The Stress Test

Note: As in many states, the standardized tests administered in certain grades
to test the efficiency and effectiveness of the school curriculums, teachers and
administrators has become most effective at inducing anxiety in children and even
parents and teachers. Washington state is just one example.


The Stress Stest from the Seattle Weekly

Choose all that apply: (a) The WASL was intended to improve schools and pupil performance. (b) It's become an unhealthy obsession among teachers, parents, and students. (c) The WASL inspires alarming anxiety among 9-year-olds. (d) It's actually stultifying public education.

by Nina Shapiro


Susan and Nathan Conners of Normandy Park working on science and social studies at home—because they get short shrift at school. In the world of WASL, the three R's rule the classroom.
(Pete Kuhns)



One morning last spring, 9-year-old Tyler Stoken awoke in his modest rambler in Aberdeen, Grays Harbor County, and asked his mom to make him bacon. He was about to take the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, the statewide test better known as the WASL ("Wassle,"), and Tyler had been told at school to have a good breakfast. The test was important to Central Park Elementary, as it is to all schools. The WASL is the linchpin of a decade-old movement in Washington, mirroring efforts in other states and at the federal level, to reform education by raising standards. Newspapers publish the test results, underperforming schools are subject to potential federal sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Act, and, as Central Park Principal Olivia McCarthy later told an investigator for the local Educational Service District (ESD), educators "are under constant pressure to perform."