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Brookings Papers on Education Policy 2002 (2002) 199-234



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Standards and Accountability in Washington State

Paul T. Hill and Robin J. Lake

[Comment by Michael J. Petrilli]
[Comment by Michael Cohen]

In the early 1990s, Washington State was in the vanguard of the standards movement. Democratic governor Booth Gardner and leaders of the Washington Roundtable--a coalition of business leaders--agreed to press for a comprehensive statewide education reform package modeled after Kentucky's. David Hornbeck, who drafted the Kentucky consent decree that started the standards-based reform movement, advised on drafting of the state's reform bill. An omnibus reform package was passed in early 1993. By 1994, the National Business Roundtable rated Washington as one of four states that had enacted the most complete standards-based reform program.

Washington political and business leaders intended to transform public education from a bureaucracy controlled by mandates and enforced compliance into a performance-based system. They envisioned standards-based reform as a rational approach to improving public education. They sought to set standards that define what children need to know and be able to do, develop measurement systems to test performance against those standards, help schools find and use methods of instruction effective enough to allow them to meet the standards, give schools the freedom of action necessary to adjust their methods of instruction to meet student needs, and reward schools that meet standards and punish those that do not.

Like proponents of standards-based reform in other states, Washington State policy and business leaders assumed that establishment of a performance-based system would change the behavior of teachers, parents, school administrators, and students. 1 Teachers and parents, informed by the standards [End Page 199] about what students need to know, would look for evidence that individual children were performing as expected. If a child or a group of children--say those in a particular classroom or school--failed to meet the standards, then teachers and parents would search for better methods of instruction. School administrators, expecting pressure from parents, political leaders, and district and state administrators if children could not meet standards, would carefully monitor school performance and lead staff efforts to improve instruction and measured results. Administrators and teachers would think boldly, knowing that old rules governing schools' instructional methods, staff assignments, and use of time had been eliminated. Children--at least the older students who could anticipate needing access to jobs and higher education--would take their test scores as evidence of what issues they needed to work on in school. The net result would be better schools, more imaginative and adaptive teaching, and improved learning for all students, particularly those now least well served by the schools.

In Washington, as in other states, these hopes are far from fully realized. However, results to date do not necessarily disprove the assumptions behind standards-based reform. 2 Like many other promising ideas, standards-based reform might work if it were seriously tried.

Though some key elements are in place, eight years after enactment Washington's standards-based reform is still under construction. Grade-level academic achievement standards for grades four, seven, and ten were established after a painstaking development process with much teacher involvement. Fourth graders took the new statewide tests (the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, or WASL) in reading, writing, mathematics, and listening for the first time in spring 1997, and seventh- and tenth-grade students took the tests for the first time in 1999 and 2000, respectively. 3 Each year since 1995 the state has allocated millions of dollars to pay for planning time so teachers and administrators could learn how to prepare students to meet the standards. The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) has also created numerous assistance programs, including teacher mentoring and a math helping corps, under which expert teachers advise schools in need of improvement. OSPI has created an excellent website on which anyone can inspect any school's test-score trends, and a business group, the Partnership for Learning, has sponsored creation of highly regarded how...

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