Surprisingly enough, now that he is freed from trying to pander for liberal votes since he is retiring, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn did something right for once. This week, he filed a lawsuit against seven school districts that — as the Freedom Foundation puts it — “have been complicit, lazy or bullied into letting the union contract negotiations take money away from student needs.”
Teachers union bosses have — for quite some time – negotiated to pull funding from educational programs in order to use for pay raises and expensive benefits for their members. According to the Freedom Foundation, teachers unions “use of strikes, bullying or outright buying of school board seats is one of the primary reasons that increases in funding have not resulted in commensurate increases in services, materials or facilities.”
Dorn insists that he filed lawsuit “not to blame school districts but to put pressure on lawmakers to fully fund public education.” But, for whatever reason Dorn did it and, if his lawsuit is successful, the shady practice of pulling funding from kids will have to end — and, ultimately, that’s what’s important.
This is a very interesting event in Olympia. Dorn was a member of the democratic majority in the legislature that by-in-large turned their collective backs on education and reduced funding over a number of years and put the system into peril that education now suffers from, all the while, taking huge sums of campaign dollars from the teachers union. What an incredible turn around. What is Dorn up to? At some point, I am sure there will be a huge epiphany and Dorn will ask for forgiveness for his past transgressions and he really didn’t want to vote to reduce education funding…haven’t we heard this type of grandstanding from public officials before? This is nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt that he is trying to use to define his legacy in a favorable light rather than telling the truth about what he has actually done: NOTHING!!! as Superintendent of Public Instruction. Nice try Superintendent Dorn-it’s a little too late to save your legacy.
Why is Dorn’s lawsuit based on a disparity of pay for schoolteachers? When will someone look at the needs in educating students in Washington? Dorn has said some teachers are getting 21st century wages and some students are getting 21st century educations and he concludes we need more money to give those lower paid teachers pay increases so they are getting 21st century pay. What about the students? Dorn knows exactly the pay scales of each school district and is basing his targets for his lawsuit on these compensation figures. So why does he not tell us which school districts are most successful in teaching students? Perhaps Everett is producing the most highly educated kids in the state? If so, maybe pay is the answer. But why hasn’t Dorn presented that information? Could it be that there is no correlation between pay scale and results?
Just a thought.
Hard to say, very hard to say since the WEA refuses to discuss results. And any discussion of merit pay will immediately result in chants of strike, strike, strike. After all they simply must reward long standing union membership over abilities.
And all of the strikes, the court decrees, etc ignore one simple fact, the increase in education costs over the last decade have been largely from a growing education administrative burden.