Last night at the Seattle Public Library, author Steven Brill told an audience of about 150 people that “It is like I am on Pluto, the Democratic party is so powerful that there aren’t charters here.”
To be fair, in 2004 Democratic Governor Locke signed the charter school bill sent to him by a Republican Senate and Democratic House---the state teachers’ union repealed it through an initiative.
Steven Brill is the author of Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools (Simon and Schuster 2011), now on the best-seller lists. Mr. Brill wrote the New Yorker article describing New York City’s infamous rubber rooms, where teachers who were on leave after being accused of molesting or hitting children sat for an average of three years, on full pay, while administrators tried to fire them.
See today’s excellent Seattle Times article for more details on Mr. Brill’s presentation, including his observation that Washington’s Race to the Top application was “by far the worst, most laughable proposal of any state submitted except for Hawaii.”
Mr. Brill is right to invoke Pluto when describing the weirdness of education policy in Washington state. Programs that work, like high-quality charters, are banned. Programs that do not work to improve schools, like Initiative 728, the smaller class size initiative, are funded to the tune of $2.5 billion.
Too often policymakers spend money on schools with the hope that more money and more programs will improve them. This is not rational, as Mr. Brill pointed out, as the U.S. is spending more money on schools than other developed countries, but achieving much poorer results.
A rational down-to-Earth approach would insist upon policies that work. Coming home to Earth from Pluto would look like this:
1) Lift the ban on charter schools
2) End the last-in-first-out layoff policy for teachers
3) Hold teachers and school principals accountable for raising student performance, and reward them for doing so
4) Repeal the teacher tenure law (RCW 28A.405.100), which makes it nearly impossible for administrators to replace a bad teacher with a good one.
5) Reform teacher certification laws which certify teachers who lack sufficient knowledge in math and science.
6) Repeal the “one-size-fits-all” single salary pay scale for teachers, which rewards seniority and paper credentials, and not the ability to raise student achievement.