Susan Byrnes / Times editorial columnist
Lifting up students by raising the bar

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Gather round, all ye critics of the state's student-assessment test. Those of you who contend the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) is unfair and harmful to children should take a moment to listen to Lorna Spear.

Spear is principal at Bemiss Elementary School in Spokane, where 85 percent of the children are too poor to pay $1.75 for lunch. In the classrooms of her school, you'll find the other side of the WASL debate.

First the facts. More than 20 percent of the 550 Bemiss students are Russian or Ukrainian refugees who don't know English when they arrive. About one-fourth of the children are minorities. Many students come from single-parent families and many parents work two or three jobs.

In 1997, just 11 percent of Bemiss fourth-graders met state standards on the math portion of the WASL. Last year, 84 percent did. Reading improvement has been almost as remarkable: In 1997, 28 percent of students met the reading standard; last year, three-fourths of the students did.

Bemiss scores are higher than any other elementary school in the state with a comparable poverty rate. They are also higher than some schools with wealthier student populations. Bemiss even scored a tad higher on math than West Mercer Elementary School on Mercer Island, which has a free- and reduced-cost-lunch rate of 4 percent.

So what's the secret?

For starters, you won't hear Spear griping about the WASL.

"You can choose to say the test is too hard, or you can choose to say, 'We can do this,' " Spear says.

At the core of the Bemiss transformation is a fundamental shift in the way adults perceive disadvantaged students. Like the majority of teachers who work with low-income children, Bemiss teachers want the best for their students. But at Bemiss, teachers and administrators believe the way to help struggling students is to raise the bar, not lower it.

For decades, in classrooms across the country, too many well-meaning adults have been soft on at-risk students in the name of helping them. That was in evidence recently at Franklin High School, where three beloved counselors fudged grades of low-performing students. Instead of pushing students to work harder and giving them the support to succeed, grade-fixing and bar-lowering sends a message that adults don't believe students are capable of challenging work.

High expectations send the opposite message. And it's an empowering one.

At Bemiss, every student has a 90-minute literacy block and a 90-minute math block every day. Every child works on a complex story problem every day. Teachers are constantly assessing students, measuring what each child has learned.

A big portion of the federal Title I money the school receives for its high poverty rate pays for four full-time instructional coaches. Professional development for teachers doesn't just happen in an occasional Saturday class. It happens every day.

There's an after-school study center and summer school for 100 kids in July and August. There's a reading nook in the entry hall. There are math contests and reading contests with T-shirts for the winners.

At Bemiss, it's cool to be smart.

In too many other places, it's cool to bash the WASL. Brita Butler-Wall, a new member of the Seattle School Board, has said the test does more harm than good. Board member Sally Soriano said labeling groups of students as failures constitutes institutional racism. The Seattle teachers' union opposes the WASL. There's even a group in Port Townsend called "Mothers Against the WASL."

Clearly, the WASL has limitations and shortcomings. It's one, narrow way to measure progress. The federal No Child Left Behind law, which imposes strict penalties for schools not making yearly improvements, has not provided adequate funding to help schools get there. Both reforms need revision.

But standardized testing is not the problem with public education. Measuring how our schools are doing doesn't make them bad. Many schools are already bad — by just about any measure.

I'm glad we're finally telling the truth about how many children we're really leaving behind. These laws spotlight the outrageous failure of our schools to serve the neediest children. That in itself is a victory.

It's time to advance the debate. The real question is, how can we provide schools with the resources, training and support so they can give every student a real shot at success? Looking at Bemiss is a good place to start.

Susan Byrnes' column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is sbyrnes@seattletimes.com

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