My vision is to create a Washington renaissance for our K-12 education.  We can build a first rate education system and safeguard our children’s future.

In that vision Washington continues to fully fund K-12 Education as a priority of state spending. However, we move to a student-centric funding system, giving parents and their students more choice of which public schools they attend and opening up the option of charter and private school alternatives.  The goal of student centric funding is to create market competition among our public schools and to be an incentive for them to strive for a higher level of excellence.  This will also quickly highlight our poorer schools and identify them for action.  We are going to have to be prepared to step up to help our poorer schools with actions to bring up their standards of performance.

Today the top third of our students get a good education.  We need to continue to improve the level of that education.  However, we also need to focus on the lower two thirds of our student population.  That is where we have the largest issues.  Today we have a 30% dropout rate in our schools.  Part of that is record keeping.  Job one is to clean up our record keeping issues to get to a true measure of our dropout rate and size of the problem.  In the interim it is clear we need mentoring programs in our middle and high schools to indentify students who are having difficulties.  We must help these students get on the right track again before it’s too late.  We need all of our students engaged.

The math and reading skills of our high school graduates is disturbing.  We need to strengthen our math, science, and English curriculum.  Part of that can be accomplished with higher standards for hiring new teachers.  It requires proficiency training for our existing teachers.  It also requires we end our policy of social promotion.  We want to ensure that when our students graduate, they have the skills necessary to be successful in the workplace or, if they choose to go on to higher education, that they are fully prepared for college level work.

Student and teacher performance is a key issue.  The appropriate testing mechanisms need to be in place to measure student progress over their student life.  Teachers should have a portion of their tenure, promotion, and raises tied to their student’s improvement in proficiency.  This is a very difficult measurement problem.  Our solution is going to have to accurately measure student progress and fairly assess the teacher’s performance in that improvement.  But we need to start to solve these measurement issues or we will never get there!

With all of the assets we have in play, there is no reason for Washington to have anything short of a great education system.  All of our decisions in Education need to be made on the basis of what is best for our students and preparing them to be happy, successful and productive citizens.  That’s what we want for our own children, and what we want for all the children of Washington.

Issue

• As a parent, there is nothing more important than a good education for our children.  This value is reinforced by our state constitution.
• An educated work force is required in our state and county to retain and attract businesses and to create high paying jobs.
• Today that is not the case.  In Snohomish County we have a 30% dropout rate in our high schools while 50 % of the students going to our community colleges require remedial math and/or English or both.
• The Chamber of Commerce compared the K-12 education innovation in all the states and the District of Columbia. Washington State scored 10^th in pipelining students to post secondary schools, 17^th in staffing and hiring practices, 23^rd in management of student data, 34^th in financing methods, 36^th in managing the individual schools, 41^st in removal of ineffective teachers, 47^th in deployment of technology to improve efficiency, 48^th in educational innovation and 48^th in the state reform environment.
• In spite of these poor results, it was not until the state wanted to compete for federal “Race to the Top” dollars, that meaningful education reform legislation was introduced.
• Washington State’s governor and legislature get an “F” in Education.

Solution

• Washington State must fully fund K-12 education: Transportation, curriculum, and staffing.
• K-12 state funding should be student-centered to encourage market competition among public schools, while encouraging charter school and private school development.
• End social promotion.  Require that every student promotion be based on merit and the ability to master the work at their next level of development.
• Have strong mentoring programs in the middle schools and high schools.
• Build stronger math and science curriculum in elementary schools.  Increase the math and science requirements when hiring new teachers, and providing proficiency training for existing teachers.
• Build a system of metrics that measure student progress over time, and tie a portion of teacher tenure and pay to the students’ progress.