Student casualties of failed education system

The school-house wheel does not need to be reinvented.

As the school district basks in the glow of an 86.2 percent graduation rate, I am not mesmerized by the “dangly shiny gold graduation object.” And, I am unsure how this statistic squares with the current district data dashboard that shows only 76 percent of students are “on track” to graduate for the 2018-2019 school year?

That said, the most jaw-dropping upsetting fact was that the Smarter Balanced Assessment for English passing rate dropped from 56 percent passing to an abysmal 46 percent passing! A drop of 10 percent in three years and 11 percent less than the state passing average for the 2017-2018 school year. And why shouldn’t we feel bad? Oh, because three other districts’ grades also dropped.

Wow!

Then even worse, the SBA math passing percentage for 2017-2018 was 34 percent — outrageous. To put these scores in layman’s terms, this means about one out of every two “scholars” fails the English SBA exam and about seven out of every 10 scholars fail the math SBA exam. Lord forbid we ever see the SAT scores. To me these results scream of a failed education system in Federal Way and our children are the casualties.

Maybe the district should be less concerned with “education nouveau theories” and how kids “feel” about education, and be more concerned with documented structured curriculums, documented teacher learning plans, required daily tutoring for failing students, and also critically important train students to have a study/do-homework/get help work ethic. Graduating from high school is easy; graduating from high school educated requires hard work and a competent board that only institute already known-proven education methods based on facts, data and evidence. The school-house wheel does not need to be reinvented.

Kim Comito

Federal Way