Challenger Judith Billings.
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Standing in front of McClure Middle School on Queen Anne, a sprightly presence in a jaunty black skirt, Judith Billings announced last month that she was making a run for her old job as state superintendent of public instruction. It was a triumph of one kind just to be back in the game. Eight years ago, while nearing the end of her second term as superintendent, Billings announced that she had contracted AIDS from artificial insemination she had done years back. Thanks to breakthrough drugs called protease inhibitors developed since, the 64-year-old Billings says her health has improved dramatically. Her telltale count of T cells, linked to the immune system, has gone from a crisis-level 200 to a robust 800 to 1,000, and she has been traveling all over the world as an AIDS activist, most recently to Thailand the week before her announcement for the International AIDS Conference.
She is returning to education politics with a bang. "I'm here to broaden the discussion," she declared as she made her announcement. She was speaking at that moment about the issue that is now consuming almost every educator in the state: the high-stakes test called the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, commonly known as the WASL. Beginning in 2008, students will have to pass the WASL to graduate from high school—a standard that, at the current level of results, would deny two-thirds of seniors their diploma. The search for a way out has been inevitable, and now Billings is suggesting one. "As far as making it a graduation requirement," she says of the WASL, "I think right now that's a mistake."
Billings has other parts to her platform, but the idea of dropping the WASL as a graduation requirement is her bombshell. It would derail, or at least seriously alter, the push toward state standards that has been the centerpiece of education policy here since 1993, when the state Legislature passed a landmark education reform bill. The notion raises the possibility that education reform could go the way of health care reform in this state—a historic initiative abandoned before it was ever implemented.
It's a possibility made more real by the fact that Billings' candidacy is tapping into a wider discontent with the WASL. Until the former superintendent stepped into the race, Spanaway mother Juanita Doyon, founder of Mothers Against the WASL, seemed like the most credible challenger to incumbent Terry Bergeson. The Washington Education Association, representing the state's teachers, pointedly refused to endorse Bergeson, a former union president, at its spring convention. Though Bergeson's acquiescence with charter school legislation was generally assumed to be the most important reason, WEA President Charles Hasse says "a level of frustration that's hard to overstate" with the WASL was talked about more at the convention. More surprisingly, a number of the original sponsors of education reform bill 1209 now express misgivings about the way it has played out through the WASL. They include the former chairs of the state House and Senate K-12 education committees, respectively Randy Dorn, now executive director of Public School Employees of Washington, representing classified employees, and Dwight Pelz, now a King County Council member, both of whom question the notion of one all-important test.
So although it's true that the Legislature rather than the superintendent has authority over whether the WASL will be a graduation test, this election has the potential of setting a new political climate for education.
It is also a match up between two longtime rivals. In 1992, Bergeson challenged then-Superintendent Billings, claiming that the superintendent's office needed stronger leadership. Bergeson lost. But the following year's education reform bill created a new commission to come up with specific standards, much to the dismay of Billings, who wanted authority over the task. And Bergeson became the commission's executive director, thus making her "the head person from day one" on the WASL, as Dorn puts it. They are women with different styles. Billings is more of a charmer and a delegator, while the 61-year-old Bergeson is known for her drive and tirelessness.
Billings served as superintendent from 1989 until 1997. She did a competent job, by all accounts, letting her staff know that the needs of poor and minority kids were paramount to her. Ironically, the most remarkable thing that happened on her watch was the education reform bill, which she largely supported. "I remember walking out of the Senate with her after the bill passed," says Pelz. "She was excited."
Now, she describes the reform effort as having gotten off track. Echoing a common complaint, she says testing has become an obsession. "It's almost become an end in itself to have a high test score."
She claims, moreover, that the WASL was never intended to be a graduation test for individual students; rather it was meant as a "systems check." As Bergeson points out, however, bill 1209 specifically states that successful completion of the to-be-created high school assessment will be required for graduation. Billings concedes the point when questioned, but adds that the original idea was to have a more varied assessment than a single test—including portfolios of classroom work. Dorn agrees. "All these things we talked about have gone by the wayside," he says.
