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The Seattle Times
January 19, 2006

Keep WASL requirement, coalition says

By Andrew Garber, Seattle Times Olympia bureau

OLYMPIA — A coalition of business and education groups is stepping up the pressure on lawmakers to keep the state's standardized test as the main graduation requirement for high-school students.

Fourteen organizations, including the Association of Washington Business (AWB) and the Association of Washington School Principals, sent a letter to state lawmakers Tuesday, urging them to keep the test as a graduation requirement.

In addition, the Partnership for Learning, which also signed the letter, is running a statewide radio-advertising campaign supporting the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL). The Partnership for Learning is backed by companies and organizations that include Microsoft and Boeing.

"Pulling away from the [test] as a graduation requirement will not eliminate the dire consequences for students unable to read, write or do mathematics," the letter stated. "It will simply delay those consequences until young people enter the real world and must survive without the skills they need."

Other groups that signed the letter include the Washington Association of School Administrators and the Washington Roundtable, a business group.

Several bills have been introduced in the Legislature this session dealing with the WASL, including measures that would remove the test as the main graduation requirement. "It's a bright line in the sand for us," Don Brunell, president of the AWB, said about keeping the WASL as a graduation requirement.

The issue is coming to a head in the Legislature because this year's 10th-grade class is the first required by state law to pass the test to graduate by 2008.

WASL bills

A hearing on these bills is planned today at 3:30 p.m. in the Senate Early Learning, K-12 and Higher Education Committee:

SB 6461

Creates a weighted system to determine if a student will graduate from high school. The WASL would be part of the overall system, but a student's grade-point average would carry the most weight.

SB 6618

Lets students graduate from high school by passing the WASL or an alternative assessment.

SB 6620

Eliminates the use of the WASL as a graduation requirement.

Charles Hasse, president of the Washington Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, said the WASL should not be a high-stakes test. His group contends grade-point average should count more than the WASL in deciding whether a student should graduate.

"We're simply saying that high standards and high-stakes testing are at cross-purposes to each other," Hasse said.