Education Reform Leader Vows Careful Changes

Education reform will not turn Washington’s students into guinea pigs, the leader of the effort assured a statewide audience Tuesday.

“We are being very careful. We are phasing this in,” said Terrry Bergeson, executive director of the Commission on Student Learning.

Bergeson in Seattle was linked by satellite to audiences in Spokane and seven other cities. About 75 people attended the meeting at Spokane Falls Community College.

Muriel Tingley of the Washington Parents’ Coalition for Academic Excellence, a group critical of education reform, was disappointed by the event.

The current draft of new standards for science, social studies, art, health and fitness was not available, allowing panelists to dodge specifics, she said.

Previous versions were “invasive to personal privacy” and “academically weak,” Tingley said. For example, asking students to compile a personal health profile might invade a family’s privacy, she said.

Bergeson took questions from a live audience in Seattle, and via fax and telephone from other cities.

One caller asked if students will be required to know about the Constitution and the United States’ other founding documents.

“Those documents bind us together as a country,” Bergeson said. “We will not neglect those, I promise you.”

Will multicultural perspectives be stressed by the standards, a woman in the Seattle audience asked.

“We are not saying students have to have a politically correct attitude to graduate from high school,” Bergeson said. “They do need to figure out how those viewpoints differ from theirs so they can achieve their own goals.”

In 1993, the Legislature created the commission and directed it to create statewide learning standards for kindergarten through 12th grade and a system for holding schools accountable.

The standards and a new testing system will become mandatory for all public schools in 2000.

So far, education reform has cost about $94 million and could cost $300 million by 2001. The effort is backed by the state teachers union, the state PTA and Washington businesses such as Microsoft and Boeing.

After Tuesday’s meeting, five parents from Pasadena Park Elementary School in West Valley School District talked among themselves, saying they were disappointed more parents didn’t attend.

They liked the standards’ emphasis on science and the arts, but they worried about the large amount of material students will be expected to learn to receive a certificate of mastery at about age 16.

The certificate will be a new graduation requirement.

, DataTimes MEMO: Find out more More information is available from the Commission on Student Learning, Old Capitol Building, P.O. Box 47220, Olympia, WA 98504. Or send e-mail to csl@inspire.ospi.wednet.edu