese and the Indians when you talk about it in the aggregate. It’s far more difficult when you recognize that it’s real people living real lives who will suffer in the effort. We need a more honest discussion about what the global economy means for our citizens and we need a far more rational understanding about the challenge we face than how a teenager answers one question on a test.
There are 1.3 billion people in China (1.1 billion in India). China can literally ignore the educational dreams of 75 percent of its children, pour all of its resources into the top 25 percent and still turn out more engineers and more scientists than the United States will produce even if we could get every single student to the bachelor’s degree level in the skills our government assumes will be most needed. Despite political rhetoric to the contrary, the simple reality is that the world is changing and the United States is not going to be the dominant economy that it was in the last century. That’s understandably scary for a country that has dominated the world economy for so long, but it is not the end of high living standards or of opportunity for our citizenry.
That said, we should also recognize that the state of China, India and others today is not what it will be in the future. Twenty years ago, the United States agonized over the prospect of Japan someday owning everything in our country. They didn’t and China and India won’t either. If the rapidly evolving history of the past 100 years has taught us anything, let it be that reactionary governmental actions to address immediate anxieties is pejorative. It’s politically expedient, but it usually leads to wasted expenditures and an unnecessary expansion of government authority over our lives.
If our concern genuinely is about global competitiveness for our nation as opposed to the well-being of its citizens, then we should begin to talk earnestly and honestly about the things that will really keep us competitive, not the things that are politically correct today. The WASL will not keep us globally competitive and WASL proponents should be more honest about admitting that to Washington citizens and join me in urging a more honest discussion about the future.
Graduation 2008
When I graduated from Fort Vancouver High School in 1979, there were some 420 of us sitting in folding chairs on the floor of the gymnasium. Some of us wore gold cords for graduating “with honors” and some didn’t. There were 10 valedictorians who had achieved 4.0s during their years in public schools. (A bit too distracted for that, I had to live with my 3.7.) In the uncomfortable wooden bleachers sat my parents and grandparents, doubtlessly filled with pride that another of their offspring was graduating. It meant a lot to me to have them there, particularly my grandmother, Norma Pridemore, who passed away last year at age 94. They cared about me and they were proud of me and those things meant the world to a college-bound 18-year-old kid. After all the interminable speeches that few of us listened to and none of us can remember (it was something about “as we go out into the adult world…”), our names were individually called and we took our turns walking across the stage to shake hands with the principal and accept our diplomas.
The graduating class of 2007 will be significantly larger but they will be astonishingly similar to those of us who graduated 28 years earlier. Some of them will be brilliant at math and some brilliant at literature. Some will be great at photography, drama, athletics, computer design or diesel mechanics. Some won’t be particularly great at any one thing but good enough in several and some will be stellar in all aspects of the educational system. Some will just be natural charmers and some gifted in areas of human and economic endeavor yet undreamed of by our government today. Just as in 1979, there will be a flush of new abilities, new ideas and new challenges for the world to accept or reject.
The graduating class of 2008, however, will be significantly different than either 1979 or 2007. Most significantly, there will be fewer than half the number of kids on the floor of the gym than there were the year before, fewer, even, than there were when I graduated 28 years earlier. Those who were only awesome in any one particular field of study, including math, science or literature, will be gone. So too will be those who weren’t at least average in all three of the government approved areas of study: reading, writing and arithmetic. If the greatest quarterback ever seen by civilized humanity didn’t meet the low standards of the WASL in all three of these areas, s/he will be gone as well. So too the photographer, the dramatist, the poet, the computer-aided design expert, the diesel mechanic, the architect, the political scientist, the geeky kid who just wrote his own operating system for the next generation of computers, and yes, even the charmer, unless they also met the low standards in all three areas that their government decided it wanted to mandate for every child.
Proponents of the WASL need to ask themselves where those kids will be at that moment. Doubtlessly many will be at home, playing Xbox or talking on the phone or tapping away at what remains of their new operating system. Many will be at the mall or hanging out downtown, scoping out members of the opposite sex and trying to look desirable. Many will be out with friends, out on the streets of our neighborhoods, trying to think of something “fun” to do. What else is there for them to do now? For them, what’s the point?
Just as doubtless, at least one kid will be sitting on those same uncomfortable wooden bleachers, watching as a treasured classmate he’s known since kindergarten walks across the same stage I did. Proponents of the WASL need to ask themselves how that kid will feel at that moment and what he’s going to do with the rest of his life, because he’s going to be wondering himself at that moment and for a very long time to come.
In fourth-grade, he took the fourth-grade WASL and failed. While his teachers told him not to worry and promised to spend more time with him, the message to him as a 10-year-old child was very clear and extremely simple: “I am stupid.” In seventh grade, he took the seventh-grade WASL and failed. With all the anxiety of puberty and despite everyone’s claims to the contrary, the message he, as a 12-year-old boy, felt inside was clear and extremely simple: “I am stupid.” In 10th grade, he took the 10th-grade WASL and failed. He trained for the test for two months and failed again. He took remedial classes, took the test again, and failed. He took more classes, tried the test for the final time in his life, and he failed. “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”
In 2008, he will sit on those bleachers, hear the alphabetical listing of last names skip over where his own should have been, and wonder what he is supposed to do next. As he watches the few, the precious few, walk across the stage and despite all their claims and efforts to the contrary, only one message will thunder in his head: “I am stupid.” The final message from his public education system that day will be brutally cruel and bitterly ironic: “Now go make something of yourself.”
Proponents of the WASL say that they’re not labeling kids as stupid. All they’re doing is saying that he isn’t prepared for the adult world. Such declarations are euphemisms for what the young adult himself hears. The message to him is that he isn’t fit. He isn’t qualified. He isn’t worthy. And no one, no one, cares about him anymore.
The world he will face will be different than the one I faced in many respects, but not in all. Having hired (and fired) dozens of people in my professional life, both public and private, I know how the hiring process begins. It starts with being handed a stack of applications and/or resumes, sometimes hundreds at a time. The first thing I need to do is make the pile smaller and the first filter I use is education. For jobs that our new non-graduate will be applying for, businesses will initially be looking for one thing on that first pass: Who has a high school diploma? Those who do will be placed in the pile for further analysis and narrowing down until a small handful is identified who will actually get an interview. Those who don’t have a diploma… they’re already dismissed, they’re already done, they’re already gone That will be the reward from their government for growing up in the public educational system of Washington State in the 21st century. Had his family been able to afford private school or had the time for home-schooling, it might have been different for him, but he had to rely on the public.
If there is one thing that has genuinely frustrated me about how this state has approached education reform, it is that it has never asked itself what that kid is supposed to do with his life. We hold hearing after hearing from WASL proponents, happily claiming that everything pertaining to education reform is working perfectly, and we bring in young people from affluent suburban communities with a strong community commitment to education, who come in and tell us to stay the course. Never, never, do we see the faces of those who will struggle with the lifelong pain of failing to meet our state standards in all three, soon to be four, areas our government cares to respect.
WASL proponents should be forced to answer the question of what happens to those kids before we continue further down this road. If you ask them what happens to kids who fail, they will cheerily answer that they will spend all kinds of money helping them to pass it the next time. Never, never, will they answer what they will do with the estimated 40-plus percent of kids who will never pass it as it exists today. Such people aren’t supposed to exist, thus we go to great lengths never to see them in the hope that we can convince ourselves that they don’t. Well, they do exist, a great many of them. I meet them when I walk down the sidewalk. I see them in my neighborhood, at my family gatherings for Christmas, and I see them in my county jail.
I want to see them on the floor of the Washington State Senate and I want to see them in the Senate Early Learning, K-12 & Higher Education Committee. I want our elected officials to look those kids in the eye the way I have, and personally tell them why they will spend the rest of their lives trying to make up for the inadequacy of a public education system and a society that plain and simply does not want them
The End of Education Reform?
Whether educational reformers want to recognize it or not, anyone who understands the political/legislative world and who is willing to honestly talk about it will readily admit what will happen with the reform agenda once tens of thousands of their constituents start leaving high school with nothing to show for it that matters in the real world. By 2008, the fundamental flaws in the current reform effort (as exemplified by the WASL) will be fully realized. The political climate will shift, championed by those who desired reform the least to begin with. When that occurs, weak politicians will run from “high standards” like it was the plague and what progress the current reform efforts have made will end up in the dust.
In fact, politicians have begun this process already, they’re just being less open about it than I am being. While still pathetically trying to cling to the axiom of “high standards,” they have begun to create new axioms in an effort to shore up what is, at its core, a fundamentally flawed system that will never address the needs of each and every child. The less-than-overt but politically defensible terms now being established are things like “alternative assessments,” “equal rigor” and “portfolio standards.”
The net effect of these political efforts is to increase the number of kids who will eventually graduate and get a diploma until a political equilibrium is reached, where the political clamoring for change is limited to a small enough number of the poor and politically impotent that WASL proponents can return to ignoring the voices of challenge and politicians can still be confident of reelection. Politicians will skillfully and successfully undermine the concept of high standards until only the politically powerless are left to be judged and labeled by their government. I think the children of this state deserve better. I think elected officials have a responsibility to be better.
While some of these proposed revisions will prove a vast improvement over the system that once dominated our public education system, they inelegantly sidestep the genuine discussion that we should be having now and should have been having for decades. Rather than bowing to every wind that popular and powerful political forces bring the government’s way, we should be talking about how we can genuinely improve the globally competitive lives of our children. We should be talking about how we can ensure that each and every one of our children can reach their full potential in life, whether they are “D” students or “A” students. Let’s do it based on what we know is right, what genuinely is challenging for each and every one of our kids, what helps them become better than they might otherwise be. Let’s do it for the human beings we’re supposed to be representing, not for any politically powerful interest to which we have too often sacrificed our children.
Genuine Education Reform
This state and nation have taken an honorable (for the most part) but fundamentally flawed road toward improving our public education system based on erroneous or at least incomplete assumptions. To truly fix it, we need to go back. We need to discard the politically motivated rhetoric of the past and talk honestly about what we need to do as a society to better prepare young people for life in our modern world.
The first step toward doing this is to fully and completely acknowledge that the challenges they face were not caused by the public education system and that those challenges will never be solved by trying to manipulate educators into supporting politically correct ends. The second step is to admit, with tolerance and affection, the painful reality that not all our state’s children are going to grow up at the same time as their contemporaries, that not all of them will be identical in innate skills and abilities, and that virtually none of them walk into the schoolhouse door as average. If we try, if we set aside the political rhetoric and honestly try, every single one of those children can walk out of the schoolhouse door with all the opportunity that God and America have promised them.
Conclusion
In my opinion, most of the people who defend use of the WASL as a graduation requirement are well-meaning and their goals are noble in intent. A great many, however, have never truly thought about what it means for real people or what it means in the context of a greater society.
Whether federal, state or local, the government of our country has a value to its citizenry only so long as it is advancing their individual interests. The moment that it assumes the role of proclaiming law-abiding citizens as fit, or able or worthy of competing in our society, it has gone too far. For all its noble intents, that is what the WASL is doing to our kids today and it must be passionately opposed by any free-thinking citizen in our state.
Rather than continuing to go down the slippery slope that the WASL presents us with, let’s find ways we can empower each individual citizen in our society to achieve the most they can with all the skills they’re born with and with all they can develop. To be sure, a large part of their eventual success will depend overwhelmingly on their own commitment and drive to succeed. I agree with WASL proponents that we will never be able to ensure their individual success. I just disagree about creating a mechanism like the WASL that will ensure their ultimate, individual failure.
Instead, let’s begin anew. Rather than building education reform on political rhetoric, let’s begin by frankly, honestly and apolitically identifying the barriers to success that kids of all socio-economic backgrounds face. Then, let’s systematically begin to break down those barriers. Doing that is our duty to them, to future generations and to the global competitiveness of our state and country. Failing to do it, or making the challenges they face even greater by creating obstacles like the WASL, is shameful.
Tags: Pridemore, WASL, assessments, high stakes