Schools To Concentrate On Academic Essentials

A handful of parents, some of them hunched in their winter coats, sat on folding chairs in Broadway Elementary School’s gym. They’d come to learn about something new in education - essential learnings.

It’s a phrase that parents across Washington will hear more and more.

Four years ago, the state Legislature passed the Education Reform Act. Since then teachers, officials and volunteers have created a set of standards - what students should learn. They are called essential academic learnings.

Benchmarks and tests have been devised to measure how well students are learning. Teachers are being trained.

“Now we want to bring parents on board,” said Jay Walter, curriculum director for Central Valley schools.

“How many of you have ever heard of essential learnings?” he asked.

About half the hands went up in the audience of less than 20 people.

Here’s an example: Essential learnings in reading include understanding and using different skills and strategies to read, and understanding the meaning of what is read.

Benchmarks for fourth-graders include these: Apply phonetic principles to read. Understand sentence structure, paragraphs and chapters. Indentify story elements (setting, plot, character, theme). Separate fact from fiction.

This spring, fourth graders across the Valley will take new state tests, to see how well they’re doing on the essential learnings and their benchmarks. Schools at this point can opt whether to give the fourth-grade tests. The tests remain voluntary until the year 2000.

Seventh-graders in the Central Valley, East Valley and West Valley school districts also will take the new assessments. They are being given to seventh-graders this year only as a trial run - testing the test, so to speak.

In these tests, students will not only have to show what they know, but how they figured out their answers. Even math questions will pose a problem and then ask students to write an explanation of how they reached their answer.

That’s a big change for students, Walter said, and one for which parents can help prepare their children.

Walter walked the group of parents through a few sample questions from the new fourth-grade tests. One was to connect science and history, by naming a significant scientist and his contribution to science.

The answers came haltingly. Louis Pasteur. Thomas Edison.

It didn’t take much for parents to freeze up.

“Congratulations. You’ve just passed the fourth-grade benchmark for science,” Walter joked.

“It’s a good thing I’m not in school any more,” muttered one woman.

The tests will require more writing, more thinking and more cooperation between parents and teachers, Walter said.

“Life will go on” if parents don’t get involved now, he said.

“But those (parents) who wake up earlier can start a partnership with teachers now.”

In Central Valley, each elementary school will schedule an evening meeting with fourth-grade parents to discuss essential learnings and the new state tests before the tests are given in March.

, DataTimes