Did Teachers Win the Election for Gregoire?

Probably not, but they did get a shoutout from Kelly Evans, Gregoire's campaign manager:

Women’s groups, the environmental community, labor organizations, the education community – everyone was focused and took nothing for granted. And we saw the results in our polling. Four weeks before the election, we were losing public school parents by 11 points – two weeks prior, we were winning by a point. Same is true for union households, a move from +12 to +27 in just three weeks. Add this to the voices of Native Americans, children’s and health care advocates, leaders from communities of color, veterans’ organizations and law enforcement groups all organizing and communicating about Gov. Gregoire’s record of results for the people of Washington.

The WEA-Eastern affiliate office in Spokane had a great, great phonebanking operation set up that turned out nearly 18,000 phone calls for the Gregoire campaign, and we were only one of dozens across the state. Dino only won Spokane County by 8,000 votes, which wasn't nearly the margin he needed to make up for the hole he was facing in King County, where Gregoire won by 230,000. The road to office may run through King, but you've got to run a statewide campaign, too, and the Governor did that very effectively.

(via Brad Shannon at the Olympian)

Bergeson trailing; Gregoire lead seems solid

This is a bit of a surprise to me: even though not-Bergeson won the primary, I was never sure that not-Bergesons would line up for Randy Dorn. Turns out they have.

However, with the most populous county still tabulating results, and with a slight lead for Bergeson in that county, she may still eke out a win.

In the other widely-watched race, Christine Gregoire seems to have locked up a victory over Dino Rossi. Snohomish and King counties, the bulk of the outstanding votes, are solid Gregoire.

the predictive value of the 2008 Washington State primary

Somewhat silly predictions aside, it's time to look at the results of the primary. A few observations.

1. Voter turnout was way below average in King County--around 20%, compared to 27%+ statewide--which may have artificially inflated Rossi's overall performance. Rossi's camp is probably praying this trend continues into the general election, since King County went 60% for Gregoire this time around.

2. As David Goldstein notes, there's no comparing this primary with the previous primary in 2004, in which voters had to choose a party, not any old candidate. The best comparison is between this primary and the general election of 2004. Provisionally, I agree with him that this is a "straw poll" for Gregoire, and that her win is a genuine win. In other words, since voters were free to choose any candidate, just as they can in the general election, the predictive power of the "top two" primary is considerably stronger than some, like David Postman of the Seattle Times, have claimed, even if Gregoire still isn't a sure thing.

3. Considering #1 above, and the natural incumbent advantage, and the fact that Gregoire's people are probably concerned that their candidate didn't top 50%, I'd predict that this primary motivates and mobilizes Democrats. Watch for a flurry of spending and campaigning, even more than last time, to secure Gregoire's lead.

4. Terry Bergeson has to feel great that she outpolled Randy Dorn. She has to be nervous, though, that "anybody but Bergeson" was the clear winner. If even David Blomstrom could siphon 4% of the vote, the electorate is clearly displeased by the current administration. Whether Dorn can rally all the opposition, though, remains to be seen. Blomstrom's probably going to call me a media whore no matter what, but I wasn't horribly impressed by Dorn's approach and his sketchy past--and partly due to Blomstrom's own efforts to raise tough questions about Dorn's past. Dorn seemed like the least worst option. I miss Rich Semler.

Washington state primary predictions

1. For Superintendent of Public Instruction, Randy Dorn will outpoll Terry Bergeson.
2. David Blomstrom, despite finishing fifth, will live to run another day.
3. Turnout will be lower than expected.
4. For Governor, Dino Rossi will trail Chris Gregoire, 47-49 (the remaining 4% split among the others).
5. For Congress, Darcy Burner will outpoll Dave Reichert.
6. No one on either of these lists will win.
7. Washington state's servers will crash as the punditocrats hit "refresh" on their election results screens, over and over until their fingers bleed, while the rest of the world watches Olympic beach volleyball.
8. Democracy will survive another primary.

Dino Rossi on the WEA Ad Campaign

Because I am fairly unbalanced, here's a post from Sound Politics criticizing the WEA for their recent attack ads on Dino Rossi, and here's video from the man himself defending the decision:

Dino Rossi Speaks Out on Education

Hot diggity damn. I wrote before that I wanted to hear more about Dino’s education platform, and he goes out and makes it the first item in his own state of the state address at DinoRossi.com. It’s good to hear him get some of his ideas out there. I don’t agree with a lot of them, but there is food for thought.

(An aside to the Rossi campaign: transcripts are a good thing, especially for bloggers!)

The italicized sections below are all from the education portion of Rossi’s speech. The commentary is mine. As always, I'll be endorsing John Kiester for Governor, so I don’t have a horse in the race.

2/3rds of our tenth graders are not passing all parts of the WASL.

While true, it also has to be noted that better than 80% of our kids are passing the WASL sections required for graduation. The big stumbling block is science, even more so than math: only 36% of 10th graders passed the science WASL

16,000 students dropped out of high school in 2005.

A startling number indeed, but in 2005 Washington State was singled out by the Department of Education for being one of the few states honest about how many of their kids drop out. If you believe OSPI stats, that year was also dramatically better than the years that proceded it, which is a sign of progress. I'm also worried about Mr. Rossi's call for stiffer standards; in California that made the dropout problem worse.

Education Week just ranked Washington’s education system 34th in the nation. We shouldn’t settle for being in the bottom half.

I believe that he's referring to the Quality Counts 2008 report that made the big splash last week. If you follow this link there is indeed a state-by-state ranking where Washington is 34th.

Dig a little deeper into the numbers, though. The absolute lowest score they gave the state was in the School Finance: Spending subcatagory, where we're 43rd in the nation in per pupil expenditure (PPE), 41st in spending on education, and 42nd and 44th on two comparisons of PPE to national averages. The quickest way to raise this number, and thus the overall score, would be to put more money into the system. Is that a plank that Dino really wants to push?

And, Quality Counts isn't a universally accepted measure.

(Speaking of Washington Learns) They spent 18 months and $1.7 million in taxpayer dollars, only to decide they need to study the problem further.

This one sticks. Anyone looking for tangible change that came out of Washington Learns is going to be left wanting, and while I have a lot of faith in Dan Grimm I'm getting a nagging sense of pessimism towards the Basic Education Financing Taskforce he's running. The left is tiptoeing around an income tax without wanting to actually say it out loud; the right tends to get so focused on teacher's unions and charter schools that they forget 1000 other areas that could be improved.

(That's why I love ya, JL. Big picture!)

I have one simple test when it comes to education: what’s in the best interest of our students?

Uh-oh.

First, we must reward success and take action when we see consistent failure. When teachers and principals succeed on a regular basis, I want them to be paid more. But when I see consistent failure, from our teachers, schools, and school districts, I want to make it easier for principals and parents to step in and take necessary action.

I'm not anti merit pay. I'm against how they're thinking about doing it in Idaho, while Houston sounds like it's getting good teacher buy-in.

That said, Rossi's getting trumped by No Child Left Behind on this one. You'll find no tougher measure than closing a school and firing a staff, and while those sanctions don't start until year 5 they're still there, and I can't imagine moving them up so they happened any faster.

For the three levels where he indicates failure could occur, he'd need a different legislative action for each:

• Teachers: More money for the Office of Professional Practices at OSPI, a revision of the existing WACs to extend the provisional time teachers spend, and money to support districts that actually begin the process of firing bad teachers.
  
  
• Schools: The authority to override local control and take control of a school, the ability to step outside of that district's CBA and make staffing decisions, and the political will to deal with the blowback from the community.
  
  
• Districts: Frankly, I don't think it can be done. What would you do? Dissolve the school board? Force more state intervention, and the money that would have to come along with it?

He has a lot of faith in principals to identify bad teachers and know how to turn things around--I wonder what he's basing that on.

Second, we need to prepare students to succeed in math and science. The first step is to focus the money where the need is the greatest. We need more college graduates with math and science degrees to join the teaching profession. Our current system doesn’t give school districts a flexibility to pay math and science teachers more salary.

That just irritates me, because there is absolutely nothing to stop local districts from giving their math and science teachers more money, as long as its collectively bargained beforehand. And if you tell me that the union would never allow that to happen, consider this: many teacher contracts have provisions that allow for extra money for special ed teachers vis-a-vis extended year contracts. Who's to say that couldn't be done for math and science teachers as well?

In his speech there’s a piece here on the math standards report that came out last summer and how he hopes this back to basics approach will be good change. He might be going after the coveted “Where’s the Math?” endorsement.

Finally:

Third, I want to make it easier to bring talented people into the classroom. We are surrounded by people in our state with tremendous skills in math, science, and computer science, many of whom would love to teach in our schools. Unfortunately, that is not allowed under the current state regulations. Bill Gates would face a lot of state regulations if he wanted to teach computer science for a day or two a week in our public high schools. We need to change the rules on alternative certification to bring new talent into the classroom. This is what’s in the best interest of our children.

The theme that Rossi is putting forward here is similar to what Nicholas Kristof proposed in 2006, which made big waves in the blogosphere (see The Stopped Clock and (one of my favorite posts ever) NYC Educator.)

The trouble with the idea is this notion that there are hundreds of capable and enthusiastic people out there who would swarm the schools if only it wasn't for the onerous requirements in the way. There's also a difference between having the knowledge and being able to communicate it; think of some of the most technically inclined people you've known in your life who are amazing with the machine but lacking in people skills.

Dino does have an opportunity here. Make the certification requirements for existing teachers easier, and it'll be just like giving them a raise. As is I need 10 credits or 100 clock hours every few years to even keep my license, and that costs money. The Professional Certificate is putting our newest teachers through a grinder right when they should be most focused on the classroom; eliminating it would make everyone who's graduated since 2001 happy.

It's on!

The Governor Stiffs the WEA

Alternate Title: Oh No She Di’n’t! No, really, she didn’t.

The two issues that the WEA has decided to push in the coming legislative session are class size and compensation. “Governor Gregoire is with us,” was the conventional wisdom. “She talked about our two issues at her town hall meeting, and she’ll sign what comes to her desk.”

The last part may be true, it may not be true, only time will tell. When she released her budget on Tuesday the Governor had a powerful opportunity to signal her support for the WEA agenda, and she did anything but.

The seven line items in her supplemental education budget, in order of cost:

Increase teacher salaries: $31,200,000. A .8% increase, which would bring the COLA for 2008-2009 up to 3.6%. Not bad at all—it would be the envy of many, really—but it’s half of what we’ll be asking for.

Maintain and improve the current assessment system: $17,300,000. This section deserves to be parsed hard.

The Superintendent of Public Instruction will develop tests that teachers can use in their classrooms to identify student learning needs. These tests will give more immediate and targeted information to teachers anytime during the school year. Having this information readily available to teachers will allow many of the current annual assessments to be shortened.

This troubles me.

We already have assessments that can be used at any time of the school year to measure where kids are. The DIBELS come right to mind, or the tests available from AIMS Web, or any of the 100 different fluency assessments that can be correlated with the Hasbrouck fluency table, or STAR Reading, or STAR Math, or (especially!) the NWEA. OSPI doesn’t need to “develop” anything; it would be a replication of existing efforts and a waste of money.

And really, does anyone believe that having more assessments available will shorten the current assessments (read: WASL) that we already have? This sounds an awful lot like it’s just one more thing, and it’s troubling to me that Gregoire would misread what teachers are asking for to such a staggering degree.

I’ve got a rant worked up about how many teachers are feeling overwhelmed by what the job asks for today. This idea would not help that, at all.

Keeping students and others safe on college and university campuses, $14,300,000. This is clearly and unapologetically a response to what happened at Virginia Tech this spring, but that’s OK. The college that I watch the most is Eastern, and they’ve made some great steps in upgrading their communications network to get information out to students. I wish that SVC Alum was still blogging, because he did some great writing about events there this spring.

Serve the first class of students of U of Washington – North Sound Campus, $1,100,000. There’s still some who would tell you that this campus isn’t necessary, but here it comes. This is to pay for the first group of students to come through, which will include 30 in nursing and 30 in teacher education. I’d suggest that we might not need yet another teacher education program in the state; I’m wondering why they chose that as a direction to start with.

Improve child-care safety, $435,000. Pays for five folks at the Department of Early Learning to work on redoing licensing for child care centers.

Provide services for visually impaired library patrons, $341,000. To pay for more talking books and Braille services. As the father of a deaf child, I’m all for it.

Boost achievement for English Language Learners, $250,000. Pilot program to integrate ELL and job prep training.

Adjust K-12 student enrollment, -$9,300,000. Yes, that’s negative. Enrollment statewide is going down, and this is what they figure to save by having less FTEs.

The total bill: $55,626,000.

Mainstream media coverage here, here, and here. The gist is that the Republicans are calling her new fiscally conservative streak either Rossi inspired or too little, too late.

And now, pure partisan political opinion.

Christine doesn’t have to do diddly-squat for teachers this session, because when Dino Rossi is the one on the other side there really isn’t much of a choice. Rossi shat the bed with teachers when he lead the drive to cut the I-732 COLA in 2003, and the trial balloon that he’s floating about merit pay isn’t going to play well with many. Your average teacher can’t support Dino Rossi, because Dino Rossi doesn’t have much to say to support your average teacher.

(Sidebar to Mr. Rossi: Education plays in Washington. Always has, always will. If you make an educated, reasonable, sensible education proposal, you'll will over a lot of people. If you run on platitudes, you'll not get the traction you could.)

So really, it’s not a surprise that Christine didn’t give the WEA everything they could ever hope for in her budget proposal, because she doesn’t have to. She can stand on what she’s already done—student spending is way up, and we did get a great raise this year and next—do nothing this session, and as she campaigns she can play the fiscally responsible card.

This election, we need Christine more than Christine needs us. There’s a lot that we’re going to do for her, because there’s a lot that she can do for us given four more years. That’s not a good or bad thing; it’s just one of those things that we have to do and acknowledge. For thoughts on how close this election could be, see Joni Balter’s column in the December 20th Seattle Times.

It’s going to be a session to watch.


Update: On the December 20th edition of Inside Olympia with the affable Dave Ammons it was shared that Dr. Bergeson was asking for "hundreds of millions" of dollars in additional spending here in the short session. Doesn't look good for her, either.