Rossi on Education

I'm over in Seattle today for a WEA conference on small/rural locals and collective bargaining. I'll have a post later tonight on some of the things I've learned.

One of the things I miss about Western Washington is being able to get so many daily newspapers. Where I grew up, in Rochester, you could get the Seattle Times, the Seattle PI, the Tacoma News-Tribune, the Olympian, the Portland Oregonian, the Centralia Chronicle, and a couple other small town dailies and weeklies. In Spokane you've got the Spokesman, one reliable weekly, and not a whole lot else. I've had a love affair with newspapers since I was able to read, so it's nice to get back to this side of the state and meet up with the old flames again.

Anyhow, the big story in Washington politics today is Dino Rossi declaring that he'll be running for governor again in 2008. You might remember the 2004 race, when Senator Rossi won the first two counts of the ballots before Governor Gregoire squeaked ahead in a third count where the veracity of the process in King County especially was questionable, and that's coming from a loyal dem.

Rossi had a big kickoff yesterday for his next run, and all three papers I read highlighted what he said about education. As a teacher, there's some things there that worry me. For example, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

In education, Rossi promised to seek merit pay for teachers and principals, encourage more college graduates to teach math and science, relax accreditation rules "to bring new talent into the classroom," and use standardized testing to judge schools and school districts, "not just the students."

When a school consistently fails, principals should have "emergency powers to hire better staff and adopt a new curriculum," he said, "and when we see an entire school district consistently fail, I want to require new school board elections."

That's a hell of an agenda, but even beyond the question of whether it's doable or not, are these worthy changes?

1. Merit Pay: Please, please, please read NYC Educator and Eduwonk to check out the commentary on the recent merit pay proposal adopted in New York City. The big thing there is that it's more money going into the schools, but if Rossi is going to stand firm on not raising taxes and controlling spending, where is this additional money going to come from?
   
   Long-time readers know that I'm not reflexively against merit pay, but I think that if it's done it has to be researched like hell before you put it into the schools. Would Rossi have the discipline to start small and expand? Would a merit proposal from him even have a chance of getting past the WEA?
   
   
2. Relaxed accreditation rules: Really, Senator? It light of everything that's going on with teacher misconduct being in the news and the highly qualified rules built into NCLB, there's a dual pronged question here: even if you could make getting into the classroom easier, should you?
   
   
3. Emergency principal powers: Why? Proposals like this perpetuate the myth that principals are powerless in the face of the teachers and their big, bad union, but at the end of the day I think a skillful principal who works hard can make a change no matter what obstacles are in their path. Further, a bad principal with more power to hire, fire, and adopt bad curriculum is going to set your school back, not take them to the promised land.
   
   
4. Requiring new school board elections: I'm no constitutional scholar, but I'm willing to bet that it would take a reworking of the state constitution to give the governor the ability to fire school boards whole cloth. Further, what does that mean for local control?

There's a lot here to think about, and I've not even touched on the Seattle Times and the Tacoma News-Tribune articles yet. It will be interesting to see where the vision goes; more details are necessary.