By Tim Sanders

As far as public education goes (and it doesn’t go as far as it used to), Washington State is having some problems. Oh, okay, so are all of the other states, but Washington’s educational difficulties seem to be especially bothersome in the areas of math and science.

First, I should explain that I’m no idiot when it comes to math and science. Here’s what I know about those subjects:

SCIENCE: After the great ice sheets that covered our planet retreated to the polar regions, multitudes of simple one-celled organisms emerged from the primordial ooze. In the early 1960s, these protozoans entered high school. By the mid-’70s they’d shed their primitive tattered Levis and tie-dyed shirts and sprouted colorful leisure suits. Over the next two decades these creatures developed button-down shirts and pin stripe suits. Soon they were roaming the planet’s board rooms and office buildings, foraging for bean curd and expelling vast quantities of methane. For this reason, paleontologists called them "Boomers."

MATH: In 1969, Three Dog Night calculated that "One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do. Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one. Ooh, ooh." That important mathematical principle profoundly affected many Boomers. It was like, you know, metaphysical math, dude.
 

I am a Boomer, and despite my advancing years can still boom with the best of them. When I was in high school in the mid-’60s, our nation’s educators realized that American students were sorely deficient in math and science. While Russian teenagers were calibrating the trajectory of orbiting satellites and learning the physics of weightlessness in outer space, American teens were busy jumping off garage roofs with umbrellas. Several laps into the space race and we were still at the starting line, tying our track shoes ... together. Something had to be done.

What was done, of course, was to frighten us to death with multiple courses in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus and biology. I still remember, for example, that "if A+B equals C, then C-B must equal A." That is the sum total of all I remember about algebra, and to be perfectly honest, the ability to add letters rather than numbers has never done me much good. (I did learn in 11th grade that if you scramble the letters in the name "Tim Sanders," you get the deeply meaningful phrase "a mind rests." I didn’t learn that in a math class, though. It was self-taught during study hall.) I also learned that when you dissect a frog, the leftover parts can be put into a girl’s purse and later in the day they will produce an excellent response. We were given lots of homework, under the theory that completing just a small fraction of each assignment would still keep us at home and off the streets at night. To measure our progress, or lack of progress, we were tested rigorously.

But as I said, we were a primitive culture back then, and education has evolved like nobody’s business. According to a March 26th Seattle Times article by Linda Shaw, 10th graders in Washington State’s public schools have been performing pitifully on their Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) exams, especially in the area of math and science. According to Ms. Shaw:

Nearly 85 percent of the students in that class [class of 2008] who’ve taken the exam have passed reading and writing.

But it’s a different story in math and science, with just 56 percent passing math and 38 percent passing science. And that doesn’t include about 3,500 students who’ve yet to take the exam.

So how do educators in the state of Washington plan to resolve this dilemma? Better textbooks? More homework, perhaps? More qualified teachers? Well, that’s silly. Textbooks cost money, more homework would lead to student riots and cafeteria food fights, and no public school system in the nation has even attempted to fire a teacher for incompetence since 1972. No, those were the kind of primitive solutions educators implemented for the Boomer generation, and you can see just how well they worked.

What Washington’s educators did was to pass the ball to the state legislature, who, being dedicated public servants vitally interested in discussing public education as long as it didn’t interfere with their vacation time, spent countless minutes frantically forming committees and subcommittees. Eventually, realizing just how poorly these low WASL test scores reflected on Washington’s educational system, both the House and the Senate agreed to take bold action:

Two bills under consideration – one passed by the House, a similar version by the Senate – would phase out math and science on the 10th grade WASL. The state Board of Education then would select new tests in algebra, geometry and biology to be given right after students finish courses in those subjects ...The House bill also says the new exams "must rely" on multiple-choice questions, which the WASL doesn’t.
 

That’s right, they decided that the only logical solution to poor math and science scores was to DROP THE MATH AND SCIENCE PORTIONS FROM THE TEST! Instead, they would insist on "end-of-course" exams in those subjects (If they’d thought about it, they’d probably have just termed them "finals"). And even better, the new state-mandated final exams would be those all time student favorites, multiple-choice exams. In the early Paleozoic Era, we called them "multiple-guess," I and remember them fondly:

Which term describes an eight-sided figure?

a. rectangle
b. triangle
c. octagon
d. Charlotte Bronte
 

With three viable options and one really goofy answer, even the dullest student had a one in three chance of getting the answer right. Long answer and fill-in-the-blank exams, on the other hand, were often a recipe for failure.

I am proud of Washington’s legislature, and I hope other states will follow their lead. Had somebody simply eliminated the math and science portions of those stupid SATs when I was a kid, I could be a well-respected endocrinologist today, with my very own golf cart. Hey, I’m as qualified to scribble something completely illegible on a prescription pad as the next guy. Possibly more so.