Tri-Cities Schools and the WASL

By in Tri-Cities Housing Market with 1 Comment

I, personally, dislike the WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning) as a tool to measure our children’s academic process.  That’s my disclaimer right from the get-go.  My son tells me that his classmates claim that WASL stands for “Wasting All Students Lives”.  Basically, I agree.

Recently, the Tri-City Herald posted the scoring breakdown for our area schools, in an article entitled, “40 Mid-Columbia Schools Failing WASL”.  With a headline like that, I’m searching for my kids’ school! The link above doesn’t list the schools which consistently fail to meet passing standards for the WASL.  But 40 schools is HALF of the schools in our area, and you cannot tell me that HALF of the children in our area are not getting a quality education, which is what a failing score on the WASL implies.

Can your child read, write, add/subtract/multiply and divide?  Can he or she reason their way through a dilemma?  Is he or she excited to learn something (anything?  even if it’s a stat about Babe Ruth it means they have the fire to discover!)?  Education is defined as ‘activities that impart knowledge or skill’.  Just because some children perform poorly on a test it doesn’t mean they haven’t received a good education.  It simply means they don’t know the answers for the questions asked on the test.

So, then you get entire schools teaching for the test…studying only what will come up on the WASL so the children will know the answers for that backwards and forwards, but will they have learned anything?

You get out of a school what you put into it.  Don’t pay attention to test scores.  Pay attention to your child and if he or she has been imparted with knowledge or skills(and I mean a skill OTHER than being able to pass the WASL).  That’s your true measure of education.

 

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About The Author
Cari McGee

My husband and I came to the Tri-Cities in 1994, and we thought it would be a temporary stop on our way to larger cities. He was a television sports anchor at the time, and we planned to go wherever the "next step up" took us. Twenty-plus years later, we're still here and we've loved every minute of it! We have two children now, and we've found the Tri-Cities area is a wonderful place to raise a family. It's a great place to do outdoorsy things -- I like to hike Badger Mountain or run along the river path. I also love reading ... by a cozy fire in the winter or a beautiful picture window in the summer (with the A/C on!). I've been a licensed Realtor since 2004. I earned my managing broker's license in 2016, which means I can run my own brokerage, or create a team of real estate agents and supervise them, which is exactly what I did when I formed the Cari McGee Real Estate Team in 2018! We have administrative and marketing personnel, as well as additional agents to serve you. I became a director of the Tri-Cities Association of Realtors Board of Directors in 2016, became Secretary/Treasurer of the organization, and was elected to Vice President in 2019. Want to talk about real estate? Click here to schedule a meeting with me!

1 Comment

  1. […] you read this blog regularly, you know I am not a fan of the WASL (the Washington Assessment of Student Learning).  The results from the latest testing go-around in […]

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