End of Course Assessments from the State

With the proposal to replace the High School math WASL comes a recommendation for End Of Course Assessments.

The Legislature is at work on the funding of this idea.

Julie Wright reports:

I gave testimony to the House Education Committee today. I only had 2 minutes to speak, so could only say the most important points. I emphasized that 2 EOC tracks is not in the best interest of our children and that we want all children to be prepared for and have access to ‘authentic algebra’ as recommended by the NMAP. This should be our new motto and repeated everywhere possible. I dropped off copies of my testimony at Sen. McAuliffe, Sen. Oemig, and Sen. King’s offices too.

Alan Burke spoke and said that OSPI recommends only having one EOC track because 80% of the standards are common to both tracks. He suggested a test for Alg 1/Int 1 and the other test for Geo/Int 2. No one spoke against having only one track and Rep. Sullivan reminded me that it will save money too—biggest selling point this session. I think we’ll get it narrowed to one EOC track and it’s likely it will be Alg 1/Geo because of the NMAP recommendation for ‘authentic’ algebra . I bet some of the committee members got a kick that OSPI and WTM were on the same side of EOC’s

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It would be a good idea to contact anyone on the house ed committee and let them know your view on End of Course Assessments. I believe that an assessment of Algebra skills one year and Geometry skills the next would be a reasonable undertaking. Given the sorry state of high school math education this will at least give us a baseline for all schools. Then we can start looking at who is doing things well and perhaps profit from them.

At last we may have some testing that has enough math in it to make the data worth collecting, no thanks to Dr. Bergeson.