No, indicted State Auditor Troy Kelley didn’t show up to yesterday’s State of the State address, but that’s not to say there wasn’t a little drama. The chair next to Kelley’s also sat empty, with a note left behind.
That was the attention-getting move by state Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn, who was protesting what he deems a lack of urgency by Gov. Jay Inslee on education funding. The News Tribune reports:
The elected superintendent of public instruction walked into the chambers of the state House along with other statewide elected officials, as is a customary part of the ceremony before the governor’s annual address. But he quickly exited before the governor took the podium, leaving a note on his chair at the front of the chamber.
Dorn later said the note read, “Reserved for kids and students.”
The paper noted that a big sticking point for Dorn, who is not running for re-election this year, was the lack of any proposal to deal with the over-reliance on local levies for education funding. “Inslee’s proposed supplemental budget for 2016 doesn’t include a plan to address the state’s unconstitutional reliance on local property tax levies to pay for basic education costs, something the state Supreme Court said the Legislature must address by 2018 as part of the McCleary education funding lawsuit.”
The issue, known as levy reform, is a difficult topic in Olympia. One proposed solution is to lower local school levies while raising the state property tax by the same amount. That would help the state address the issue of over-relying on local levies without expanding the total amount taxed. The problem with that is, some areas would do better than others under the proposal. The plan would like mean a tax cut in less wealthy school districts while increasing costs in property-rich areas like Seattle and Bellevue.
It is far past time to Disolve the Education lobby, the Public Instruction bureaucracy and shut down and prosecute the WEA for child abuse, theft, corruption, collusion and whatever can be found for charges to be pressed.
These mobsters have failed all students in the state, the public school system is just a toxic propaganda machine not a path to education and success in life.
The whole system needs to be privatized, immediately.
Agreed. Things work so much better when taxpayer money is given directly to corporations.
Get help, extortion is a crime, theft is a crime, squandering Taxpayers dollars should be a crime.
‘The unions and the Education Associations have proven over an over they are not “For The Children”. In fact exactly the opposite.
We should disband the unions under the RICO statutes and let the teachers choose their own representatives not thugs that continue to extort and badger them.
It is well past time to end this corrupt monopoly and start rewarding Teachers for excellence. Pay them better than they are paid by taking the money wasted on the “Education Association” thugs and spend it on the Deserving Teachers.
Liberalism is a severe mental illness.
Dorn should have simply sat down and shut up. When people complain about the state of education, they ignorantly point at teachers without understanding that it’s Dorn and the neoliberal crowd in Olympia that are responsible for the mess we’re in. (The Republican Party’s meddling in not funding public schools is simply frosting on the cake.) Add in the Washington State Board of Education, the U.S. Department of Education, and Bill Gates and who needs the inability of the WEA to figure out where they stand on core issues in education? There will be no fix to the education system at all if we leave it up to politicians to work out.
It is simple, just pull your children from those government indoctrination day jails we euphemistically call public schools, and let them unschool. “public education crushes creativity, curiosity and the natural love of learning, refuses to teach the importance of government obeying the Constitution of these united States of America or what is the purpose of the Constitution (rules for the government which government currently totally ignores), the real history of the Founding of this union of sovereign States, or the time since that founding. Kids learn better when they do it the way humans learned in all the millennia before the Prussian system of indoctrination, sorry I mean “education” was introduced in this country, it is called unschooling and is best explained by this award winning teacher — John Taylor Gatto. With not enough children attending those day jails, they then go out of business and the taxation that supports them will also fall by the wayside (if not we must demand that).
I couldn’t vote in your poll because Gary Johnson was not on the list.
Good thing he left a note. Otherwise someone might have thought he was just MIA as usual.
Well my suggestion if you want more money for education, would be cut all teachers pay by 10% and put them to work on a 48 week schedule like the rest of the working population. Teachers start out in most districts in Washington just below the average wage of Washington workers and it goes steadily up very quickly from there. Remember the NEA is one of the leading lobbying group in Washington and also in America.