9486 in the collection  

Political Blather in Washington State

Ohanian Comment: They seem to be fiddling while Rome burns. Do they think their constitutents will stand for 50% of the kids not getting a high school diploma? They'd better start fiddling faster.

OLYMPIA -- Gov. Gary Locke praised recent indications of academic improvement among Washington students yesterday, but called for changes in state and federal laws to keep progress moving.

Locke's news conference came less than a week after the announcement of last year's scores on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, the testing portion of the state's education reform effort.

"Our students are making some of the greatest academic gains in the nation," Locke told reporters at his weekly news conference.

Locke and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson also praised Washington students' high scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the American College Test, two exams widely used in college admissions.

But their biggest concern remained the results of the WASL, which is used to measure the progress of students and schools under both state law and the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The tests are administered in the fourth, seventh and 10th grades. Beginning with the class of 2008, passing the 10th-grade exam will become a requirement for high-school graduation. Since the tests were first offered, scores have steadily improved, but most students still fail at least one subject.

Among last year's seventh-graders -- the first class subject to the graduation requirement -- 53 percent met the state standard in writing, 47.9 percent in reading and 36.8 percent in math.

At the school level, 70 percent of the state's schools made "adequate yearly progress" as defined by the federal law.

Helping students and schools do better will require changes to both state and federal law, Bergeson and Locke said.

They urged the Legislature to modify the state law to allow high school students to retake the test if they fail, allow alternate testing methods for students with learning disabilities and make sure every eighth-grader has a plan to meet the graduation requirement.

"We can't have a goal like this without a retake on the test," Bergeson said.

Although such changes enjoy broad support, they died in the Legislature earlier this year, caught up in a contentious fight over allowing charter schools in Washington.

On the federal level, Locke said he hopes for changes that won't penalize schools that have special challenges, such as high numbers of non-English-speaking students, or high numbers of children who have recently moved into the state.

"It's not fair to say that those students and those schools are failing," Locke said. Locke also said that Washington's relatively tough standards tend to penalize schools more than other states.

However, Locke stayed away from the biggest concern of many education advocates -- more state money for schools. Last year, Locke proposed suspending two voter-approved initiatives that mandate class-size reduction and yearly teacher pay increases rather than raise taxes to pay for them. The Legislature largely went along, outraging union teachers and others.



— Paul Queary
Locke wants to modify student testing
Seattle Post Intelligencer
2003-09-04
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/138008_education04.html

---

INDEX OF OUTRAGES

Pages: 380   
[1] 2 3 4 5 6  Next >>    Last >>