Anti-WASL bill gets civil rights backward

Can it be mere coincidence that the state Senate’s education committee is holding a hearing on the latest anti-WASL bill on Monday – Martin Luther King Jr. Day?

The timing certainly suggests that this is a civil rights issue, and that’s what some opponents of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning have long been claiming. Their theory: Blacks and Latinos have been failing the test at higher rates than whites and Asians. So its use as a graduation requirement (which begins this year) amounts to racial discrimination.

Senate Bill 6540 would supposedly fix that by not requiring graduating seniors to pass the WASL’s reading and writing sections until 2012. (The math requirement has already been deferred.)

By packaging this as a postponement instead of an outright repeal, SB 6454 would permit lawmakers who vote for it to have it both ways: To citizens demanding higher standards in public schools, they could claim they weren’t abandoning the requirement, just tweaking the test a little more.

In reality, the test would be tweaked to death. Pushing the deadline out another four years would undo the immense work that’s been invested so far helping struggling students clear this bar. The state’s 15 years of trying to build a culture of educational rigor and accountability would be sabotaged. It’s hard to take a test seriously if students are never quite required to pass it.

For the record, students are already excused from the WASL requirement if they instead satisfy one of the many alternatives the Legislature has created. A senior can fail the WASL but still graduate, for example, by earning grades comparable to others who barely pass it, or by assembling a portfolio of acceptable class work.

Students can also take the WASL time after time, with free tutoring. What’s more, the Legislature has dumbed down the passing scores. This test is hardly an insurmountable obstacle to a diploma. Nearly nine of 10 members of the class of 2008 have in fact passed both the reading and writing sections. What problem, exactly, would SB 6540 solve?

But back to the civil rights question.

Are African-American and Latino students well-served by handing them empty diplomas that reflect no academic achievement or mastery of basic skills?

Their elders don’t seem to think so. A survey commissioned by the Partnership for Learning last year asked black and Latino parents if they supported the WASL graduation requirement. They did by large margins: 62 percent of blacks, 72 percent of Latinos.

Told of the multiple opportunities to take the test, the state-funded assistance and the exemption of students with serious disabilities, the support went from strong to overwhelming. Eighty-three percent of blacks and 81 percent of Latinos said they’d support the WASL requirement even if one of their own children didn’t pass it on the first try.

Minority parents appear to better understand the realities of the job market – and expect more from their schools and children – than some who claim to speak for them. Let no one forget that America’s greatest civil rights leader and one of its greatest success stories was an African American boy who labored to acquire a serious education – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.