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Math achievement testing
delays don’t help kids,
says Fall City lawmaker
Rep. Glenn Anderson,
R-Fall City, today questioned the governor and Superintendent of Public
Instruction’s decision to delay the Washington Assessment for Student
Learning (WASL) math requirement for three years.
“We have 32,000 students not meeting math standards for their graduation
requirement, so the plan is to delay solving that issue for three more
years?” asked Anderson. “I don’t get it. We’re okay sending all the
students that are unprepared out into the world without the skills they
need to succeed? I’m not okay with that and I suspect parents aren’t
going to sign off on that idea either. The message being sent here is
that when the going gets tough, it’s time to quit.”
Anderson, who has advocated for adopting a stronger and more rigorous
international approach to math, introduced legislation last year that
would have mandated that Washington state schools adopt the Singapore
Math Model, which is the international gold standard for math
curriculum. The model is a well-defined sequence of math instruction
from elementary school through high school that has proven highly
successful across the globe.
“The governor and I do agree,” said Anderson. “We both acknowledge our
state’s current mathematics standards, curricula and teaching
methodology has been a catastrophic failure for kids. But, we disagree
on how quickly we should remedy the situation and what rigorous
standards should be put in place. We’ve known since the current math
standards were put in place over 12 years ago there have been problems
and we’ve just ignored them. Our children are paying the price for that
failure. Waiting three more years to deal with the problem tells me we
have just written off those students. It also tells thousands of parents
and students who have worked hard to learn mathematics, including tens
of millions of dollars in private tutoring expenses, that that sacrifice
was a wasted effort.”
An adequately funded two-year “Manhattan Project” approach, says
Anderson, is both more realistic and essential. Unless taxpayers see
that our state education system can and will rise to the occasion and
meet the mathematics learning challenge we face, then public confidence
to invest in our schools will decline.
“Walking away from this problem that has damaged and deformed our
children’s education is inexcusable,” said Anderson. And, he says, the
governor and legislators should be obligated to gather around a
bipartisan table before January to decide on a mathematics instruction
and testing model that is clearly aligned with international standards
and is transparent to parents and educators.
“The agreed upon legislation should be offered by the governor to the
Legislature in a bipartisan manner and should be the first bill the
governor signs this session,” said Anderson.
“This isn’t a partisan political issue; posturing for who gets the
political credit around this critical issue would be a true tragedy for
the kids of our state,” said Anderson. “They deserve better.”
# # #
Rep. Anderson is the assistant ranking
member on the House K-12 Education Committee and the Appropriations
Committee.
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