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Inslee Delivers Bad Word From D.C. – Legislature Better Pass Teacher Evaluation Bill, Despite Union Opposition

Gov. Jay Inslee meets briefly with reporters in his office Tuesday afternoon.

Gov. Jay Inslee meets briefly with reporters in his office Tuesday afternoon.

OLYMPIA, Feb. 26.—Uh-oh. The feds weren’t fooling.

So says Gov. Jay Inslee, who met behind closed doors with legislative Democrats and Republicans Tuesday afternoon to let them know the U.S. Department of Education isn’t about to back off. That means they’re going to have a pass a teacher-evaluation bill over opposition from the state teachers’ union, the Washington Education Association. It is the kind of prospect that makes strong Democrats gulp.

They’ll have to get over it sometime in the next 15 days, before the current legislative session comes to an end. Inslee and Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn are drafting a bill that would make a modest change in the state’s teacher-and-principal evaluation program. Student performance on standardized tests would have to be considered when job-performance is rated. Right now it’s an option. If the state doesn’t make that change, school districts will lose roughly $40 million a year in federal funding for local programs. Maybe even worse, virtually every parent of a school-age child in the state will get a letter informing them that their local schools are failing, and that they are entitled to pull them out and enroll them somewhere else. Not a positive message for school districts that depend on voter-approved levies and bond issues.

“This funding is crucial in our efforts to support struggling students, and I think everyone in Olympia agrees we must do everything we can to preserve it,” Inslee said.

What it means, though, is that legislative Democrats are going to have to make a terrible decision — to turn their backs on their allies in the Washington Education Association, which has been pulling out the stops this session to defeat the bill. Last week, in a dramatic vote on the floor of the state Senate, union opposition forced Democrats to vote en masse against a bill they had written that would have made precisely that change. A handful of Republicans also voted against the measure, for different reasons, and it went down on a highly unusual 28-19 vote. Now it looks like lawmakers are going to have to swallow hard and do it all over again. Same thing will have to take place in the House.

Rock and a Hard Place

Senate Majority Coalition education leads Bruce Dammeier, R-PUyallup, and Steve Litzow, R-Mercer Island.

Senate Majority Coalition education leads Bruce Dammeier, R-Puyallup, and Steve Litzow, R-Mercer Island.

It is the kind of dilemma that can make solons go weak in the knees, at least some of those of the Democratic persuasion. Turn against a special-interest group? One that is among the most generous backers of Democratic political campaigns, both in terms of money and ground-troop support? For weeks now, the union has been making the pitch that Washington state could go to the feds and ask them to bend the rules. Now the feds are saying Washington can forget it. 

Washington is one of seven states that have obtained “waivers” from the feds from a requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act, that they use standardized tests in teacher performance reviews. It is a mandate that raises the hackles of the politically powerful union: Standardized tests aren’t a fair way to assess teachers, it maintains, in part because students aren’t taught by the same teacher from year to year. The state’s current law allows districts to consider student performance on standardized state tests, and some of them do – but it is considered a matter between districts and local unions, to be settled at the bargaining table.

The U.S. Department of Education has put the seven states on notice that they are at “high risk” of losing their waivers if they do not change their teacher-evaluation laws. And the perhaps-presumptious idea that this Washington might be singled out for a special break seems to have run up against a brick wall in the other. In his closed-door meeting with legislative leaders Tuesday, Inslee let them know that idea is a no-go.

“He basically said he was unable to convince the Department of Education to go forward with a waiver without legislation,” said state Sen. Steve Litzow, R-Mercer Island, chairman of the Senate Early Learning and K-12 Education Committee.

He added, “We’re trying to get a bill out that we can all get behind. We are very encouraged that the Democrats have finally figured out that we have to do this.”

Inslee spoke briefly with reporters after the meeting. The governor said he was told that a bill phasing in the new rule by the 2017-18 school year would pass federal muster. That would give the state a chance to roll out its teacher-evaluation program and a new “common core” curriculum before the testing mandate kicks in. Now his staff is working with that of state schools superintendent Randy Dorn to come up with language. “We think this is a reasonable proposal,” he said.

A Most Difficult Decision

It might seem like a no-brainer, but you always have to account for politics. The 83,000-member teachers’ union has made opposition to the measure one of its top priorities of the session, second only to a teacher pay raise. It has meant conniption fits for Democrats, many of whom represent districts that stand to lose big if no bill passes. The bill is going to be a tough thing for the WEA to swallow, given the tough fight it has mounted to block the measure this session, said Frank Ordway of the League of Education Voters. “They have got the whole village up in arms with their pitchforks and everything,” he said. Yet the high stakes compel lawmakers to pass the bill “through gritted teeth.”

At risk in the Seattle School District is $2.8 million; in Tacoma $2 million, and some seven districts across the state stand to lose $1 million. Every district stands to lose something, but the effect is greatest in districts with heavy concentrations of minority students.

The way the law works, if the federal waiver is ended, school districts that receive federal Title 1 funds would have to set aside 20 percent of the money. It would pay for transportation and education costs for parents who wish to pull their kids out of a failing school and enroll them in a non-failing school or in a tutoring program. The hitch is that under federal definitions, virtually every school in the state would be declared to be failing. And when the federal dollars are yanked from local education programs, it means teachers would be laid off and programs would be canceled or curtailed. The Tacoma School District has estimated that it would have to close six preschools and reduce other programs.

For now, WEA is drawing no conclusions. Said spokesman Rich Wood, “We haven’t seen anything yet, so we have no specific response, but teachers still believe mandating the use of state test scores in teacher evaluations is premature and will undercut the collaborative work we’re doing to successfully implement the new evaluation system in Washington. We need time to make sure the student tests we use are reliable and valid, and forcing schools to use unproven test scores to evaluate teachers will undermine confidence in the fairness of the system.”

Not Much Choice

Senate Democratioc Education leads Christina Rolfes, D-Bainbridge Island, and Rosemary McAuliffe, D-Bothell.

Senate Democratic education leads Christine Rolfes, D-Bainbridge Island, and Rosemary McAuliffe, D-Bothell.

Democratic lawmakers didn’t have much to say on the way out of Inslee’s office.  “We have to see what these guys come up with,” said Senate Democratic education lead Rosemary McAuliffe, D-Bothell. “They understand our concerns.”

But Superintendent Randy Dorn said there really isn’t much choice to make. All session long he has been urging lawmakers to pass a bill that would change the law and protect the waiver. The consequences of losing it are too great, he says. Dorn said he has never been troubled by the use of standardized tests in teacher evaluations — the more data, the better. “I think it should be an element of the evaluation, and that is where I have always been, so this is an easy thing for me,” he said.

At this point it is unclear precisely what mechanism will be used to revive the teacher-evaluation bill in this year’s legislative session. Technically speaking, the vote last week in the Senate was the last shot for Senate Bill 5246 – it has been deemed a measure not necessary to implement the budget, and so the bill “died” when it failed to win passage in the Senate on the deadline day for passage of bills out of the their chambers of origin. Lawmakers might try to pass a bill in the House, where no such determination has been made; there are also several procedural tactics that might be employed in the Senate.

Dorn says he figures lawmakers will ultimately make the right decision. Probably, anyway. “You know, this is the Legislature. Nobody can be overconfident in the Legislature.”


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