By Lisa Macfarlane, DFER Washington State Director
Education reform ground is finally shaking in Washington State and you can now see some fault lines.
After a lively exchange between one of the state’s largest Democratic donors and strongest public school advocates, Nick Hanauer, and the President of the Washington Education Association, Mary Lindquist, the Chair of the State Democratic Party, Dwight Pelz, weighed in with a spirited defense of the status quo. No surprise there, since D’s in our state get an awful lot of money from the WEA. But Mr. Pelz’s open hostility to education reform was special. Mr. Pelz told the Seattle Times, “Ed reform is like the weather, if you hang around, it will change.”
And then there’s our Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire with her hardheaded unscientific opposition to charter schools and her treat to veto any charter school bill that gets to her desk. “I have told them I will veto it. I will veto it,” said Gregoire.
Governor Gregoire does not seem to care that 41 other states have charter schools and she must have missed the memo from President Obama and his Democratic administration promoting their strong support for the expansion of high quality public charters. Why would our Democratic President do such a thing, our state party leaders might ask? Because there is an urgent need to accelerate student achievement in under-represented groups, and the research shows that public charter schools serving low-income, urban students consistently outperform traditional public schools.