OPINION: Look under the surface for a true picture of education in Washington

This editorial was published in The Seattle Times.

Anyone trying to understand where Washington’s education stands as far as performance can be forgiven for confusion.

Officials say our schools are among the best in the nation. And last month, Speaker of the state House Laurie Jinkins chided this editorial board for being overly critical of current academic outcomes.

“Consumer Affairs rated us fourth in the nation,” the Tacoma Democrat pointed out, even though state tests show that 50% of students here — some 500,000 kids — are not reading and writing well enough to attend college without remedial classes. Jinkins’ own son graduated from a Tacoma school where only 10% of students are on track for college-level math.

So, what gives?

First, consider what’s being counted. The Consumer Affairs ranking, for instance, rates Washington highly for teacher salaries, overall K-12 spending, and the quality of our colleges and universities.

These are indeed good things, deserving of praise. But there’s no glossing over the state’s own metrics. After being hammered for sagging test scores, the Office of Public Instruction under Superintendent Chris Reykdal quietly changed the way it defines success. No longer does its school report card indicate whether students are learning at “grade level.”

Instead, the state education department has tweaked its wording to differentiate between kids who show “foundational grade level knowledge” (a reasonable 71% in language skills and 63% in math), as separate from those “on track for college-level learning without needing remedial classes” (a much smaller figure).

To assess K-12 outcomes, Consumer Affairs combined several measures, including Washington’s above-average ACT scores on college entrance exams. That’s an utterly skewed statistic, since only students aiming for selective universities take the ACT, and a scant 32% of high school graduates even enroll in four-year institutions.

But the most galling omission in the Consumer Affairs ranking touted by Jinkins is the enormous variation in outcomes between different groups of kids. A 30-point gulf separates affluent and low-income students in both math and English skills — concerning, since 50% of students in Washington qualify as low-income.

This gap is prompting lawmakers like House Finance Committee Chairperson April Berg and Senate Education Committee Vice Chairperson T’wina Nobles to tackle the question of equity. That is, the idea that young people growing up in poverty need more, and cost more, to educate to college-level standards. Washington’s school funding system, meanwhile, is designed to allocate money equally to all.

It’s past time to get serious about this if education truly is the “paramount duty” of state government, as Washington’s Constitution says. Picking and choosing national rankings may make for pithy sound bites. But look under the hood, and it’s not such a pretty picture.

TNS