Why 65,000 WASL tests are bound for the trash

Plenty of students have wanted to trash their WASL tests over the years, but now the state plans to do just that.

More than 65,000 exam booklets will be thrown away after the state earlier this month ended the practice of allowing freshmen to take the test early.

“We will have to pay for those booklets that aren’t used,” said Chris Barron, a spokesman for the state superintendent’s office. “As with all unused WASL books, they just get destroyed.”

Randy Dorn, the new state superintendent, pulled the plug on freshmen taking the Washington Assessment of Student Learning early, because his office doesn’t have the $477,000 it would take to print, ship, process and score the exams.

His decision came too late to stop roughly 30,000 writing exams and 35,000 reading from being printed, Barron said. Math exams given a year early to ninth-graders had not been printed.

How much the tossed tests eventually will cost taxpayers won’t be known until the state gets a bill from the testing company, Barron said.

Each exam costs about $5 from the time it is printed to after it is graded. A majority of the cost is for processing and scoring the exam, Barron said.

Terry Edwards, curriculum director for the Everett School District, said he wishes the state would reconsider canceling the freshmen testing, given the fact the booklets have been printed.

“When they canceled the test, I said, ‘This is a lost opportunity,’” Edwards said. “Now, with the book printed, it is even a bigger lost opportunity.”

In the past, the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction was able to cover the cost of ninth-graders taking the Washington Assessment of Student Learning a year early because the number was small, he said. Registration ballooned this year with 35,000 freshmen signing up early ­— nearly double the number who signed up a year ago.

“Now, the costs have grown significantly at the same time that an economic crisis is forcing our agency to cut optional programs and activities,” Dorn said Feb. 5 when he canceled the freshmen exam.

The booklets for ninth-graders had been ordered before Dorn took office. Dorn defeated incumbent Terry Bergeson in the November general election.

Dorn is phasing out the WASL, replacing it with separate sets of exams for high school students and those in lower grades. The exams will be available by 2010. The 10th-grade WASL will become the High School Proficiency Exam next year.

Dorn also is dumping the paper-and-pencil test in favor of computer exams, which, he said, will save printing more than a million test booklets each year.

More than 21,000 of the state’s 80,000 freshmen attempted the WASL exam last spring. That was up from about 14,000 in 2007 and 6,300 in 2006, the first year ninth-graders could take the high-school WASL.

Participation rates varied from a smattering of freshmen at some Snohomish County high schools to nearly all at others. Statewide, 22 percent of last year’s freshmen have already passed the reading WASL; 24 percent, the writing; and 13 percent, the math.

Everett and Stanwood school districts had most of their students take the 10th-grade WASL reading, writing and math exams as freshmen last year. Most passed the reading and writing tests, the two state exams they must pass to graduate from high school.

The state’s decision to cut WASL spending for freshmen will come at a cost for some schools, said Mary Waggoner, a spokeswoman for the Everett School District.

“It is going to be a long-term cost increase for school districts that have to readjust their curriculum when they have strategically aligned it for students who have prepared for success as ninth-graders for the reading and writing WASL,” she said. “It also eliminated that early diagnostic alert for kids who need extra help.”

There also was some level of predictability with the WASL, Waggoner said.

“Now we have a high-stakes test we have never seen before that 10th graders are going to take next year,” Waggoner said. “We have a test that hasn’t even been developed and it hasn’t even been vetted.”

Barron said school districts seem to understand the lack of money to pay for ninth-grade testing and why it was canceled.

“Believe me, it’s a decision no one wanted to make,” he said.

Reporter Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446, stevick@heraldnet.com.