Gregoire doesn’t like math or Mondays

The silicon chip needs an upgrade while students take a bye on the WASL

Every Tom Dick and Harry has an opinion on the short changing of our public schools by Olympia. Being a person who likes to see the opposite of what has been delivered by our sitting Governor and her predecessor in terms of education, here are a couple of obvious pointers voters should take note of. Yes we hear a lot of “blah blah blah” promises, but in 12 years we’ve yet to see our education system outperform the junk at the bottom of a septic tank.

First, the current class of high school flunkies started kindergarten around the same time Locke took office. We are nearing 3 terms of “promises” on education and pouring money into a funnel that goes anywhere and everywhere in the system but the classroom. When it does end in a classroom we see priorities on anything and everything other than learning the basics. It’s time to flatten the org structure and make some serious changes. Math and science are the keys to the next generation of engineers and business leaders, and our students are doing the exact opposite of excelling in these subjects.

If I had my nieces and nephews out on a construction jobsite for a week they would learn more about geometry than they would in a year of high school. What’s wrong with this picture?

Next, more cash is not the answer to this problem because educators have no forcing function to correlate cash to results, which burns them not only in getting more cash, but also in justifying why they should maintain the cash flow they currently have, while under performing against private schools that are operating on less in terms of capital resources.

Further on the cash subject. As a self declared tight wad- I’d be more than happy to fund teacher and district raises based on performance bonuses. You union types are doing no one- including yourselves any favors by opposing this concept. Let the bonus go to the entire district from principal to janitor- everyone wins and everyone is a stakeholder to get the job done. I’d like to see good work rewarded and I’m voting no on funding anything other than a sure return on my investment. To date, you’ve failed- so you’re negotiating in the show me state of Missouri instead of Washington as far as pay is concerned.

Lastly I want to point to a statistic near and dear to my political being: How many of these kids are in single parent homes and have less than 15% of their time with their non-resident parent? The correlation between under performers and single parents is around 95%.

This isn’t limited to bad social engineering by the family courts and the DSHS money train though. How many hours a week are parents spending on their kids in educational activities? I’ll take a wild stab that most parents of under performing students spent more time watching reality TV and dancing with the narcissists than they did doing something interactive with their kids.

Ah, now we’ve run full circle; these are the same voters who put the king and queen of educational promises in office. It takes a more than a Must See TV attention span to recall what promises a sitting politician made 4 years ago.