Sounds harsh, but true.  A student who refused to answer a WASL question was suspended.

Has the State and its flawed WASL gone too far?

Via Bloomberg 

Tyler Stoken was a well-behaved fourth grader who enjoyed school, earned A’s and B’s and performed well on standardized tests.

In May 2005, he’d completed five of the six days of the Washington State Assessment of Student Learning exam, called WASL, part of the state’s No Child Left Behind test.

Then Tyler came upon this question: “While looking out the window one day at school, you notice the principal flying in the air. In several paragraphs, write a story telling what happens.”

The nine-year-old was afraid to answer the question about his principal, Olivia McCarthy. “I didn’t want to make fun of her,” he says, explaining he was taught to write the first thing that entered his mind on the state writing test.

In this case, Tyler’s initial thoughts would have been embarrassing and mean. So even after repeated requests by school personnel, and ultimately the principal herself, Tyler left the answer space blank. “He didn’t want them to know what he was thinking, that she was a witch on a broomstick,” says Tyler’s mother, Amanda Wolfe, sitting next to her son in the family’s ranch home three blocks from Central Park Elementary School in Aberdeen, Washington.

Because Tyler didn’t answer the question, McCarthy suspended him for five days. He recalls the principal reprimanding him by saying his test score could bring down the entire school’s performance.

“Good job, bud, you’ve ruined it for everyone in the school, the teachers and the school,” Tyler says McCarthy told him.

I only have two questions about the story.

Consider this:

Tyler, who’s 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall and weighs 70 pounds (32 kilograms), hasn’t been the same since, his mother says.

"He liked the principal before this,” she says. "He cried. He didn’t understand why she’d done this to him.”

Now, Tyler blows up at the drop of a hat, his mother says. "They created a monster. He’ll never take that test again, even if I have to take him to another state,” she says.

a)  If the kid liked the principle so much, as is noted, why did he think of her as a witch.  Premonition maybe?

b)  I don’t think one single incident, even as bad as this was is sufficient to suddenly make a kid into a monster. 

So in the regard, I think they are playing it up.

But the truth is that complaints about the WASL, have been growing and a network of protests has formed.

I recommend that anyone with children look into the WASL further, and decide for yourselves.  Be actively interested in what the State is doing with your kids.

And someone fire that principal.

http://mothersagainstwasl.org/