Is this the year Washington eliminates testing as a graduation requirement?
At least since the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) debuted in the late 1990s, WEA members have opposed the misuse of standardized tests.
WEA members believe testing takes too much time away from classroom instruction and that using standardized tests as a graduation requirement does nothing to help students – and may hurt them.
“I am against high stakes testing being linked to graduation,” said Amy Shaffer, a high school special education teacher in North Thurston. “Standardized testing is not helping students prepare for life after high school, but instead creating more problems. Test-based reform has undermined good education practices for far too long by narrowing the curriculum and wasting scarce resources.”
Shaffer and other educators recently testified in support of Sen. John McCoy’s legislation to de-link high school tests from graduation. Under Senate Bill 5014, students would still take the high school tests in science, math and English/language arts, which are required by the federal government. But the tests would not be required for high school graduation, which is not required by the feds. (The WASL has since been replaced with another acronym test, the SBAC.)
Other graduation requirements, including earning 24 high school credits, would remain.
Most states do not use tests as a graduation requirement. At one time, 27 states required tests to graduate. Now Washington is one of only 12 states with that requirement.
At the Senate education committee hearing, students and teachers urged legislators to pass SB 5014 and to remove the federally required high school tests as a graduation requirement.
“The decision to tie diplomas to the results of standardized tests is totally a state decision, and you have the power to change it,” Shaffer told the committee.
North Thurston math teacher Andrea Hicklin, who has created questions for the SBAC test, was blunt in her assessment of the assessment.
“I know this test, and I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that it does not measure what you think it measures,” Hicklin explained to senators. “One single and somewhat unreliable score should not be allowed to outweigh everything else.”
WEA opposes related legislation, including SB 5548, which removes the tests as a graduation requirement but adds other unnecessary requirements.
“We oppose this bill because it adds additional steps to graduation at a time we are trying to remove barriers for those students who have already demonstrated they meet our current graduation requirements,” said WEA lobbyist Simone Boe.
