C'mon, Chris

This is just silly:

After passing the Families and Education Levy, and managing to re-elect three of the four incumbents running for school board, the Emerald City rudely cast out School Board President, Steve Sundquist. In an upset, Seattle elected a retired substitute math teacher – a result that has some casting about for answers and left to wonder, what happened? Teachers’ union contributions happened. And likely a whole lot of other stuff. But without the benefit of exit polling, we’ll likely never know, exactly.

That's from Chris Korsmo of the League of Education Voters, and while she's already being beaten up pretty good in the comments section (+1 for transparency), it bears repeating:

• The incumbent who got tossed out, Steve Sundquist, raised about $50,600 according to the PDC website. The winner, Marty McLaren, totaled about $27,000, or roughly half what Director Sundquist did.
  
• About $9,000 of McLaren's money, a third, came from the WEA.
  
• Director Sundquist had 11 donors who gave more than $1,000. McLaren only had 5, including three from the WEA.
  
• Sundquist's top donor is the head of the Gates Foundation, along with his wife, in together for a total of $5,000, so there were motives to be found on both sides of the ledger.

When the LEV points out the union money as something of note without talking about the other money at the same time, it's pretty easy to think that there's an agenda. That "whole lot of other stuff" includes a dilly of a financial scandal, a fired superintendent, and a technically legal land deal that still had a stink to it in the newspapers.

It's funny when people who are very good at playing politics, like the LEV, complain about politics not breaking their way.

Read more here, if any.

In the Year 5399....If Kids Are Doing Fine....and the LEV is Over the Line.....You May Find.....

The first big education kerfuffle of the legislative session is regarding SB5399, proposed by Senator Rodney Tom, which would mandate that those teachers with the lowest evaluations were the first laid off, and order that the principal must agree before any teacher can be transferred into the building. You can read most of the obvious objections to the bill in this comment thread over at Publicola, but there are a couple of other pieces of media that deserve to be highlighted too:

On The Conversation on KUOW last week they had a segment with Mike Ragan, Vice President of the WEA, and Shannon Campion of Stand for Children, an advocacy group that has poured tens of thousands of dollars into supporting senators like Tom who will bring forward their bills. The money quote from Campion comes at the 15 minute mark, after a comment about how the bill will get in the way of teacher collaboration.

Shannon Campion: "Teachers won't get ranked in the school. The evaluation....that's not really connected to what this bill is all about. There's no public ranking or listing of teachers."

Shannon apparently didn't read the bill her group wrote, because that's exactly the entire purpose of what they're trying to do here: rank the teachers, and get rid of the ones on the bottom when the whim strikes. There's a math formula embedded within the bill that averages evaluations and comes up with a number for each teacher, fer chrissakes. To pretend that this isn't a ranking system is intellectually dishonest.

Then there's Chris Korsmo of the League of "Education" Voters:

Publicola covered the opposition to the bill which seemed a little ill-informed. The opposition, that is – ill informed. The bill includes a “mutual agreement” provision requiring the school principal and teacher to agree on the teacher’s placement. This legislation would be a great next step in the work to change the way we assess and value our teachers.

No comments on why the opposition is ill-informed, no sign of her participating in the debate over at Publicola, and no rebuttal of the very real objections that have been raised. Way to raise the debate, Chris.

My belief, on which I will not yield, is that RIF should be about economics and non-renewal should be about performance, and never the two should meet. Building a system where a principal has every incentive to give higher-paid employees worse evaluations so that they can put more money into their own budgets isn't in anyone's interest, but that's what this bill does. Elevating the principal above the contract, the superintendent, and the school board might make sense to some (hi, Liv), but to everyone else that's lunacy.

This is a bad bill. It won't make things better. It should go no farther.

Read more here, if any.