4th-grade WASL scores causing concern

The percent of fourth- and seventh-graders who passed reading and math on this spring's Washington Assessment of Student Learning went down. So did the third- and 10th-grade passage rates in math.

As usual, there were bright spots as well as sobering ones in Tuesday's release of results of the WASL, which is given in seven different grades each year and covers two to four subjects in each.

Fifth-graders, for example, passed reading and math at greater rates than last year. Passage rates in writing continue to rise.

Eighty-six percent of incoming seniors have already passed reading and writing on the 10th-grade WASL, which they need to do to graduate, up from 84 percent last September.

Individual schools also made big gains, such as Chief Sealth High, which Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson singled out as one of this year's success stories. At that West Seattle school, passage rates jumped more than 10 percentage points in reading, writing and math, and 20 in science.

In general, however, WASL passage rates stalled or declined in more areas than they advanced.

The fourth-grade scores, in particular, worried Bergeson and others.

When Bergeson first saw them, "it made my heart sink," she said.

Fourth-graders were the first group to take the WASL when it was introduced 11 years ago. Their passage rates went up steadily over a number of years, as did those in other grades. But a few years ago, the fourth-grade scores stalled. And now they've dipped in reading for the second year in a row.

The drops were big enough in the fourth and seventh grades to make some question whether the problem was with the test.

In the Bellevue School District, for example, spokeswoman Ann Oxrieder said the WASL results "don't make sense."

She cited Puesta del Sol, a school where a little less than half of fourth-graders passed math this year, compared with 89 percent last year when many of the same students were third-graders.

"It's absolutely baffling," said Mark Migliore, principal of the school, where students learn English and Spanish. "I'm very confident that it's not representative of what our kids can do."

Bergeson, however, said the problem isn't with the test. That's the first thing her office examined.

"We have obviously tortured ourselves for days trying to figure this out," she said.

Bergeson and other educators said they plan to dig deep to figure out what's going on.

In Renton, for example, middle-school passage rates declined in reading and math after a big gain last year. When Superintendent Mary Alice Heuschel gave her staff that news Tuesday, she said, "the sighs were heavy."

But she told them that they just need to keep going because "we are doing the right things."

Early indications, she said, are that many students may have fallen short by just a question or two.

The WASL grew out of a 1993 state law that mandated higher learning standards for students, new state tests and increased accountability for students and schools. The exam covers reading and math and, in some grades, writing and science, too.

For many years, it was given in three grades: four, seven and 10. Grades three, five, six and eight were added in 2006, as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

WASL scores are used to track the progress of students and schools, even though many consider them a very imperfect indicator of school quality. The federal government, for example, uses the results to judge whether schools and school districts are making the gains it requires under No Child Left Behind.

Even more significantly, high-school students now must pass reading and writing on the WASL (or an approved alternative) before they can earn their high-school diplomas. They also must pass the math section, or continue to pass math classes through high school.

As of this month, about 93 percent of the class of 2008 had met that requirement. (That number, however, doesn't count roughly 20,000 students who started high school four years ago, but since dropped out or, in some cases, had fallen behind in credits.)

WASL supporters see the exam as a way to ensure that all students reach a minimum level of skill in key subjects. Its opponents question whether something as important as graduation should rest on one exam, even if students can retake it several times.

Randy Dorn, who is running to replace Bergeson as state superintendent this year, is a former state legislator who helped write the bill that led to the WASL. But he says the exam, as Bergeson has developed it, takes up too much class time, and isn't achieving the desired goals.

With the drop in fourth- and seventh-grade reading and math scores, he said, "it seems like we're going in the wrong direction."

But the Partnership for Learning, a business-backed group that's long been a WASL supporter, said that even though most scores remained flat this year, improvements are in the works that will change that, especially the plans to significantly shorten the test in all grades but grade 10 next spring.

Bergeson also took time Tuesday to celebrate the fact that Washington students continue to score well on many national measures, such as the SAT college-entrance exam. The SAT scores, also released Tuesday, showed that Washington students continue to score above the national average.

But she stressed that there are many challenges ahead.

Too many students still drop out, she said. And a gap remains between the performance of students who are white or Asian, and those who are black, Latino, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander or Native American.

Often, the schools that score the highest and lowest on the WASL (or any standardized test) are predictable because test scores correlate highly with family income. In general, the richer the families of a school's students, the higher its test scores — a relationship that raises questions about whether it's fair to judge a school's quality by its scores. A better measure of a school's quality often is how much scores improve over time.

On Tuesday, Bergeson said she was confident that the state's schools and teachers, given more financial support, can succeed in helping all students pass the WASL.

She said it ultimately would take perhaps an additional $1 billion to $2 billion a year, but she would start by asking, for example, for a fourfold increase in funding for a state program aimed at helping struggling students catch up.

She also said she expected improvements in math in the next few years now that the state has a new set of math learning standards, recently approved by the state Board of Education. A revision of the science standards also is in the works.

But schools need to do more to line up what's taught with what's tested, she said.

And her initial thoughts about the drop in reading and math passage rates in grades four and seven?

"My hypothesis is that people are worn out, and they're discouraged," she said.

But she maintains that educators are more upset about what she considers unfair aspects of the federal No Child Left Behind Act than the WASL, and she pledged to work to change those as well.

Seattle Times staff reporter Emily Heffter contributed to this report.

Linda Shaw: 206-464-2359 or lshaw@seattletimes.com