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The Great WASL Debate

Ohanian Comment: David Horsey is a wonderfully acerbic cartoonist. And he blogs too. Many of his cartoons are about political leaders, but when he turns to education, he nails it.

by David Horsey

My cartoon slamming the WASL and Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson has generated a flood of reader comments. (To see cartoon and the reader comments, go
here.

(For out-of-state readers of this blog and my cartoons, the WASL is the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, a statewide test used as a requirement for high school graduation and as the state's yardstick to meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law.)

A number of good points were made by those who agree with my view that the WASL has serious problems and needs to be dramatically revised or completely replaced. Among them:

• The test takes too much time and costs way too much money.

• Test results arrive too late to be of use to classroom teachers.

• The shift of time and resources to the WASL is crowding the arts out of our schools and shortchanging other vital subjects, such as history.

• The WASL regimen should not be the primary measure of student success since, to a significant extent, it measures the ability to take a test rather than actual knowledge or skills.

• Post-high school, graduates are being told the writing style and math methods drilled into them by the WASL are not appropriate for college work or technical jobs in the military.

• There are alternative tests that are cheaper, provide faster results and better measure student learning.

Strangely, most who wrote in to support the WASL did not make factual arguments. Instead, they resorted to denigrating remarks and screeds against liberals. With friends like that, Bergeson could use a few more enemies.

It is only human for a person to become passionately invested in any big project that consumes one's career. The danger, of course, is that such total investment can make one incapable of objective reassessment when things go awry. I suspect that has happened to Terry Bergeson who has made the WASL the big project of her years in office. As a result, I doubt she is capable of shifting her direction or even acknowledging that there are big problems with the WASL. Such reform will have to come from her successor. Let's just hope that, for once, Washington voters will be offered not a token opponent or a fringe candidate, but a strong alternative to the incumbent in the coming election.

— David Horsey
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
2008-03-26
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/horsey

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