The WASL -- a money pit

The WASL has been an expensive experiment. The original education reform law stated that the assessment was supposed to help teachers identify what students did or didn't know.

The trouble is, the individual results come back too late for remediation and they are too secret for anyone to see. The score report is so vague, it is hard to figure out what to teach to improve the students' scores.

Besides that, the WASL is not a measure of knowledge anyway. It is an assessment of thinking PROCESSES. A student could get a math question right, but lose points for not writing an explanation of his or her PROCESS which matches with the grader's list of acceptable processes.

Millions of dollars have been spent on the WASL and the related activities. No one knows (or no one is revealing) the exact cost. There is no line item called "WASL" in the budget. The expenses are hidden under categories such as professional training, printed materials, motivational awards, payroll, or other areas. Millions of dollars have also been spent on textbooks to match the PROCESS-oriented curriculum. Sadly, it is not just money that is wasted, but also the students time and their future opportunities.

Just what are Higher Order Thinking Skills?

Not only is education different now compared to how it was a few decades ago. The way educators TALK about education is different now too. Parents and grandparents need to learn a completely new vocabulary. Words they thought they knew have been re-defined.

Here's a phrase you'll hear a lot: "We teach 'higher order thinking skills' ." But what do the education theorists really mean?

Educators like to use Benjamin Bloom's "Taxonomy of Learning". Dr. Bloom, a big advocate of "mastery learning", pictured learning as a pyramid with higher order thinking skills on the top.

Imagine a pyramid with 6 floors. He put the learning and understanding of basic facts and information on the bottom two levels. Applying, Analyzing, and synthesizing those facts came in that order, on the next three levels. On the top level he put evaluation which involved making higher order judgments about all the information.

You can see that higher order thinking skills depend on solid lower order thinking skills. The problem is today's public school curriculum does not emphasize developing the basic skills such as multiplication tables and spelling and grammar rules. Instead, education theorists call practicing such basic skills "drill and kill".

Here is an article by Jay Mathews, Washington Post staff writer, about higher order thinking skills. Read it and make up your own mind using ...you guessed it...higher order thinking skills: "The Thinking Behind Critical Thinking Courses" .