The eastside Seattle burbs overwhelmingly voted for President Obama in 2008. And the eastside Seattle burbs are hot on education reform. Ironically, it’s a Republican candidate for the state Senate, investor and consultant Gregg Bennett, who’s running on Democratic President Barack Obama’s education reform platform in the 48th Legislative District (Bellevue, Redmond) this year.
“He [Obama] and Race to the Top [Obama's education reform program] are right on, it’s moving us in the right direction,” Republican Bennett says.
Bennett is running against incumbent Sen. Rodney Tom (D-48) in the GOP’s effort to take back the hotly contested swing turf on the eastside. Tom (who used to be a Republican before switching to parties in 2006) also hypes education reform and was a lead player in passing both 2009′s and 2010′s educations reform bills.
However, those bills—which expanded the definition of basic education to make students more competitive when it comes to meeting college prerequisites and tweaked guidelines around accountability—fall short when it comes to the big reforms Obama (and his aggressive education secretary Arne Duncan) have been championing—like statewide, uniform evaluation standards for teachers that are tied to data on student acheivment.
“It’s all window dressing,” Bennett says. “How does this improve test scores or graduation rates.”
Bennett says: “We must have a data system that captures student progress across the sate. We’re spending $10 billion on education in this state, and we don’t even know what works.”
Republican state Rep. Skip Priest (R-30) and Republican State Sen. Curtis King (R-14) tried to amend the Democrats’ reform bill to include a state-level, teacher evaluation system—and Bennett told me he would have supported those amendments. They were killed by the Democrats who sided with the teachers union against state-level evaluation standards. There was no roll call on King’s amendment, but Tom tells PubliCola he voted for it and Sen. King confirms that Tom supported him on it. (The teachers union told us that the local level knows best when it comes to evaluating teachers.)
The state’s application for Race to the Top funding (about $250 million in federal dollars for schools) is based on the legislature’s education reform bills and Bennett says, “we have little to no chance [of getting Race to the Top money]. There are so many flaws in our application.”
In addition to not including uniform, data-driven teacher evaluations, charter schools are another Race to the Top litmus test. Bennett accuses Washington state’s appliction of “stiffing”charter schools.
He right. Kind of. While Washington state’s Race to the Top application doesn’t include charter schools, it does focus on innovative public schools. “It turns out the X factor in successful schools,” says Gov. Gregoire’s spokesman Viet Shelton, “is not charters, it’s well run, well taught, innovative schools.” Indeed, Gregoire’s Race to the Top application plays up innovative public schools like the School of Arts in Vancouver, Aviation Highschool in Des Moines, and Delta Hight School, a math and science school, in the tri-cities.
Sen. Tom (who supported charter schools in 2002) says, “In Washington state, charters are not the first avenue to education reform. The voters have told us so.” (Charter initiatives have been voted down three times.)
Tom, who’s been on the senate education committee for eight years, defends the reform bills, pointing out that they made “significant progress” by increasing teacher tenure from two to three years and changing the teacher evaluation system from a binary “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” rating to a more nuanced four-level rating system. “This will have a significant impact on our education system,” he says.
Tom does, however, acknowledge that the bill failed on meeting Obama’s state-level, teacher evaluation standard and points out that “I bucked” the teachers union on that front (they’re not supporting him) by supporting Sen. King’s failed amendment.
“I do agree with him [Bennett] on evaluations,” Tom says. “We will get hit on our Race to the Top Application for not doing more on that. I was disappointed that we only did a pilot project on teacher evaluation [tied to student achievement.]”
He also sponsored a failed amendment with Republican state Sen. Joe Zarelli (R-18 ) to allow principals to dismiss an under-performing teacher after three years. Tom is on the WEA’s shit list for that vote too, he says.
Meanwhile, the League of Education Voters and Stand For Children, two education reform groups that are in sync with Obama’s push for reform, are supporting Tom over Bennett.
Bennett has raised $226,000 to Tom’s $39,000 according to the Public Disclosure Commission web site.
