Work with Gary for More Community, Less Olympia

The future of our state depends on educating our children. Nowhere is the failure of bureaucracy more apparent. Over 30% of our kids don't graduate and it is getting worse. Our graduation rates are falling faster than any other state except one. 52% of our students entering college must take remedial courses to enable them to do college level work.

The problem isn't money. Our education spending is 25th out of the 50 states, $10,506 per student. The problem is where our money goes. We rank 45th in getting money to the classroom. Only 59 cents of every education dollar reaches students.  Where is it spent? On bureaucracy. Only 47% of the system's employees are teachers. 

Common sense tells us that the money must get to our classrooms. Instead, despite our recession, Olympia had a banner year creating bureaucratic programs that distract from teaching. Legislators allocated $4 billion dollars on top-down new statewide formulas for school staff, administration, and class size requirements and to plan a full-day kindergarten (HB 2776). They also set up a  new "Department of Early Learning" (HB 2867) which will plan services for children from birth to age three. Finally, they also spent $57 million on a new bureaucracy to plan a new universal pre-school entitlement for three and four year olds (HB 2731).  This spending won't help a single child. It buys bureaucratic planning for an fantasy program that has no funding and wouldn't start until 2018-19.

Teachers with the support of parents educate our children. Programs such as these take the focus off of fixing our current system. The bureaucrats argue that ours schools are failing because our kids aren't prepared for kindergarten, but 42 states have better graduation rates than Washington without universal pre-school, and the statistics show that the longer our kids are in the system, the further they lag behind the rest of the nation. Such programs would cost billions when no amount of spending can replace good parents. This spending would compete  with existing public classrooms for limited funds and would destroy existing private sector day-care and pre-school operations, eliminating parental choice, burdening tax payers, and eliminating accountability.

Only getting money and accountability into the classroom will fix the system. The state could get more money from the federal "Race to the Top" program, but those grants require accountability and choice. Our legislature passed a bill to try to quality for these grants (SB 6696) but that bill requires union approval for teacher evaluations and prohibits charter schools. Both of those provisions decrease our chances of funding. Why? Large bureaucracies need to avoid choice and accountability. Forty-four states have charter school programs because they work.

Parents need to have more impact on the system. The only way to fix the system is to put money and accountability where it belongs: in the hands of parents and our local schools. We need to run the system from the bottom up rather than from the top-down from Olympia. There is no "one-size-fits-all" definition of "basic education."

A Common Sense Plan for Education

Gary's program would look like this:

• 80% of education funds would be directly connected to the student, going directly to the budget for the school that the student attends.  The other levels of bureaucracy can fight over the remaining 20%.
• Parents would be given more and more choices about which school their children could attend, this would force local schools to compete for student dollars on the basis of educational quality.
  
• Elected school boards would choose the types of choices, including local charter schools, magnet schools, and other schools, that make sense given the unique nature of their district. Schools are qualified for funding at the district level, but districts are rewarded for providing more alternatives to parents.
• District school boards would select the type of federally approved standard tests used in their district so alternatives could be compared on a standard basis of performance.
• Graduation rates and grade level proficiency based on standard testing would be published for each school, for each grade, and for each teacher within the school, so that parents could make informed choices about where to send their children.
• School principals have the ultimate decision making in terms of staffing. Teachers would have control of their curriculum. Parents would able to "vote with their feet" increasing or decreasing school funding based upon the quality of their choices.
• District, country, and state levels of the system would offer services that could be offered more efficiently at a higher level, but the local schools could opt in or out of those programs, either providing those services internally or using a private sector alternative. This would ensure that the bureaucracy offered only programs that the schools valued in this mission to educate children.