Kids may need summer school to graduate

OLYMPIA – The high failure rate among high school students taking the state’s high-stakes assessment test is spurring the state’s top school official to push for a new $42 million summer school program.

This year’s sophomores are the first class to face strict new graduation requirements, and if past performance is a good predictor, about half of them will fail at least one part of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning on their first try.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson hopes to give those students an opportunity to spend five weeks of their summer break in the classroom, trying to learn the reading, math and writing skills they will need to graduate from high school in 2008. At the top of her 2006 Legislative agenda is money to pay for her voluntary statewide summer school program.

“I want to make sure that any kid who needs help that we can supply an extended learning opportunity for those kids,” Bergeson told the Associated Press in an interview previewing her State of Education speech on Thursday.

The part-day summer program she’s proposing would carry over into the school year as a class for students who need extra WASL support.

Bergeson says it’s about time the state lived up to the higher standards officials have been talking about since before the class of 2008 started kindergarten.

“We can’t hide the fact that we gave diplomas last year to kids who couldn’t read,” Bergeson said.

Starting with this year’s sophomores, students will have five chances to pass the WASL before they finish their senior year and Bergeson hopes to make sure they are given all the tools they need to succeed.

She said her biggest worries about the WASL are that students will get discouraged and that parents will be scared to death.

“People are afraid,” Bergeson said. “They all know a kid who isn’t going to meet the standards.”

Bergeson wants to reassure the parents and their children: there are 906 days until June 2008. “We have to work together in a very targeted manner,” and nearly every child will succeed, she said.

When asked if she thought the Legislature might decide to put off implementation of the new graduation requirements, the superintendent said, “I don’t think they’re going to cave. I think the Legislature is going to stand firm.”

She pointed out that legislators have known for years the graduation deadline was coming and they haven’t changed their minds yet.

She spoke encouragingly of Massachusetts’ experience with a similar test. Last spring, of the first graduating class required to pass, 95 percent succeeded, including 85 percent of minority students.

With just 46.9 percent of last year’s Washington 10th-graders passing all three parts of the WASL, this could be a long 906 days.

“Math is our Achilles heel,” Bergeson said, explaining that she has shaken up her staff and put her best people and a couple of new hires on the math achievement gap.

She will ask the Legislature for $4.7 million for math programming, including money to train 400 teachers in a new math remediation program.

Bergeson could probably talk all day about the WASL and how the state needs to help its young people to pass, but she wants to make sure parents and students understand that the new graduation requirements are not just the WASL.

For the students who pass the 10th- grade WASL on the first try — and even for those doing remedial work during summer school — the goal is not to pass a test but to move beyond the basics to project learning and more robust academic programs for all students.

“I want to change the goal line. The goal line isn’t the 10th-grade test. The goal line is work and life,” she said.