Pete Kuhns
Susan and Nathan Conners of Normandy Park working on science and social studies at home—because they get short shrift at school. In the world of WASL, the three R's rule the classroom.
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One morning last spring, 9-year-old Tyler Stoken awoke in his modest rambler in Aberdeen, Grays Harbor County, and asked his mom to make him bacon. He was about to take the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, the statewide test better known as the WASL ("Wassle,"), and Tyler had been told at school to have a good breakfast. The test was important to Central Park Elementary, as it is to all schools. The WASL is the linchpin of a decade-old movement in Washington, mirroring efforts in other states and at the federal level, to reform education by raising standards. Newspapers publish the test results, underperforming schools are subject to potential federal sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Act, and, as Central Park Principal Olivia McCarthy later told an investigator for the local Educational Service District (ESD), educators "are under constant pressure to perform."
Tyler wanted to be ready for this all-important test, and he had every reason to believe that he was. He was a bright boy who got great grades, scored in the 89th percentile on the national Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and was so favored by his third-grade teacher that she asked to have him back the following year.
"I think I aced it," he told his mom after one day of the test, which spans two weeks. On a subsequent day, however, he faced an essay question that stumped him. It asked him to imagine that he saw his principal flying by the window and to write several paragraphs about what happened next. He sat there, not writing a word. "I didn't want to make fun of the principal," he explains, quietly recalling the episode while leaning against his mom.
At the time, Tyler didn't say why he found the question so difficult. All his teacher, and later his principal, knew was that he wasn't performing. And they did not like it. His mom, Amy Wolfe, says the school called her three times over the next couple of days, during which Tyler was repeatedly given the question to complete. The school wanted Wolfe to get her son to write that essay. The last time they called, he got on the phone, crying. Unable to figure out what was going on, Wolfe and the school finally gave up on the test. But Tyler hadn't heard the end of it.
The Friday after the test was over, Central Park held a special event to celebrate the students' hard work on the WASL. The kids had curled up in blankets from home as they watched Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events in the gym. Before the movie started, though, Tyler was called to the principal's office. "She said I didn't deserve to watch the movie," Tyler says. She instructed Tyler to go to a table in the office's reception area and put his head down. He was left like that for five hours and 20 minutes, according to a report by the ESD—so long that his neck hurt.
When he went home that day, Tyler had a note in his backpack from Principal McCarthy informing his mother that he would be suspended for five days because of his "refusal to work on the WASL." The note called Tyler's behavior "blatant defiance and insubordination" but made very clear that it was his score that caused such a grievous wound. McCarthy wrote: "As he chose NOT to perform, he will get a zero on that section, which will be averaged with the scores of all the other students in his class. . . . Additionally, this extends to the whole fourth grade, as our school score, the one that is reported to the state and the media, is an average of all fourth-grade students."
The WASL has swept the state education system like a fever, an obsession, a madness. "Where can you go in the state of Washington and not hear 'WASL'?" asks Washington Middle School teacher Debra Tarpley. In anticipation of the legislative session beginning in January, the Washington Education Association, the state teachers union, hired a pollster to conduct focus groups with teachers to find out what issues most concerned them. "They talked about the WASL," says WEA President Charles Hasse. "He [the pollster] then asked, 'What else?' Then they talked about the WASL some more."
"I dream about the WASL," says Brittany Morris, a sophomore at Rainier Beach High School in Seattle. Tenth-graders there are expected to attend a weekly after-school WASL prep class, and there are "WASL Wednesdays," when every class introduces some kind of practice for the test.
The pressure is greater than ever. This year's sophomores will be the first class required to pass the reading, writing, and math sections of the 10th grade WASL before they can graduate from high school. Last year, just 42 percent of the state's sophomores passed. At Rainier Beach, an overwhelmingly poor and minority school, just 7 percent passed. So the state faces the possibility that thousands of kids, perhaps virtually the entire senior class of some schools, will be left at graduation time in 2008 with no place to go. Even more kids will likely be in that position in 2010, when students will be required to pass the 10th-grade science WASL, as well.
