Reacting to the news, State Superintendent Randy Dorn said, "As I've said many times before, Washington students do very well if they stay with us all 12 years. That's why we've got to focus even harder on those students who are at risk of dropping out."
Keep in mind though, the ACT is only taken by students who are already thinking about going to college; it doesn't measure the college readiness of ALL students in Washington schools.
As I've written previously, high schoolers in our state are not required to take the same number and type of classes Washington's state universities require for admission.
Reading further behind the headline of today's news, while participation of racial/ethnic groups continued to increase, achievement levels decreased for the second straight year.
And, a postscript to my blog about WASL scores released last Friday, in looking at the breakdown of scores by racial/ethnic tenth graders - Whites and Asian/Pacific Islanders continue to lead all other groups in all testing subjects though all groups showed declines in the math portion of the exam. Fairing worst were African Americans; only one in five of those Blacks taking the test met the minimum math standard. Hispanics were only slightly higher with a 23.3 percent passage rate. One-fourth of Native American students passed the test. Only half of Whites and Asian/Pacific Islanders passed.
As some of you have commented, many factors go into the success and failure of our students - parental involvement, peer and societal pressure and income among them - but the figures continue to support a need for re-thinking how subjects are taught so that students of all races and ethnicities can pass the state's standardized tests.