News and Commentary

Work force plan emphasizes education

08.27.2008 | Seattle PI | Washington has drafted an ambitious plan to bolster the state's work force, calling for every high school student's graduation and a publicly funded 13th year for job training or education after secondary school. | Read

K-12 Education: Increase standards

07.22.2008 | Seattle PI | The state Board of Education should adopt new high school graduation requirements for 24 credits, to be phased in from 2013 to 2016. The plan will serve students much better than today's lax state minimum of 19 credits. | Read

Real crisis in education is lack of money for basic services

07.21.2008 | The Olympian | When the Basic Education Task Force met with legislators, school officials and other stakeholders in Olympia last month, predictably, the focus wasn't on support personnel. News reports highlighted ideas on teacher salaries, training for teachers and hiring more teachers. | Read

McCain pledging to NAACP more education options

07.16.2008 | Seattle Times | John McCain is telling the NAACP he will expand education opportunities for children in failing schools, including vouchers for children to attend private school. | Read

In Our View: More Learning

04.16.2008 | Vancouver Columbian | Justifiable demands for improved quality of public education will continue to reverberate fruitlessly until a stark confession is made: Students in Washington state and across America are not spending enough hours and enough days in classrooms. | Read

Seattle “pay-for-k” a cautionary tale for other states

04.07.2008 | New America Foundation - Early Ed Watch | Rounds up progress - and backsliding - in Minneapolis toward universal full-day kindergarten. Seattle Public Schools get a mention as a cautionary tale. | Read

With teacher turnover high, Vancouver schools shift recruiting effort to attract idealists

03.02.2008 | The Columbian | Washington state school districts are struggling to retain the teachers for whom retirement is still decades away. State schools Superintendent Terry Bergeson wrote in her five-year strategic plan that Washington’s attrition rate for new teachers is higher than the national average. “Lower paying districts have particular difficulty attracting and retaining teachers,” Bergeson wrote. The result, she said, is that “lower-income and minority students often don’t have equal access to the best-prepared instructors.” | Read

Tacoma School Board agrees to fund free full-day kindergarten

02.29.2008 | The News Tribune | If you want smarter high school graduates, you’d better start feeding students bigger doses of reading, writing, math and even coloring right from the start, Tacoma school officials believe. So starting this fall, free all-day kindergarten will be on the menu at every public school in the city. | Read

Support education programs that boost working families

02.17.2008 | Seattle Times | We all know education pays. It is the foundation of prosperity for most working families. The lack of an education is a factor in the rapidly growing income inequality in our state. As the educational-achievement gap widens between higher- and lower-income workers, so does the income gap. To begin erasing these disparities, more low-income working adults need to gain the education and skills necessary to compete for higher-wage jobs and prosper in our local economy. | Read

Nurturing human capital

02.17.2008 | Seattle Times | In the 19th century, industrialization swept the world. Many European nations expanded their welfare states but kept their education systems exclusive. The U.S. tried the opposite approach. American leaders expanded education and created the highest-quality work force on the planet. That quality work force was the single biggest reason the U.S. emerged as the economic superpower of the 20th century. That progress stopped about 30 years ago. | Read

Head Start: Raising Standards

02.08.2008 | Seattle Post-Intelligencer | During the past year, Congress and President Bush raised the standards for Head Start. That decision threatens to leave a Washington state program for young children even further behind the national model. With a little flexibility, though, establishing and funding a state Head Start will strengthen the academic and social foundations for thousands of lower-income children. | Read

Good education is key to everything

01.31.2008 | Everett Herald | Real estate professionals have proven time and again what you already know -- strong schools make for stronger home values. If your home is a major investment for you, then schools should be, too. | Read

Time to care major factor in gaps at school

12.09.2007 | New York Times | A new study by the Educational Testing Service - which develops and administers more than 50 million standardized tests annually, including the SAT, concludes that an awful lot of low test scores can be explained by factors that have nothing to do with schools...like high-quality day care and paid maternity leave. | Read

Where's the evidence that property taxes are too high?

12.12.2007 | Everett Herald | Our kids are falling behind in global standards, and education ends for the majority at 12th grade. This is not just about the need for our children to have the skills and the brains to compete globally. Public education is the foundation for democracy. | Read

Misguided law masks real progress schools have made

09.05.2007 | Everett Herald | Reading the paper I noticed that Ballard is once again on the list of "academically struggling" schools. It didn't make a lot of sense, until I read the fine print of the Leave No Child Behind law. This law slices and dices the student body until one sub-group emerges of students who aren't doing well. | Read

Full-day kindergarten too important to be phased in

03.21.2007 | Everett Herald | When kids start kindergarten, are they ready to learn? Too often, according to a survey of kindergarten teachers, they aren't. In 2004, kindergarten teachers found that more than half of their new learners were not prepared for the academic and social challenges of kindergarten. This isn't just a low-income problem. For those schools with mostly students from middle-income families, fully two out of five kids were deemed not ready to learn. | Read

Success matters both in the classroom and on the field

09.06.2006 | Tacoma News Tribune, Everett Herald | We have this fixation on WASL tests, but we also know that sports evens out the playing field for some kids left behind on exam day. It is an equal opportunity avenue for success and advancement. It is something every kid can be part of. We need to increase funding for sports, not cut that opportunity. So when we consider de-funding our public schools with Initiative 920, let’s remember who we are hurting. | Read (Tribune)| Read (Herald)

Repealing state estate tax would rob public education

06.14.2006 | Tacoma News Tribune, Everett Herald | Last week we got our first inkling of the WASL scores for 10th-graders. While more than 85 percent of kids passed the reading and writing tests, 45 percent did not make the grade in math. In order to graduate from high school, each child must pass all three tests. That means that as of today, every other kid in 10th grade has the credentials to graduate, and every other kid doesn’t. | Read (Tribune) | Read (Herald)

Use part of state surplus to fund sixth period in high school

12.14.2005 | Tacoma News Tribune | This week, Gov. Chris Gregoire proposed a major education initiative for young children. She recognizes that it makes a lot of sense to provide the foundation for learning early in a child’s life. And in the long term, it saves society a lot of money. As important as this new initiative is, it doesn’t do anything for the children who are already in the “pipeline.” | Read

Full-day kindergarten should be priority for Legislature

11.30.2005 | Tacoma News Tribune | Kindergarten teachers are confronted the first day in school with children who are not prepared to follow a sentence through to its end, who haven’t been read to, and who don’t know their numbers or their ABCs. Today, the state only pays for half-day kindergarten as part of basic education. But half-day kindergarten lasts two hours and 15 minutes – just about enough time to get these kids organized and almost ready to learn. So each day is too close to starting all over again. We could change this, with state funding for full-day kindergarten. It’s not a radical idea. And the results are proven. | Read

Educational improvements, investment must continue

06.29.2005 | Tacoma News Tribune | Our place in the world will rest on brainpower. If we want to compete, we have to give our children the skills to compete. Our democracy is based on an informed and thinking citizenry. If we want to renew our democracy, we must educate our kids in the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic and critical thinking. Our children – all of them – deserve the opportunity to learn and succeed. If we want to give them this chance, we have to invest in them now. | Read