Private School Students and the WASL, Pt. 1

During the 1993 session, the Washington State Legislature adopted ESHB 1209, known as the Education Reform Act. The intent was to raise academic standards and student achievement by establishing common learning goals for all Washington students. The stated desire of the policymakers was to “provide opportunities for students to become responsible citizens, contribute to their own economic well-being and to their families and communities, and enjoy productive and satisfying lives.”

The Act gave duties to the newly created Commission on Student Learning (CSL) to develop and administer many important components of a systemic shake-up beginning to take form in the K-12 common school arena. This restructuring of the state’s involvement in providing school systems for local communities became known by the widely-used, albeit difficult to define, term of “education reform.”

Specifically, the Commission was changed with developing:

• Clear, challenging academic standards;
• Standards-based assessments and other ways of measuring student achievement;
and
• An accountability system to hold schools and districts accountable for results.

Following an ambitious timeline, the Commission generated academic standards in Reading, Math, Writing and Listening known as the Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALR’s). Subsequent legislative action resulted in the establishment of another committee to design and oversee the accountability aspects of the Act – the Academic Achievement and Accountability Commission (A+ Commission).

Before its term of operation expired and its duties were absorbed into the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), the CSL also worked to create a comprehensive assessment system used by all schools. This system includes familiar, standardized multiple-choice tests as well as innovative performance-based assessments for grades 4, 7 and 10 to measure student growth in mastering the standards. These newly created state-wide performance measures have become known as the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL). Students who were successful on the 10th grade WASL would be eligible to receive a Certificate of Mastery. Completion of this Certificate would become a requirement for graduation.

While the standardized “norm-referenced” tests are good gauges of basic student concepts such as vocabulary and math computation, the performance-based WASL takes assessment to the next level by attempting to determine how well a student can apply those basic concepts to problem solving tasks and real-world situations. In reporting, the former test gives a comparison of the student’s performance compared to other students across the country and scores are indicated as a percentage ranking in relation to that “normed” sample of students. The WASL report, by contrast, gives a student’s result as a score relative to a fixed level of achievement. One is a relationship to other students, the other is a relationship to a standard. Both are part of critical body of tools a classroom teacher can use to give parents a detailed view of how their child is progressing.

From the very beginning of the education reform wave, members of Washington’s independent school community have been involved. When the initial legislation was proposed, no thought was given as to how all this might affect private school students. Representing the wide diversity of the non-public schools, WFIS was able to have language inserted which would specifically exempt students in private schools from the regulatory provisions of education reform while at the same time allowing those institutions who so chose to voluntarily “have their students master these essential academic learning requirements, take these assessments, and obtain certificates of mastery.”

A private school representative, Dr. John Traynor, President of Gonzaga Prep in Spokane, was named by the governor to the 11-member CSL. A number of schools, most notably St. John School in Seattle, adopted elements of the state goals and standards into their own local curriculum, reshaping their instruction to reflect a true performance-based philosophy. More than 20 schools regularly participated in the pilot testing of the new assessments, providing beta scores and teacher feedback on the design, rigor and how well they matched the standards.

When the state was ready to adopt the 4th grade test, an offer was made to the private schools that had participated in the pilot to have them continue to use the assessment and the state would pay for the scoring. Because the WASL includes a great deal of short answer and essay type responses, each test needs to be reviewed by a human scorer. The cost (figured to be around $23 per test) is significantly greater than the machine-scored multiple choice tests. Many accepted the offer.

At some point, after this first year, a question was raised in Olympia as to whether it was constitutional for the state to pay for the scoring of the WASL test for students enrolled in a religiously affiliated private school. The practice came to an abrupt halt.

Next month, the story continues. What was the independent school response? What avenues have been tried to challenge this barrier? Is there hope for a resolution? And why would anyone care?