WASL is inspiration, frustration

GRANGER, Yakima County — At Granger High, a couple of blocks from a fishing-lure plant and across the street from a grain elevator, Principal Richard Esparza keeps a suitcase stuffed with cash.

It's fake — $420,000 in grainy, photocopied $20s — roughly the amount students gain over their working lives if they earn a diploma. Esparza keeps the suitcase propped open in a corner of his office, one of his tools to motivate students to pass the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) and graduate from high school.

The money also serves as a striking reminder of what's at stake if he fails.

Starting with this year's sophomores, failure on the WASL (or a WASL alternative) means no diploma, fewer choices of jobs, and a lot less income. For students such as those at Granger, where nine out of every 10 qualify for free school lunches, the prospects look daunting.

Line up WASL scores, and the pattern is clear: Rich districts such as Mercer Island and Issaquah, where high-school parking lots are full of the cars students drive, sit at the top; Granger and Yakima, which serve many of the children of Yakima Valley's farmworkers, settle near the bottom.

Last year, three-quarters of the state's poorest 10th-graders failed the reading, writing or math sections of the WASL — the three subjects that this year's sophomores must pass before graduation.

Among Latino students — about two-thirds of whom are poor — the failure rate was 84 percent, about the same as low-income blacks and Native Americans. For students learning English — about one-third of Granger High's students — it was 93 percent.

Without significant new support, the state projects that in 2008, fewer low-income, minority students will graduate on time than ever before — down to as few as 40 percent among some groups.

Such statistics raise questions about fairness. The state's 13-year-old school-improvement effort is, in theory, supposed to boost achievement of all students, especially those who have lagged behind.

"The issue really is whether or not we have accomplished what we set out to do with education reform or if we have simply made matters worse," says state Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos, D-Seattle. "I would suggest we're making it worse."

Esparza is one of the optimists. The pressure of the WASL, which 10th-graders finished last week, is just what's needed, he says, to bring attention and resources to his Latino students — the largest and fastest-growing ethnic group in Washington schools.

Thirty miles up the highway, however, Yakima schools Superintendent Ben Soria says it "borders on the inhumane" to withhold diplomas starting in 2008. In his office, he has big charts showing test scores going up and up. But not fast enough, he says, to get close to 100 percent in two years.

Their views are a microcosm of a debate raging all over the state when it comes to the WASL and how it could hurt Washington's underclass.

Grades improving

A pile of bright-red certificates sits on Esparza's desk, waiting to be signed. In a few hours, they will be handed out to students on Granger High's honor roll. Esparza holds up the stack to show how thick it is. Seven years ago, some teachers didn't assign homework because they didn't think students would do it. This year, one-third of students have a B average or better.

Esparza smiles. He has a quick, easy smile. In 2008, he's confident that Granger will prove that a high-poverty school can have a high WASL passage rate. The license plate on his sporty, red Mazda reads "SE PUEDE" — It can be done.

Esparza is the first minority principal in Granger, a small town with a sprinkling of stores and just as many boarded-up storefronts. He grew up in nearby Grandview, where he cut asparagus alongside his parents during school vacations and on mornings before classes.

For too long, he says, expectations for Latino students have been too low. In his seven years at Granger High, he's helped prove they can be much higher.

In reading, for example, Granger High's WASL passage rate has soared from 25 percent to 61 percent, despite the fact that half of each year's freshmen arrive reading at the fifth-grade level or below. Math-passage rates have risen from 6.5 percent to 31 percent.

To get there, Esparza changed instruction and, just as important, attitudes.

"He just won't accept people saying, 'Yeah, but,' " says Mike Nyberg, the school's instructional facilitator. "He was just, 'No. We have them now; what can we do with them?' "

One of Esparza's first steps was to assign faculty advisers for each 20 students. The advisers track grades, scores, attendance — and call parents to share progress or problems. Even though Granger is a small school with about 300 students, Esparza says it used to operate like a big school where students could fail without much intervention.

He also started a reading program to help students catch up. A section of the school's library is stocked with books more often found in elementary school — down to "The Little Engine That Could." But that's where some need to start.

In one of her first meetings with Esparza, English teacher Joyce Golob says he spread out her grade sheets, littered with F's, on his desk. "This is deplorable," she remembers him saying. The previous principal told her she was good, to keep at it. Esparza, however, shared her desire to figure out why she wasn't reaching students. That, she says, "was the beginning of finding out what works."

Near-term worries

At 8 a.m., Soria ducks out of a meeting on Yakima's new math curriculum. It took two years for the staff to agree on a new program, and Soria hopes it will help Yakima's math scores triple, as reading scores have at the fourth-grade level over the past six to seven years.

But he's deeply worried about the shorter term.

The state, he says, started this race to 2008 without a good plan in place. Where, he asks, was the money for all-day kindergarten, or new math books, or reading coaches for elementary teachers — all the things that Yakima has scraped to find money to do?

He is more serious than Esparza, but just as passionate. He's had success, too — one reason why he was one of four finalists this year for National Superintendent of the Year.

Soria came to Yakima in 2000, a year after Esparza was hired in Granger. He was looking for a challenge — the messier, the better.

Yakima's test scores, he says, were low and not rising. When he arrived, the district's 14 elementary schools were using six different reading programs, which he replaced with one that research showed worked. He beefed up reading instruction in middle and high school, too, and more. The all-day kindergarten program, he's proud to say, means 85 percent of kindergartners now are reading, or ready to read by the end of the school year.

But that won't help the sophomores who face the WASL now.

On one of his regular morning visits to schools, he stands in the back of a math class, hands folded behind his back. When the teacher invites him to the front, Soria mentions the new math curriculum, then asks the teacher to explain how it will affect his life. The teacher is honest: It will mean an incredible amount of work for a couple of years.

Soria appreciates the honesty. Change takes time, he says, and students shouldn't have to pass an exam that the system hasn't fully prepared them to take.

He proposes that students be required to pass the reading section of the WASL by 2008, followed by writing in 2010 and math in 2012. A few more years won't hurt students — or the country, he says.

Esparza sees no benefits to waiting. If a student has a diploma but a fifth-grade reading level, he says, the student won't be much better off jobwise than a dropout.

Like the wrestling coach he once was, Esparza sees his job as figuring out a way to prepare and motivate students to win.

He stops in the hall to talk to one of his advisees, a slight girl named Norma Bojorquez, 16. Has she raised her grades? She nods — in all but one class. Good, he says, because if she hasn't, he's doing something wrong. She hates disappointing him, she says later. "I make him feel sad. I see it in his face."

Granger parents are expected to do their part, too. If they don't show up for twice-yearly conferences, staff members call them until they do. One teacher even scheduled one at a high-school baseball game.

Esparza is worried, too. He is well aware of how far Granger's students have to go to reach his projection: 90 percent passing the WASL and the rest graduating through some alternative means.

He's already talked to sophomores to fend off discouragement they will feel when some fail the WASL this spring, and face retaking it again in August.

After lunch, all the students start to file into the gym for the honor-roll assembly.

Esparza runs back to his office to fetch the suitcase of cash, which he sets in front of the podium, and a hand-drawn poster he calls the "three roads of life": the high-income road accomplished with high grades, the middle and the low.

The honor-roll students come down from the bleachers to get their certificates and T-shirts that read "No grades, no glory." They are excused to get the ice cream that's waiting in the cafeteria.

Esparza's left with the rest. He's hardest on the freshmen. "There is no reason in this school that you should not have a 3.0 or above." He smiles. "You know it. I know it. It's a matter of attitude and how hard you're willing to work."

Optimism vs. data

Soria has met Esparza, admires him, prays he's right. But he can't bring himself to share the same optimism.

These days, he says, educators often are told to make decisions based on data. And when he looks at the data — 22 percent of Yakima 10th-grader passing reading, writing and math last year — he says it's unrealistic to hope for 100 percent in two years.

"I would say to the world, 'Guess what? We're going to make it,' " he says. "People would know I'm a damn fool."

His most optimistic prediction: Half of Yakima's sophomores will pass the WASL by 2008. And that, he says, would be a tragedy.

He knows he risks reinforcing the very view he wants to dispel: that poor, minority students can't learn. But if 2008 comes and many Yakima students fail the WASL, he says, it won't matter how much they improved, how close they came. He and the students will be viewed as failures.

"That's absolutely wrong," he says. "It's a system failure, not a student failure."

Soria strides into a beginning ESL class at Davis High where, in Spanish, he asks students how many took the WASL.

A half-dozen hands go up.

How did it go? he asks.

"Defícil," says one. Difficult.

"I didn't take the WASL," says another in Spanish. "The WASL took me."

Seattle Times reporter Cheryl Phillips contributed to this story.

Linda Shaw: 206-464-2359 or lshaw@seattletimes.com