Stepping up to the WASL
A local middle school seeks to improve its testing status

By ROSETTE ROYALE
Staff Reporter

Arun Somasundaram is a student at Chinook Middle School, in the Highline Public Schools District. The soon-to-be 14-year-old credits teachers there with helping him surpass state goals on all of last year’s WASL exams. Yet while Somasundaram has found success, many of his classmates still struggle to bring WASL scores up to state standards. Photo by Joel Turner

Bing bing bing bing.

The electronic bell announcing the end of fifth period chimes over the intercom of Chinook Middle School and, as its tone disintegrates into the ether, the closed classroom doors burst open, releasing streams of students into the barren corridors.

Laughter bounces off tiled walls. Backpacks yawn open in receipt of books. Lockers slam shut in percussive succession. Another quartet of bells ring out. Racing against its dying strains, a thin, dark-skinned girl, her pigtails bouncing with kinetic fury, sprints a diagonal path from locker to classroom. A door latches closed. And once again, silence and stillness reign.

Kim Ustanick, having wended her way through the youthful tide, enters a room adorned with colorful posters at the southern end of the hall. A part-time employee, Ustanick serves as Family/Community Support Liaison for Chinook, one of several middle schools in the Highline Public Schools District. Eight years in this capacity has left her with unrepentant and passionate views about why educational levels are lower in South King County.

Kim Ustanick, Family/Community Support Liaison at Chinook, attends a community meeting on the WASL. Photo by Joel Turner

“At this school,” she says, “we’re about 70 percent free and reduced lunch,” speaking of a statistic that can be taken as a barometer for a region’s socio-economic make-up. (The percentage for Chinook is nearly twice the state average.) She continues talking, eyes trained on a map.

“Over here,” she says, her finger acting as pointer, “what we have is I-5. And,” her finger shifts leftward, “we have [the Seattle-Tacoma International] Airport.” Her nail taps an area on the map located between the two landmarks. “This is us.” She means Chinook.

But more than being hemmed in by an interstate to the east and an airport to west, or even caught under someone’s finger, Chinook finds itself pinned down by an educational reality and regional perception.

The reality is that the Chinook Middle School, a red brick building attended by more than 600 seventh- and eighth-graders whose racial makeup — roughly 26 percent Hispanic, 22 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, 18 percent Black, 31 percent white —stands in stark contrast to state averages, is not meeting federal achievement goals. Those goals are determined by student scores on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, or — in the parlance of educators and administrators, concerned parents and their test-loathing children — the WASL.

Unless something is done, federal mandates warn, to bring those scores into alignment with state standards, Chinook will be deemed a school that has failed the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). That Chinook Middle School and its attendant community cannot keep up, that others are leaving them behind— it’s this perception that administrators, teachers, parents, and students are working to upend.

Signed into law by President Bush in 2002, the NCLB mandates that any school receiving federal funds where test scores do not satisfy achievement goals for two years running will be placed on what’s called an “improvement” list. Viewed as a ladder, this improvement list bears five rungs: Step One being the highest, or closest to removal from the list, and Step Five, the most dire designation, the lowest.

According to a preliminary report issued last fall by the state’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, Washington has 248 schools on its improvement list. Eight of these schools are in Step Five. Four state schools are in Step Four, a rung above those viewed most at risk. One of these Step Four schools is Chinook.

Seated around a grouping of tables in Chinook’s library, parents and students are gathered for a community meeting on the WASL. Nearly 40 people, mostly adults, occupy chairs constructed for young people, listening to counselors and teachers instruct them how the audience will be divided into two groups: one English speaking, the other Spanish speaking. Like a cell splitting during mitosis, the group cleaves, the halves heading to different classrooms.

There are four “strands,” or separate tests that make up the WASL — reading, writing, math, science — and the evening community meeting, taking such structure as a guide, is broken into four segments, each taught in separate lessons. Each half of the larger group will visit the four classrooms in turn.

During the writing segment, a teacher parses, via an overhead projector, two actual student essays culled from a past WASL, one meeting state standards, the other falling short. She points to the essays’ command, or lack of, cohesion, and tone. The teacher advises parents to encourage their students to write at home during their free time.

As she speaks, a mother rushes into the room, her son in tow. “Sorry,” she says, nearly out of breath. “I just got off of work.” She takes a seat. The teacher returns to the essays.

Seconds later, a father stands up from a chair. He twists his hat in his hands. “I have to go,” he tells the teacher. “Work.” She nods.

Students entering the hallway at Chinook Middle School, responding to the toll of the bell. Photo by Joel Turner

Why, a parent wonders aloud, is there so much stress around passing the WASL for graduation, if a child can retake all sections of the test in their sophomore, junior, and senior years until they pass each one?

“Because it all matters,” answers Ustanick, standing near the doorway. “Our schools are being judged each year.”

During the math segment, a teacher suggests parents could try to incorporate vocabulary from a handout — containing such terms as rhombus, radii, theoretical probability, and stem-and-leaf plot — into daily discussions. A father furrows his brow.

“Should my child be stressed out?” a second father asks.

“You can only prepare them as much as you can,” a second teacher advises.

In another room, a female teacher tells the parents the science WASL is filled with written language. “So reading skills are essential.” She admits this presents a challenge to students who haven’t mastered English.

Highlighting a sheet that shows how the science test is scored, she tells parents that only 18 percent of Chinook students who took that WASL met the state standard. She recommends educational TV as a tool to helpyoung people understand science. “And the kitchen is one of the best places for kids to learn,” she adds.

The parents trudge off to a new room.

A male teacher, who has just spoken to the Spanish-speaking group in their native tongue, tells the English speakers that the reading WASL should not be viewed as mysterious. Parents nod their heads as they gaze at a screen.

Nearly 75 percent of Chinook students would have passed the reading WASL, he goes on, if they had only gotten two more questions right. The adults cheer up at this information. Riding that wave, he says, Some students may not have done well because they had a bad day.

“What if the person grading the test has a bad day?” a mother asks. The rest of the parents grunt in agreement.

The teacher concedes it could happen. “But it’s a complicated system for a complicated test,” he says, “in a world that’s getting more complicated.”

Arun Somasundaram, who’s seated near his family in the library at the WASL community meeting, sees the complications he’s encountered in Chinook’s classrooms as history.

Last year, says Somasundaram, while in the seventh grade, he was placed in a special education math class. He concedes he wound up there based upon a math WASL he took in the fourth grade — which, along with hiswriting WASL, found him scoring below state standards — and a math placement test he took upon entering Chinook. But he credits the teacher of that special education class with helping him grasp mathematical concepts to such a degree, he was placed in an honors algebra class this year. The teachers of a two-week afterschool math program last year, he adds, assisted him in passing the math WASL. (He surpassed state standards on all of last year’s WASL exams.) “It’s not the teachers who are doing anything wrong,” he proclaims of the school’s testing woes. “They’re great.”

Then what causes the low scores?

Ustanick blames lack of resources. “It isn’t about the school, and it isn’t about the teachers,” she says. “It’s about kids having what they need, to learn what they need to learn.”

Somasundaram says he believes that both racial perceptions and socio-economic factors may affect student achievement. After all, as an Indian, he says he knows that people expect him to be smart and succeed. But as for the reasons a student might miss a state standard on the WASL, he says, “It’s complicated.”

He thinks some students’ inability to meet standards can be overcome, much as his were. “In elementary school,” Somasundaram says, “I never paid attention. But when I got here, I wanted to put my priorities in order. But some students think it’s too late. They may have given up by now.”

Still, he insists all students can make a turn around, if they want. With a dream of working in robot technology in the future, he says he thinks success on the WASL can happen for every child at Chinook. “I think everyone can pass,” says Somasundaram. “Everyone.”