I'm disturbed by the questions that weren't asked after state Superintendent
Terry Bergeson recently admitted:
"We can't hide the fact
that we gave diplomas last year to kids who
couldn't read"
She plans to remedy this outrage with a new $42 million, five-week
summer
program to teach basic reading, writing and math skills to high
school students.
Questions I think Bergeson should answer:
1- Nearly 60 percent of our state's 10th grade students failed at
least one core
subject on the WASL, last year. How do
you expect a five-week, $42 million
summer program to make up for the apparent failure
of 10 years of full-time
schooling at a cost of billions?
2-You were leading the charge more than a decade ago in the state's
major
education reform efforts, which promised that,
by the year 2000, Washington's
students would "leave grades four, eight and
12 having demonstrated
competency over challenging subject matter, including
English, math and
science", and that at least 90% of our students
would be graduating from
high school. You have been the state's
top education official for the last
nine years. How do you explain those broken
promises?
3-Your office commissioned a review of the 10th-grade WASL, which
concluded
that reading standards amount to eighth- or ninth-grade
content nationally
and math standards amount to sixth- or early
seventh-grade content inter-
nationally. Why do you continue to claim
this test is rigorous and these
standards are high?
4-If our state's education reform efforts are still not working after
12 years of
implementation, isn't it time to admit we may
be headed in the wrong direction?
Our current public education system is not a work in progress; It
is a failure.
It stifles rather than cultivates the most important factors in
student achievement:
Highly qualified teachers
in every classroom
Clear and rigorous academic
standards;
Strong school leaders;
Local control for parents,
teachers and administrators
Meaningful parent involvement
You can't solve a problem until you acknowledge it exists, and you
can't solve
it with the same kind of thinking that created it. Change
is uncomfortable, but
failure to change in this case is unacceptable. It's time
to do what works.
for further info: www.effwa.org
Editor Note:
The education mess is the product of Washington State's long
standing liberal
philosophy of government. That philosophy says it's more
important to protect
teacher's jobs than to worry about how our kids are educated.
That guarantees
the unions will support the politicians in power. The WEA
has been repeatedly
fined for using member's dues (required to keep their jobs) for
political advocacy,
but, they keep on doing it.
I used to be in the recruiting business, recruiting engineers,
scientists and other
high tech people for high tech manufacturers. In the process,
i had occasion to
talk with heads of top US engineering schools. One thing
they all told me:
"80 to 90 percent of my students are foreigners - not US citizens"
That was a couple of decades ago and nothing I have read or heard
since leads
me to believe that situation is any differnent now. American
schools simply aren't
turning out the engineers, doctors, nurses, scientists, computer
experts we need
to compete.
The only reason the US is tops in technology is that many of those
students stayed
here to work because China, India, Indonesia and other foreign
countries didn't have
work for them. Now those countries have huge advances in
their manufacturing
and we are fast approaching the point where we won't have that
favorable "brain drain".
If the US loses in technology, we will become the fat goose to
be dined upon by the
world who are jealous of our wealth and salivating to take it
away from us.
- - - JMC