WASL Fails to Make the Grade

There has been a lot of debate here in the state of Washington over whether the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) test should be the focus of the curriculum for our children. There have been arguments over the scoring of the tests and whether this focus is actually helping our children improve or hindering them. One news bit on the radio stated that dropping the WASL focus will enable the teachers to teach the children in a way that will help them improve their math scores, which is the section that consistently has the lowest scores.

I object to the WASL personally for two reasons. The first is the fact that I have a 10-year old son who is incredibly intelligent. From the age of two he has had a fascination with learning. He took an interest in the human anatomy so we bought him an anatomy book for children that explained about different parts of the human body, what their function was and so on. He was giving adults information that most college students outside of the medical program couldn't tell you about the human body before he was in kindergarten. His focus has grown to include paleontology, archeology, history, geography, mathematics, astronomy, physics, and on and on and on. His teachers refer to him as a sponge because he just soaks up every topic that he encounters.

Because of his thirst for knowledge, he is a little bit more of an advanced student than most of the other kids. He finishes his assignments rather quickly and, in order to keep him from distracting the other kids that are still trying to puzzle it out, he is allowed to read quietly. One teacher remarked that they have a difficult time getting most kids to read at that age, but she has a more difficult time getting Jared to stop reading to pay attention to the instructions for the next assignment.

I have always loved his thirst for knowledge and learning. I see a bit of myself in him that way. He has always loved school because he loves learning. This is where I have difficulty with the WASL focus for education. Kids are now under tremendous pressure at a young age to meet an educational standard early on. My son's desire to go to school is diminishing because they have taken his love, learning, and replaced it with stressful memorization and recall. He has a terrific memory, but when he is under a lot of pressure he struggles to recall the information and he does not score as well. And when his scores drop, what do you think that is doing to his self-esteem at that age?

Think about how it affects the quality of teaching our kids are receiving as well. Teachers job security depends on how well they prepare the kids to take this test. That puts stress on them which they in turn put on the children so that they can keep their jobs. I don't fault the teachers for this. I blame the program that they are forced to work with. They no longer have the time to look for ways to make the subjects entertaining and interesting to feed the children's desires for exploration and examination. And entertainment is probably just as important as the education. I bet that, no matter what age you are, you have forgotten the majority of the information you learned in high school in the subjects of history, chemistry, geometry, any subject outside of your college major and later career, but I bet you can remember quite clearly some of the movies you watched, your favorite books and/or your favorite songs. Kids need the entertainment factor to give them the long-term retention of information that the education administrators desire for the students.

The second problem I have with the WASL program is actually an issue I have with the educational system as a whole. The WASL program is just a more intensive version of this problem and that is that it does nothing to prepare you for real life. Education today is primarily based on memorizing facts and figures and recalling the information accurately during the test. But what happens when kids get out into the world and discover that the answer to the question is neither A, B, C or D? They don't have the problem-solving and decision-making skills necessary to find the answer and they struggle because none of their memorized facts and figures fit the situation.

Life is meant to be experienced hands-on and education should be the same way. I remember my high school math teachers telling me that the reason we needed to learn the math concepts was because we would use them later in life. I hated that answer because they were just avoiding the issue that the subject was BORING and DIFFICULT and made no sense to those of us who didn't have a college degree. And I know many people who have never used algebra, geometry and certainly not calculus since they graduated.

I applaud those teachers who use interesting and challenging projects to get their point across like the ones whose students have to design and build bridges to understand physics and engineering. Those kids will always remember that BECAUSE THEY ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING WITH IT!

So those of you who are concerned about the quality of education our children are getting, I hope you will push for those programs that fill our kids with a love for learning, that gives them the opportunity to explore, that entertains them, and that gives them hands-on experience in solving life's challenges.