Published February 2005

Students must be prepared
for real world

Despite the debate that continues over Washington state’s WASL test, student-to-teacher ratios in the state’s schools and the quality of K-12 education, state School Superintendent Terry Bergeson believes progress has been made in recent years — but not enough.

“To prepare students for the demands of today’s world … Washington created a comprehensive school improvement plan more than a decade ago,” she wrote in a “Better Schools Briefing” published last fall by the statewide Partnership in Learning, a group supported by state business leaders committed to creating better schools in the state.

The plan requires “establishing clear academic standards for every grade” to measure whether students are meeting the standards, and developing a system “to hold everyone accountable for what really matters: student learning,” she said in the report.

Although there are frequent media stories about upset parents who don’t think their children should have to meet those standards, the fact remains that originally 74 percent of surveyed parents supported developing those “challenging” graduation criteria. And, 84 percent of the voters agreed with the plan.

There is evidence, thankfully, that a few years down the road some students are doing better. Twice as many students, for instance, now meet the state’s mathematics standard. In the first year of testing, in 1997, a reported 52 percent of the students tested had little or no skills in math (100,332). Now that troubling figure has been reduced to about 27 percent (58,570 students). Put in a more positive way, only 26 percent of the students tested in 1997 had scores that met the standard (17 percent) or exceeded it (9 percent), but in the 2004 testing, educators found that 52 percent met or exceeded the math standard, with 27 percent of the students meeting the minimum requirement and 25 percent exceeding it.

While those are encouraging figures, we should be focusing more on how far we have to go than on how far we’ve come. Simple interpreting of the test scores shows that 53 percent of the students still don’t meet minimal standards. That’s not very impressive. It’s scary, in fact, particularly when those lackluster results mean more than half of our students statewide are going to have difficulty continuing in school, graduating with even minimal math skills and finding a decent job that will insulate them from lives of crime, drugs and welfare living.

That’s not a harsh view. It’s a realistic view. And it should scare educators, parents and students as much as it scares employers trying to compete on U.S. soil and globally in today’s challenging, high-tech world.

Mrs. John Fluke Sr., whose husband founded Everett’s global high-tech instrument firm, Fluke Manufacturing, a few decades ago, is one of those who’s scared. She told me recently she’s dreadfully afraid of what’s happening with our school system. Even at 94 she keeps in touch with education issues and is fearful of what the future holds if the state cannot create a successful education program that graduates students who can actually read, spell and balance a checkbook.

“My husband could see this coming years ago,” she said. “He saw a growing number of job applicants coming in who could not even fill out an application for employment. And it’s gotten much worse since then.”

Bergeson believes the days are gone when students could get through school with minimal effort and minimal results.

“Today’s high school graduates face an entirely new set of challenges than most of us did when we started our adult lives. They must be able to think and digest information faster, communicate better and … work harder and smarter,” she said. “These challenges apply to every graduate, not just some. To under-prepare any graduate for these challenges does a disservice to the graduate, our society and our future.”

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