Why the WASL Must Go: A primer on the Washington Assessment of

Student Learning from a classroom teacher's perspective

What is the WASL?
In 2008, for the first time ever in Washington State history satisfactory
completion of the WASL reading and writing examinations will be a
mandatory high school graduation requirement. Previously, reading,
writing, and math were all going to be required, but this plan was
jettisoned in 2007 when the failure rate on the math assessment reached
50% .
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The genesis of the WASL: School reform under Reagan

In the 1980s, as a part of the ruling class backlash against various
social movements, conservative intellectuals like Milton Friedman began a
slow takeover of public education in the United States. Subsequently, the
innovation and momentum for educational reform shifted from the public
interest where it had been since the turn of the century toward a pro-
freemarket model.

President Reagan, whose campaign included a pledge to “abolish the

Department of Education,” consistently used his office to attack and
2

undercut public education by cutting school lunch programs, attempting to

break teachers' unions, appointing William Bennett as Secretary of
Education, and most importantly, the commissioning of the study A Nation
at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform , the intellectual 3

forerunner of Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

A Nation at Risk was a pro-business report by the National Commission on

Excellence in Education and published by the Department of Education in
1983. The report contained thirty-eight recommendations; they ranged from
“achieving proficiency in a foreign language by beginning instruction in
elementary school” to “the introduction of tougher sanctions for truancy”.
These thirty-eight recommendations were divided into five major
categories : 4

• Content: Alignment of high school graduation requirements nationwide:

4 years of English, 3 years of mathematics, 3 years of science, 3
years of social studies, and one-half year of computer science
• Standards and Expectations: mandated learning targets and expansion
of standardized testing
• Time: 7-hour school days and a 200 to 220 day school year
• Teaching: increased salaries, more strenuous teacher training, and
increased emphasis on specialization in an “academic discipline”
• Leadership and Fiscal Support: Doing more to help meet the needs of
economically disadvantaged, ethnic minorities, and second language
learners

1 http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2003450895_math28n.html
2 http://www.cato.org/research/education/articles/reagan.html
3 http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nation_at_Risk
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But all anyone heard was testing... While the major recommendations of the
report had merit, they were largely ignored. School reform efforts
subsequently have focused on increasing “Standards and Expectations” while
ignoring the underlying systems of class inequality that contribute to low
student achievement.

A new corporate agenda for Washington State schools

Following the release of A Nation at Risk, many states in the U.S.
responded by creating educational reform commissions and working groups at
the state level. These commissions were led by business leaders from the
private sector, district and state level administrators, and corporate
educational consultants: not teachers and certainly not students.

In Washington State, the response to this report led to the creation of

the Commission on Student Learning in 1993. It was an eleven member board
appointed by the governor that included state business leaders. They were
charged with the following : 5

• Creating clear, challenging academic standards

• Creating standards-based assessment and other ways of measuring
student achievement
• Designing an accountability system to hold schools and school
districts accountable for results

The Commission on Student Learning's work resulted in the creation of

standardized content expectations called EALRs (Essential Academic
Learning Requirements), standardized skill expectations called GLEs (Grade
Level Expectations), and a statewide standardized assessment called the
WASL—the WASL has been the most problematic.

For the last twenty-five years educational reforms in Washington State

have been driven by the desires of Boeing, Microsoft, Weyerhauser, and
other large corporations in order to produce obedient and efficient
workers—not critical thinkers.

The WASL is a money, time, and resource pit

Money... Annually, Washington students spend countless hours in
preparation for the WASL. Nationwide, the same corporations that provide
the testing materials to schools also sell test preparation classes and
materials to schools struggling to improve test scores. This is a
lucrative business for them. According to Bloomberg News, “in 2005,
CTB/McGraw-Hill, Educational Testing Service, Harcourt Assessment, Pearson
Assessments and smaller firms generated $2.8 billion in revenue from
testing and test preparation.” With their right hand, these companies
create and sell cash strapped schools expensive exams and with their left
hand, they sell the same underfunded schools expensive test preparation
workbooks, practice tests, and even computer software to help increase
scores.

Despite the high costs, these tests do nothing to prepare students for

5 http://www.newhorizons.org/trans/holayter.htm
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life after K-12; they are irrelevant to the development of job skills or
the cultivation of democratic citizenship, and they cost school districts
and state boards of education literally hundreds of millions of dollars.

Time... Because of the long delay between when students take the tests and
when the scores (and only scores, for “test security” purposes) come back
(four to six months later), the results are useless to classroom teachers
for instructional purposes. Teachers are unable to discern what items the
student needs remediation on—only scores for opaque section titles like
“number sense” and “evaluate reasoning and ideas/themes related to the
text” are given.

The results from year to year are instead used for polemical purposes by
pundits and the media to stigmatize low income schools and sometimes
entire urban communities. Furthermore, the tests serve as one more way of
marginalizing English Language Learners (ELL).

Resources... The WASL is a black hole for resources and already scarce
educational funds. Instead of instilling academic rigor as it is posited
to do, the WASL actually causes instruction to be overly skills based (at
the cost of critical thinking and life skills). Teachers desperate to
appease administrators with rising test scores sacrifice creativity in the
classroom and teach to the test. With an emphasis on raising test scores,
teachers increasingly teach the same skills over and over for struggling
students instead of providing the breadth and depth that students deserve.
The WASL rewards rote memorization and formulaic thinking. It is an
impediment to the kind of educational reform Washington State actually
needs and does nothing to contribute to improved educational outcomes for
students.

WASL opponents do not contend that schools in Washington are perfect—far

from it. It is clear that public education is in need of drastic reform;
however, more standardized testing is not the solution.

The WASL must go!

In the years since the Reagan Administration’s report, educational reform
has been inappropriately based on market principles. These reformers
support a competitive theory that says “low performing” schools should
either improve or go away at the pressures of the market. This theory is
detrimental to the quality and sustainability of public education in
working class communities for a number of reasons:

1. The WASL means less money for needy schools: Following the free
market logic, low performing schools would see a flight of students
as parents use vouchers to help pay for private schooling or send
their students to “higher performing” schools. A decrease in
enrollment at low performing schools would mean a commensurate
decrease in the amount of funding available to these schools. This
leads to a paradox where the schools that need the most help and
resources will actually get less and less help from the state, thus
leading to the eventual collapse of these schools.

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 This is a fundamental tactic of conservative ideology: starvation.
Starve an agency or program of resources until it fails miserably or
collapses and then call for its privatization. We saw this cycle play
out in 2006 as conservatives praised the response of corporations
like Wal-Mart to Hurricane Katrina, while denigrating the budget
starved Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA).

2. The WASL ignores class injustice: According to Michael W. Apple,

Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy
Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, only by “eliminating
poverty through greater economic parity, establishing effective and
much more equal health and housing programs... only by tackling these
issues together can substantive progress be made” in school reform. 6

The United States has taken strides to raise expectations for

students without a accompanying increase in efforts to fight the
poverty and inequality within students' lives. These long ignored
factors are the greatest barriers to raising academic achievement.

3. The WASL punishes schools for non-school factors: When examining

standardized test scores like the WASL it is helpful to understand
that scores are highly correlated with socioeconomic status. The
following statistics are for 10th grade math scores in 2004 . The data 7

is clear; as the number of students receiving free/reduced lunch

increases at a school, the number of students “meeting standard”
decreases:
• International Community School, Lake Washington School District,
WA: 0.5% of students qualify for free/reduced lunch, 100% “met
standard” on the math section of the WASL.
• Bainbridge High School, Bainbridge Island, WA: 5% of students
qualify for free/reduced lunch, 79.7% “met standard” on the math
section of the WASL.
• Interlake High School, Bellevue, WA: 23% of students qualify for
free/reduced lunch, 72.4% “met standard” on the math section of the
WASL.
• Rainer Beach High School, Seattle, WA: 58% of students qualify for
free/reduced lunch, 37.4% “met standard” on the math section of the
WASL.
• Cleveland High School, Seattle, WA: 63% of students qualify for
free/reduced lunch, 23.1% “met standard” on the math section of the
WASL.

The WASL and current testing based school reforms are doing nothing
to address the inequality at the root of these numbers.

4. The WASL stigmatizes working class communities: Using terms like “low
performing” or “failing” to describe entire school districts,
communities, and schools unnecessarily stigmatizes the working class.
6 Educating the “Right” Way, 2006, p. 81
7 http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/education/links/wasl7thgrade.pdf
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 These communities need more resources—not an accusatory finger
pointed at them with a threat to close or take over their school. The
fact that the highest scores can be found at schools within the most
affluent communities demonstrates clearly the unspoken truth: the
WASL is an assessment of the level of socioeconomic power and access
to additional resources (private tutoring, educated parents, and
parental supervision after school) within a community—not of the
intellect or achievement of the students therein.

5. The WASL is a barrier to graduation: In 2007, only 46.1% of the 10th

graders who took the WASL passed reading, writing, and math. This is
not an anomaly; math scores are low statewide and across all grade
levels:
[A]n overwhelming majority, nearly three-quarters of the state's
African American and Latino students who took the 10th-grade
WASL failed at least one the subjects needed to graduate. Two-
thirds of Native Americans were not on-track to earning a
diploma, and 70 percent of students living in poverty, mostly
white and Asian did not meet standard . 8

Parents, teachers, and students are united against the WASL

Many parent and teacher groups have protested against the WASL, claiming
unreasonable expectations and cultural bias among other issues. They have
proposed alternatives; instead of a single measure, such as the WASL,
Washington State PTA supports multiple measures of student achievement.
Others have pointed out how the WASL leads to a homogenized curriculum and
disengagement:

[S]tandardized tests give every student a solid picture of

achievement, and an equal opportunity for advancement. But after
years of rote memorization and drills, what were once intellectually
excited and motivated five-year-olds have become bored or grade-
obsessed teenagers.

The problem with standardized tests and the fixed curricula they
engender is their tendency to kill off the kind of education that
matters most. But who can blame a teacher or school for orienting the
lesson toward helping students pass those tests with high marks? The
temptation to teach students to do well on standardized tests is
almost unavoidable when performance on such tests is how entire
school systems are evaluated . 9

According to Joe Lubig, in The American School “an effective democracy

requires a citizenry with a civic education. The public schools were
founded in part to create an informed citizenry through a curriculum that
formally promotes common knowledge, skills and dispositions allowing for
authentic engagement in the business of a democracy 10.”

8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Assessment_of_Student_Learning
9 http://www.engines4ed.org/hyperbook/nodes/NODE-69-pg.html
10 http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_American_School/Ch1_The_Role_of_Education_in_a_Democratic_Society
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The WASL does nothing to contribute to the further understanding of
democracy. Instead, because administrators abandon content areas that are
not assessed by the WASL, like Social Studies and History, the WASL is
actually an impediment to citizenship education.

The WASL has been heralded by its supporters as a remedy to the ills of
public education in Washington State, when in actuality it has simply
exacerbated previous ills and created far more problems than it has
solved:

The WASL is a money, time, and resource pit.

The WASL means less money for needy schools.
The WASL ignores class injustice.
The WASL punishes schools for non-school factors.
The WASL stigmatizes working class communities.
The WASL is a barrier to graduation.
Parents, teachers, and students are united against the WASL.

It is time for the WASL to go.

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 Appendix:

I. Further explanation of the WASL

The Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) is a standardized
educational assessment that because of requirements of Bush's No Child
Left Behind (NCLB) Act is also used as a high school graduation
examination in Washington State. At the behest of the Washington State
Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) the WASL was
created in 1997 by a company called Pearson Education, headquartered in
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Pearson Education is a subsidiary of
London based media conglomerate Pearson PLC.

The WASL assessment consists of examinations over four subjects: reading,

mathematics, science, and writing. It utilizes four different types of
questions: multiple-choice, short-answer, essay, and problem solving. The
WASL is administered every spring to public school students in Washington
State from third to tenth grade.

II. Budget shortfalls for local schools

Over the past ten years, the WASL has cost Washington State taxpayers over
$850,000,000 to develop and administer to state students. For 2009 the
projected cost of administering the WASL is between $37 to $47 million
dollars . Meanwhile, all over the state, districts are announcing radical
11

cutbacks to confront budget shortfalls for the upcoming school year:

 Seattle Schools face a shortfall of $22 million for 2008-2009 12

 Tacoma Public School District faces a $6.6 million shortfall for

2008-2009 . 13

 Bellevue School District faces a shortfall of nearly $5 million for

2008-2009 . 14

 Bethel School District (south of Tacoma) faces a $5.6 million

shortfall for 2008-2009 . 15

 Vancouver School District is cutting twenty-six educational support

staff positions . 16

III. Regarding various state school reform commissions

These commissions were frequently taken over by free market
fundamentalists who advocated “school choice” to promote excellence in
education through competition. According to their reasoning a “highly
competitive market” for schools and education vouchers would permit
17

parents to select and pay any school, public, private (or for profit),
with funds allocated to local public schools. The theory was that parents
would naturally shop for the best schools and lower performing schools
would be identified for further reform through standardized testing.

11 http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/354854_wasl13.html
12 http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2004316803_promises31m.html
13 http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/education/story/356880.html
14 http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/eastsidenews/2004292191_skulcuts19e.html
15 http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/education/story/355085.html
16 http://www.oregonlive.com/metronorth/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/metro_north_news/1210125312298300.xml&coll=7
17 http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-023.html
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