Consider WASL’s long-term effects

Education is often viewed as a stolid, petrified, stand-in-place profession – lost to, and maybe even alienated from, the rest of America.

But, believe it or not, change is a reality for educators too. School boards adopt new programs regularly, forcing teachers to move out of their comfort zones, at least in the short run.

At about the 15-year mark in my career, I noticed that many of the new programs being proposed really weren’t new. The jargon was new but the strategies suggested, and the tools provided to meet the district’s goals, were not. About the same time I realized that an intelligent, research oriented educator could find data to support just about any proposition.

As I approached retirement age, I developed a new empathy for the local canine, which was regularly observed chasing its tail.

When the state introduced the WASL, I expected the test to make the headlines for a while, then fade away. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Educators have been busily testing school-age kids for several years now. The resulting test scores have become a big deal.

Terry Bergeson, our state superintendent of public instruction, has indicated that a little more than half of our kids are passing the WASL. What happens now? Are roughly half of our seniors going to receive something other than a diploma? If so, will those kids be excluded from attending a college of their choice? If that’s the case, I’m not willing to buy into the program.

Experience has taught me that everyone will support the WASL until their child or grandchild is the kid holding the brass ring. Then, stand by. Further, I think that using the WASL as the main criteria for determining graduation from high school will more often adversely affect our community’s lads than it will our lassies.

Have you visited a “resource” or “special services” room in one of your neighborhood’s schools lately? Unless things have changed drastically in the past few years, most of the kids populating those rooms are males. And analyses of WASL data have shown that guys do worse than gals on the test, especially in reading and writing.

I don’t think we’re looking at a healthy situation here, and my empathy for the ones the WASL leaves behind runs deep.

I was a tenacious reader who could organize, comprehend and discuss historical and social data effectively. But my dyslexic mind rebelled when it came to learning the rules of grammar and math; and dealing with spelling lists was a special joy.

Scientists started using magnetic imaging to research how the brain works in the late ‘80s. Among their findings is an indication that the area in our brain that makes rule-driven learning tasks possible opens for most girls between the ages of 7 and 9. It doesn’t open for most guys until they’re 18 to 25 years of age.

My question is, “Are we willing to consign approximately half of our kids to the educational or career scrap heap before they’re ready to fly?”