10th Grade WASL Results Delayed

From the Seattle Times:

The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) plans to wait until late August or early September to report how many 10th-graders did well enough on this year's Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) to put them one big step closer to earning their high-school diplomas.

Sophomores will get their own WASL scores by June 14, but officials for the state's education agency said Thursday there are too many data issues to quickly calculate how many students statewide passed the three exam sections required to graduate — reading, writing and math. OSPI, however, will release this month how many of the test-takers passed each individual subject.

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The question is over the statewide results. Willhoft said results for the reading, writing and math sections will give a rough idea of how students fared. But he said OSPI, for a number of reasons, needs more time before it will be confident reporting how many students passed all three.

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The prospect of a three-month wait between the time 10th-graders receive their scores and the release of the statewide results has raised some concern.

The president of the Washington Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, last month questioned why the public can't get preliminary scores if they are available to districts.

Some parents also are unhappy that they won't be able to view their student's actual 2006 WASL test until September, too late to appeal their scores until after the August retake.

There's a fair amount of irony in the WEA complaining that scores aren't being released fast enough--they've been fighting for years to have the entire test thrown out, and now we're pushing the state to get the results out even faster instead of making sure that the data is accurate? C'mon, guys.