On Monday, a Washington state Senate committee will commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday by trying to kill the WASL.
Somehow the committee feels that setting aside the reading and writing requirement until the Class of 2012 – just as it set aside the math requirement last year – is the best way to honor the memory of America’s premier civil rights champion.
In truth, it would insult black and Hispanic students who are making tremendous progress toward getting the skills they need to succeed.
School reform is transforming the high school diploma into a meaningful document, one that can tell colleges and employers that the person whose name it displays can read and write and compute and reason.
In 1999, 27 percent of black 10th-graders passed the reading section of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning on the first try. Last spring six of 10 did so.
For the Class of 2008, 73 percent of black seniors and 71 percent of Hispanic seniors meet standards in reading and writing.
There remains an achievement gap. Overall, 85 percent of seniors have passed the reading and writing tests.
But there also is an effort gap. While 6,000 students still need to pass both tests to graduate, two-thirds have never even taken the test. And a lack of credits, not WASL failure, is why most kids are not on track to graduate.
It is unfortunate that opponents of the WASL graduation requirement would now use people of color as a tool to do what they’ve wanted to do for years: kill the WASL.
After all the changes that were made last year – suspending math, ordering changes to the math and science curriculum, creating a bunch of alternative assessments – this short legislative session really should be a WASL-free zone.
That leading Senate Democrats are instead relaunching their assault – even recasting it as a civil rights issue – demonstrates that they don’t want to reform school reform, they want to end it.
I’m not arrogant enough to speculate what the Rev. King would think about the WASL. I do have a good idea what black and Hispanic Washingtonians think about it.
They support school reform, they support higher standards and they support using the WASL as a means of making sure the diploma means something. That’s what a 2006 survey of black and Hispanic residents of Washington showed.
After learning about remediation programs and alternative testing, 80 percent of blacks and 86 percent of Hispanics supported WASL passage as a graduation requirement.
Let me end by speaking to the relative handful of high school seniors who have tried and failed to pass the reading or writing test. Don’t get your hopes up that the Legislature will bail you out. Senate Bill 6540 has a veto target on it, thanks to Gov. Chris Gregoire’s commitment to raising and enforcing higher standards for Washington schools.
“The system is succeeding in reading and writing. I think that’s undeniable,” Gregoire said Thursday.
And, she said, that to tell students inspired to succeed that they can’t pass is the wrong message.
“Time is available when you’re 18. It is not available when you don’t have the skills and you’re unemployed and looking for jobs and scraping at 35.”
Such prospects are worse than failing to graduate with your class and needing to stay in school a bit longer.
“If it takes us an extra year to make sure that student is proficient in reading and writing so they can qualify to get a good job, that, in my opinion, is the right thing to do,” she said.
Don’t let the continued misadventures of Senate Democrats dissuade you from doing what you have to do to graduate: getting the credits and passing the reading and writing sections of the WASL, or completing one of the many alternative assessments.
It might seem hard now, but it’ll only get harder later.
Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657
peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com
blogs.thenewstribune.com/politics
