Published January 2006

Public education system
is failing; it’s time for change

By Marsha Richards
Guest Editorial

I’m disturbed by the questions that weren’t asked after state Superintendent Terry Bergeson recently admitted: “We can’t hide the fact that we gave diplomas last year to kids who couldn’t read.” She plans to remedy this outrage with a new $42 million, five-week summer program to teach basic reading, writing and math skills to high school students.

Here are some of the questions I think Bergeson should answer:

1. Nearly 60 percent of our state’s 10th-grade students failed at least one core subject on the WASL last year. How do you expect a five-week, $42 million summer program to make up for the apparent failure of 10 years of full-time schooling at a cost of billions?

2. You were leading the charge more than a decade ago in the state’s major education reform efforts, which promised that, by the year 2000, Washington’s students would “leave grades four, eight and 12 having demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including English, math and science,” and that at least 90 percent of our students would be graduating from high school. You have been the state’s top education official for the last nine years. How do you explain these broken promises?

3. Your office commissioned a review of the 10th-grade WASL, which concluded that reading standards amount to eighth- or ninth-grade content nationally and math standards amount to sixth- or early seventh-grade content internationally. Why do you continue to claim this test is rigorous and these standards are high?

4. If our state’s education reform efforts are still not working after 12 years of implementation, isn’t it time to admit we may be headed in the wrong direction?

Our current public education system is not a work in progress; it is a failure. It stifles rather than cultivates the most important factors in student achievement: highly qualified teachers in every classroom; clear and rigorous academic standards; strong school leaders; local control for parents, teachers and administrators; and meaningful parental involvement.

You can’t solve a problem until you acknowledge it exists, and you can’t solve it with the same kind of thinking that created it. Change is uncomfortable, but failure to change in this case is unacceptable. It’s time to do what works.

Marsha Richards directs the Evergreen Freedom Foundation’s Education Reform Center. For more information, go online to www.effwa.org.

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