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Governor Proposes Great Big Agency to Take Control of Education, and Steps on a Thousand Toes in the Process

Article by Erik Smith. Published on Thursday, January 06, 2011 EST.

Dorn Denounces Power Grab, Calls it a Smokescreen – Would Create a Mega-Agency to Rival DSHS

 


Apparently they didn’t talk: Gov. Christine Gregoire proposes a big new state agency to oversee education, while Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn calls it a power grab.

By Erik Smith

Staff writer/ Washington State Wire

 

OLYMPIA, Jan. 6.—If you like the Department of Social and Health Services, you’ll love the state Department of Education.

            Gov. Christine Gregoire, not one to waste the opportunity of the state’s current budget crisis, on Wednesday announced a plan to combine all the state’s various education offices into a single mega-agency. It’s an enormous plan that hands control to the governor’s office, creates an agency that would rival DSHS in size, and steps on a thousand toes in the process. Not the least of them is state schools superintendent Randy Dorn, who spent much of the day denouncing the governor for a great big power grab, and for putting up “a smokescreen” to hide the fact that the state doesn’t have enough money to pay for basic obligations like schoolkids.

            But to be fair, it is an idea that has floated around for years. You can’t accuse the current arrangement of perfection. And in fact, Dorn himself seemed to endorse at least part of the idea during his 2008 campaign for the position. What seemed to irk him is that the governor didn’t bring him into the loop. She didn’t treat him as an equal.

            All of which seems to explain why the governor came up with the idea.

 

            Like Herding Cats

 

            Gregoire said she’s sick and tired of dealing with the state’s scattered education agencies – at least eight big ones, dealing with everything from preschool to night classes for grown-ups. And there are some 800-pound gorillas in there, like Dorn’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, which serves some pretty powerful political constituencies – like every elected school board in the state, and the massive Washington Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union.

            And then there are all of the state’s colleges and universities, which never have quite been tamed, despite more than 25 years of effort by state officials. Though the state Higher Education Coordinating Board was created back in the ’80s to help prevent turf wars and keep the state’s four-year schools marching in the same direction, you still get occasional running gun battles between institutions. And every one of those schools has strong supporters, often among the state’s business and commercial interests.

            Now just try getting all those interests to speak the same language. That’s part of it. There’s also the state’s embarrassing performance in last year’s national Race to the Top competition for federal education money. It was a top priority for Gregoire, but the state’s K-12 education system couldn’t get its act together, and Washington finished toward the bottom of the heap. The governor said she’s had enough.

“Right now I’ve been in this job six years,” she said. “I’ve spent six years trying to get the education system in the state of Washington to work. And finally I’ve realized it doesn’t work, because there’s no system.

“Duh, Gregoire. There’s no system.

“So you’ve gotta fix it by creating a system that has accountability and a single focus on what’s good for our kids. Not what’s good for me. Not how do I get more money. How do I get more territory? How do I do whatever? But what’s best for our kids. That’s what I think the Legislature is constantly trying to get to. I am as well. This is what affords them the opportunity to get that done.”

                       

            Would Combine Education Agencies

 

            Here’s Gregoire’s solution. She would combine all of the state’s education agencies into a single department, and give them a cabinet-level secretary – just like the vast majority of the state’s agencies. That secretary would report to the governor.        

“They get a single point of focus and accountability, which makes all of our lives a whole lot easier,” she said.

Gregoire’s staff handed out a new organizational flow chart that showed how everything would work. Scattered blobs of authority and power would be connected for the first time, and if you follow the lines upward they all go to a single point – the governor’s office.

Which raises two questions. Is it a good idea? And can it possibly be done?

 

Remember DSHS?

 

The whole plan is somewhat reminiscent of the plan to create the Department of Social and Health Services some 40-odd years ago. The idea was to combine all of the state’s social-service agencies under one roof and make administration more efficient. Certainly it centralized authority and made administration easier, but it also gave every critic of state government a single target. The agency has been hammered ever since by various interested parties for being big, unwieldy and unresponsive to their needs. And while there are a thousand beefs and a thousand different solutions, the idea that there is something wrong with DSHS seems to be the one point on which every constituent group seems to agree. Some big functions have since been removed – the state Department of Health was plucked out 20 years ago, and recently authority over Medicaid programs has been handed to the state Health Care Authority.

Gregoire said the big advantage of an education super-agency is that it would allow the state to decide its priorities and then carry them out – a big problem in an age when the state doesn’t have as much money to spend as it once did. When a thousand voices are lobbying the Legislature, it’s hard to sort them out.

Gregoire said she’d like to emphasize early learning programs, make the senior year of high school more rigorous, and develop a system that allows colleges and universities to raise tuition only when state support declines – lest college become too expensive.

But there’s also the chance that a huge mega-agency will earn the same rep as DSHS – a barely-understandable mess of an agency that no one can quite deal with, and which changes cabinet secretaries as frequently as Angelina Jolie replaces husbands.

“Streamlining governance and ensuring governance and accountability are important goals,” said Bruce Dammeier, ranking Republican on the House Education Committee. “However, the governor’s proposal, based on the limited details it provides, does not appear to accomplish those goals. I’m concerned it would create a new mega-agency, like the Department of Social and Health Services, which would not necessarily improve outcomes for students. Our state needs an education system that is flexible and responsive to the needs of children, and it’s hard to imagine this proposal would promote these objectives.”

 

            The Politics of the Thing

 

            And then there’s the other big question – is it politically feasible?

            Every one of those education agencies has its own powerful group of supporters, each of which would have a much tinier voice in a great big mega-agency. Some might be able to shout louder than others. An attempt to reach the Washington Education Association for comment Wednesday was not successful. But that’s just the most obvious player among a hundred various stakeholder groups that would be affected by the proposal. Take the state’s colleges and universities. Said Kathy Haigh, D-Shelton, chairwoman of the House Education Appropriations Committee, “We have our four-year institutions, which are not really used to having anyone tell them what to do.”

            Neither is Dorn. The proposal would put his office in the strangest position of all. As the superintendent of public instruction, Dorn is an independently elected state official and the master of his own domain. But he would wind up reporting to an appointee of the governor.

            “I don’t know anything in the constitution that would prevent this,” Gregoire said.

            And if you go back to the debates that took place during the 2008 election, Dorn himself said he wouldn’t oppose a move to make the position a gubernatorial appointee. But to make it a subsidiary position, a couple of notches down on the flow chart? No more important than the person in charge of preschool? Dorn seemed to have as many problems with that as he did with the fact that the governor didn’t consult with him in the first place.

 

            Dorn Denounces Power Grab

 

            “I’m concerned, first of all, that I heard the proposal the same time as the media did,” Dorn said in a statement he issued Wednesday afternoon. “The conversation I had with the governor this morning did not reflect what she said in her press conference. And in fact, members of the media were given more specific information than I was given by the governor.”

            Despite what he said in 2008, Dorn now says he is totally opposed to the idea. The idea of an independent office is a noble concept enshrined by 122 years of tradition.

“Every governor I’ve known has wanted more power,” he said. “They’ve tried to abolish offices. That is not in our constitution. Ours is direct election by the citizens of this great state.

“The governor can create any staff position she wants. Her proposal, however, would require the state superintendent to report to a new secretary of education. I am an elected official. My boss is the people of people of this state, not the governor. That is state law, explicit in article III of the state constitution. Would the governor also suggest that the other elected officials report to a governor-appointed official?

            “What troubles me most, though, is that this feels like a smokescreen. The most pressing issue we face is lack of funding. In February 2009, a King County Superior Court Judge ruled that basic education is underfunded in this state – and that ruling was based on financial data from two years before. Since then, education has been cut even futher. Consolidating commissions and eliminating agencies isn’t a bad idea, but it takes time and energy away from much more pressing issues.”


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