Some Things Shouldn't End Up in the Newspaper

The state Supreme Court made a major ruling on Thursday regarding teachers who are accused of sexual misconduct. From the Seattle Times:

The state Supreme Court issued a ruling Thursday that pitted the fear of stigmatizing an innocent teacher against the threat of allowing sexual predators in the schools to escape detection.

The scenario before the court was this: A teacher is accused of sexually abusing a student. The school decides the allegation is unsubstantiated. Under state law, should the teacher's name be disclosed?

By a 6-3 vote, the court fell on the side of accused teachers. The names of teachers must be disclosed only in cases where sexual misconduct has been found or some form of discipline has taken place, the court ruled. In unsubstantiated cases, the details of any investigation may be disclosed — but with the teacher's name redacted, or blacked out.

A big part of this goes back to the big Coaches Who Prey series that the Times did several years ago. Now they're looking for other predators, but I think they threw their nets way too wide, and the Court made a good decision.

There are already mandatory reporting laws in place; any school official who reasonably suspects abuse must report to the authorities. What the media was asking here was basically for carte blanche access to any allegation, ever--the 7th grade girl who makes up a story and promptly takes it back, the high school student who goes for street cred by manufacturing a liason between himself and the female math teacher, the crazy parent who has accused every teacher their daughter had of some sort of perversion or another.

Imagine a world where all those allegations were put into a nice spreadsheet and published as a table in your local paper. If your name is on that list guilt or innocence don't matter--you're already smeared by association. That's no way to keep teachers in the classroom, it's no way to attract people to the classroom, and it's no way to conduct an investigation.

The papers, of course, are apoplectic. The Times tries to make it sound like a union issue and notes that you have a chance to vote for the judges who wrote on either side of the decision, while Steven Smith of the Spokesman-Review calls it "a stunning ruling" and furthers the anti-union theme. Then there's the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, and commentary from Education Week here.

Doing everything to protect kids doesn't mean exposing their teachers to all the slings and arrows of the newspapers. I like the court's ruling--what do you think?

Diplomas Count, Part II: Change is Good

(Part of a series looking at the 2008 Diplomas Count report from Education Week; you can find other articles here)

In the report EdWeek chose to work with the 2005 graduation rate data, because it’s the most recent number that has been thoroughly vetted by research. In their overall look at graduation rates state-by-state they also include a look at the five-year trend, and Washington comes off well:

1. Tennessee, +7.9%
2. Florida, +7.8%
3. (tie) Kentucky and New York, +6.2%
4. (tie) Arizona and Washington, +6.0%

Top six, and a tie for Best in the West! Not too shabby. At least we’re not on this end of the scale:

50. Louisiana, -9.4%
49. Nevada, -9.3%
48. District of Columbia, -7.5%
47. New Mexico, -7.3%
46. South Dakota, -4.2%

Remember, that number above for Louisiana is pre-Katrina. Next year’s report will be even worse.

Diplomas Count, Part I: The Congressional Representative’s Perspective

In my mailbox today was Education Week’s annual report on graduation rates, Diplomas Count. They do an excellent job with their theme issues, and the neat thing about Diplomas Count is just how accessible it is; there’s something in here for everyone. I’ll be taking some time in the coming weeks to highlight the Washington State pieces from the report.

The first interesting bit is a way of thinking about things that had never occurred to me before: looking at graduation rates by congressional district. Most of the state does merely OK, in the 66% to 75% range on the scale that EdWeek uses, but we seem to have a problem on the coast and in southwest Washington: the 6th congressional district (the peninsula and Tacoma, represented by Norm Dicks), the 3rd (southwest, Brian Baird), and the 9th (Olympia and southern King County, Adam Smith) all trail the state average by falling in the 56%-65% range.

I’m sure there’s a reason for each of them to trail, but still.

A fun summer project for someone that's not me would be to break things out by county. I'd suspect that even though the overall picture looks good that the lowest graduation rate could be Adams, Stevens, or Ferry.

Governor Gregoire in Education Week

The July 18th edition of Education Week has an article on how governors across the country are using their power to streamline the education systems in their states, particularly the divide between K-12 and college. For example,

In Washington state, Gov. Gregoire created a 13-member P-20 council to evaluate public education from prekindergarten through graduate school and to hold schools at all levels accountable. At least 30 states have launched councils or initiatives to foster collaboration across the different levels of education, according to the Denver-based Education Commission of the States.

So while some suspect (perhaps rightly) that the P-20 Council will be just another thing that doesn’t mean much, I think there is some comfort in knowing that other states are doing the same thing. If they can be productive with it, perhaps we will be too.