Alternative Title: Why Johnny still can’t read after billions of dollars.
If you’ve been keeping up with the tales of the Washington Assesment of Student Learning (WASL) test ‘controversy’ (and if not, you can find my previous posts here), you will know that the State of Washington has spent millions of dollars creating and implementing the WASL only to be shown just how badly the teaching centers in Washington are at instructing the youngins of the state on the very basics of education (reading, writing, arithmetic).
And now that they see how bad they suck, they are not calling for review of teachers, administrations or curiculum, but they instead insisting that the standards be changed.
Passing the WASL was supposed to be a graduation requirement, but now both houses of the state legislature are setting lower standards for a diploma, none of which inckudes passage of the WASL.
KNowing that the lowered standards will not be enough to save their sorry asses, the Seattle Public School District has decided to take the problem into their own hands by “reclassifying” close to 30% of their sophomore students as freshmen.
Now, this doesn’t mean thet they are holding them back a year; what it means is that since the student shouldn’t have passed from 9th to 10th grade in the first place, the district is “reclassifying” them so as to refer them into night or summer school to try and get the credits that the student actually needed to move up into 10th grade.
The students still get to take classes as sophomores, even though they stand very little chance at understanding the matierial, and they still get to hang out with and take lunches with their friends, even though they should be with their lower classmen, and provided that the student can write their own name at the end of the year and attends the extra classes, the student will get to move on to 11th grade.
Note the phrase “attends the extra classes”. The student doesn’t actually need to pass them, they just need to be on record as having taken them so that the district can point and say “Look, we’re doing all we can! The kids just aren’t learning!”
Which just goes to prove that the districts objective isn’t to educate the students.
I was talking this over with the Analog Wife last night and she asked if there was a way to take a smaple WASL, to see just how hard the graduation requirement test really is. I looked and looked, but couldn’t find anything.
But then I remembered that the test questions are at the 8th grade level.
Yes, as long as you know as much as your average 8th grader, you can graduate from Washington State Public Schools.
Which just goes to prove that the state Department of Public Education’s objective isn’t to educate the students.
Welcome to Washington! Thanks to our Democrat Party minders, our future #1 export will be middle aged burger flippers with 5th grade literacy.
If we’re lucky.
They keep telling us as taxpayers we need to throw yet more of our money at this black hole because we owe it to the children! Never mind the fact that a good share of the kids don’t care to learn and the teachers don’t care to teach. It’s a pretty sad commentary on both when the standards can be lowered to the point that all a student has to do to move on is be able to hear thunder and see lightning and everybody is OK with that!
“They” say – if we had more money we could hire and retain better teachers. That tells me two things:
Either our schools have hired knowingly crappy teachers or they’re just teaching crappy and will do a better job if we give them a raise! It sucks either way.
The fact that the kids are out of school more than they’re in, doesn’t help either. And we may be producing a bunch of burger flippers, but their egos will be intact and they will demand big bucks for the great job they do! Now that I’ve written a book, I’ll shut up….can you tell this subject fires me up?