The real gold in this speech is talking about creating assessments that target higher level thinking. In this regard, I think the business sector needs to be involved in letting academia know which skills are most necessary to be successful. When America included business minds in the design of education (think Henry Ford), America led the world in education. There is still a tremendous resource available that needs to be tapped.

I also appreciate Duncan’s call to find common ground. The students I work with are fighting a system that isn’t working. It’s going to take compromise and guts to change it.

For me, I got a very skewed document stating WSPTSA would initiate and/ or support charter legislation. These forums should have been held BEFORE Hattendorf was in Olympia speaking on my behalf.

NO, Ramona Hattendorf does not speak as one united voice for WSPTSA.

Public schools can have a college focus. There are public school students who take the SAT in middle school as part of that Johns Hopkins program. There are public school staff who also stretch, stay late, and answer emails from families.

There is nothing that charter schools can do for students that public schools can’t do.

As far as the forum goes, there should be discussion about the bill itself. You can talk until the cows come home about social justice, costs, etc. but you have to talk about the realities of what would be happening in Washington State if this bill passed.

LEV continues to ignore the real problems in this bill. Senator Tom, on KUOW, was neither clear nor truthful on some of the issues. He stated that charters would only be in areas with educationally disadvantaged students. That is not true and unless he hasn’t read his own bill, he would know it.

It is wrong to mislead, tell half-truths or hide realities about this bill in order to gain charters in Washington State. I hope this forum does not do that.

NOVA students come from all over the district. Most choose NOVA right out of middle school, but many come there after finding a traditional high school didn’t work for them. Every year NOVA has some of the highest average SAT scores in the district and sends students to competitive colleges, including Ivy League schools.

Charter school proponents would do well to come visit NOVA and see what can be done – and has been done for decades – in public schools. We don’t need charter schools for any of it. Finally, NOVA does it cheaply. It receives the lowest funding per student of any high school in Seattle.

You might want to throw Senator Tom into the mix.

No, the fish you smell is their bill. No matter your view on charter schools, this is not a good bill and that’s why it shouldn’t have gotten out of committee. One more time (and if anyone from LEV wants to stick up for the bill and say why it works, please do so but no one seems to have that courage). It is not enough to say “it’s for the kids”. We are way past that kind of thinking and need strategic and targeted ideas/actions.

FYI, in Senator Tom’s letter to people who write to him on this subject he says,

“I’m surprised by the veracity of the pushback on charter schools.”

Either he doesn’t know what veracity means or he really believes that the pushback DOES have truth to it. He also says:

“Most of the fiscal note is associated with the transformation zones portion of the bill, not charters.”

Yes, that is true that most of the money in this bill goes to transformation zones (schools that are taken over by the state). However, ALL the money in this bill goes to administrative purposes. None goes to the classroom.

There is no new revenue to be found and Senator Tom does not identify where the money WILL come from. NOBODY will identify where this money is to come from. And, I’m sure whoever is the next governor will appreciate a brand-new commission being plunked into the governor’s office complete with paying the costs of the commission.

The bill itself:

- first off, it’s 3 bills in one – that’s not the way to create good legislation.

- The bill provides that the majority of authorized charters should go to entities who work with “educationally disadvantaged students.” So all 10 authorizations could go to charters that just work with these students. Or none of them.

- If the authorizers each find 10 charter proposals for educationally disadvantaged students, there’s 30 of them. The state says you can only have 10 charters per year. You might think – well, great, there’s 30 approved charters for educationally disadvantaged students, so they would send them to another set of eyes who would then look over the 30 approved charters and pick the very best 10 to serve disadvantaged students.

Nope. The 30 names go into a lottery and get picked. So for all the talk about how great KIPP is, you still might not get a KIPP school. So we can open charters that score very high on the approval OR are just barely clear the bar for the criteria.

- What is troubling is that this bill allows authorizers to contract out their responsibilities out to other employees or contractors. At the end of the day, how does the public know who really read and reviewed any charter proposal?

- There are a couple of places in the bill where religious/sectarian groups are mentioned. One place is who can create a charter and the other place is about donations. In neither place can a religious group or sectarian group open a charter nor donate to a charter school.

However, when it comes to types of charters, the wording says charters can have “theme” but cannot be sectarian. There is no mention of religion in this section.

This is worrisome because in states like Minnesota, New York, and New Jersey they have had issues over ethnically themed charter schools opening that include teaching about religion as being part of an ethnic group. The school cannot promote or teach how to practice a religion but you can have religious services at the school after the school day ends.

- This legislation does NOT provide for background checks and child abuse registry checks for charter school board members. Anyone who will be part of a charter school, whether founders, employees or members of a governance team, should have to have a background check to be around children.

- Only non-profits can start charters BUT they can then contract any services, including the management and operations of a charter school to any FOR-PROFIT company. Bringing in for-profit companies to make money off of running public schools is troubling.

- In talking about providing a plan for educationally disadvantaged students, the bill mentions, “student discipline for Special Education students.” Why are these students are called out specifically for discipline issues?

- There is no requirement in this bill for parents to be part of the chartering process, whether it is for parents in the neighborhood where the school is to be located OR parents who enroll their children at the charter school.

The bill does not allow for any redress by parents of students in the school or by neighbors in the community where the charter sits.

- Charters have the right of first refusal to purchase/lease at or below fair market value, a closed facility or property OR unused portions of a public school facility or property if the district decides to sell or lease the facility or property.

This bill is too big, too lax and does not address the very issue it says it does; helping educationally disadvantaged students.

The above issues are why McAuliffe and Tomiko-Santos do not want this bill going out of committee. It is not a good bill.

What I hear a lot of people saying is what they DON’T want and what SHOULD happen. They make a lot of noise, type a lot of words. But I don’t hear them saying what can be done NOW that they’re actually DOING, directly helping kids. Maybe I’ve missed that.

No one wants to talk about the upheaval to districts that this could cause.

No one wants to talk about districts losing control of buildings via charter conversion (via the parent trigger which is a source of HUGE controversy in other states).

No one is talking about how this bill doesn’t guarantee – in any way – that charters for educationally disadvantaged students WILL open. They could but they might not. And, if there are 30 charters proposals for educationally disadvantaged students but they can only open 10 schools, will a second set of eyes look at the proposals and pick the best ones? Nope, they go into a lottery. It’s kind of funny thinking that KIPP could get kicked out because their name didn’t get picked out of a bowl.

This legislation does NOT provide for background checks and child abuse registry checks for charter school board members. Anyone who will be part of a charter school, whether founders, employees or members of a governance team, should have to have a background check to be around children.

In talking about providing a plan for educationally disadvantaged students, the bill mentions, “student discipline for Special Education students.” Why are these students are called out specifically for discipline issues?

Charters have the right of first refusal to purchase/lease at or below fair market value, a closed facility or property OR unused portions of a public school facility or property if the district decides to sell or lease the facility or property. It’s okay for cash-poor districts to have to sell for LESS than market value to a charter school?

This bill is flawed, very flawed. Whether you like charters or not, this is not the way to do it.

Cost the taxpayers more and provide no better education!

Thanks for all your thoughtful comments and continued fight against a flawed policy that the LEV is promoting. I hope that our legislators will remember how we’ve voted against this idea three times already!!

It is precisely the immeasurable that contributes most to the growth of an individual and a student, “measuring” everything is precisely what is wrong with the outsider so-called “reformers” who haven’t a clue what it really takes to educate each and every student, in my humble opinion, while each assesment just overloads an already taxed teaching staff with yet another test to teach to.

disappointing, but I see that this isn’t about the students anymore for LEV. moving my support to the educators who have dedicated their lives to their students instead.

There is no reason that she could not have had that same experience in a public school. Nothing that she described as a feature of her school could not happen at a public school.

There is nothing that a charter school can do that a public school cannot do.

There is nothing that a charter school can do that a public school cannot do.

What is the problem that people are really trying to solve here? The problem appears to be that school districts are not responsive to the needs of the community. School districts are the most local form of democracy we have. If we cannot get our elected school boards to meet our needs, then what hope do we have for democratic control of the county or state? It strikes me as a strange surrender for a political organization, such as LEV, to discount any potential for influencing the most local politics in the state.

I wish I had all the answers, but, like you, I really do have more questions than answers about the best way(s) to improve the public education system for all stakeholders. I’ll try to address some things here, though.

Can we identify what it is that leads to better outcomes for these students? I think so. But it will require more research, open minds, and constructive debate (like what we have here). I’ll get back to this later.

You have concerns about lack of enforcement and accountability under the current system and I could not agree more. We have systems in place at the school, district, state, and even federal level that make accountability hard. People and organizations who can, surround themselves with barriers, making it difficult to enforce the accountability that we should expect as taxpayers.

The best way to combat this is through active, engaged, knowledgeable (insert emphasis there) taxpayers and stakeholders. My post above is to help everyone be properly informed about all aspects of the debate around education reform (in this case, yes, charters). It makes my head hurt when I see people (you and I have both seen them) who make snap decisions on an issue without anywhere near enough or accurate information. Nobody here wants that (I hope). Some folks have been throwing around data from a particular study and it’s pretty clear to me that they did not read the whole report. They regurgitate (often incorrectly) one piece of data that supports their view and close their minds to the rest of the data. This is not good for anyone and it also does not make for constructive debate or good policy.

While I agree with you that we all need to hold our bureaucrats, administrators, and public servants accountable, I don’t feel like charters are a distraction. Back to your first question, can we identify what it is that leads to better outcomes for these students? I think there are important lessons we can learn from charter systems, private school systems, home schooling, innovation schools, entrepreneurial teachers, and district administrators who think outside the box. I think it would be a huge mistake for us to disregard lessons we can glean from any of those sources and I hope that everyone takes care to be as informed as possible in this important policy debate.

Thanks for your post and your involvement.