Washington should follow California’s lead and resist flawed federal education demands

Next week Wash­ing­ton Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee will meet with U.S. Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary Arne Dun­can to dis­cuss the state’s waiv­er from the require­ments of the failed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. Last year Dun­can’s depart­ment threat­ened to revoke the waiv­er unless the state leg­is­la­ture man­dat­ed that dis­tricts include stu­dent test scores in teacher eval­u­a­tions. Cur­rent­ly dis­tricts have flex­i­bil­i­ty on how to define “stu­dent growth” mea­sure­ments and can refuse to base teacher eval­u­a­tions on test scores — which is a good move for teacher morale and ensures com­pre­hen­sive, qual­i­ty instruc­tion for our students.

The Inslee-Dun­can meet­ing was caused by the State Sen­ate’s wise rejec­tion of a bill that would link scores to eval­u­a­tions. Sev­en Repub­li­cans joined the Democ­rats in vot­ing down SB 5246, buck­ing their cau­cus to side with a grow­ing nation­al revolt against the cul­ture of stan­dard­ized testing.

But before Gov­er­nor Inslee meets with Sec­re­tary Dun­can, he should place a call to his col­league in Cal­i­for­nia. Gov­er­nor Jer­ry Brown and the state leg­is­la­ture faced a sim­i­lar threat from Dun­can, who vowed to revoke the NCLB waiv­er and take back mil­lions in fed­er­al fund­ing from Cal­i­for­nia schools. Cal­i­for­nia reject­ed the demand and so far, Dun­can has not fol­lowed through on his threat.

The sit­u­a­tion in Cal­i­for­nia was sim­i­lar, though not pre­cise­ly the same, as in Wash­ing­ton State. Cal­i­for­nia is mov­ing to a new statewide stan­dard­ized test­ing sys­tem aligned with the Com­mon Core cur­ricu­lum. That sys­tem will not be ready until the 2014–15 school year. It made no sense for the state to force teach­ers to give stu­dents the now obso­lete STAR test. So the Cal­i­for­nia Leg­is­la­ture adopt­ed AB 484 to sus­pend STAR tests for the 2013–14 year.

Sec­re­tary Dun­can spoke out against this bill, but Gov­er­nor Brown was not moved:

Jim Evans, a spokesman for Brown, said Tues­day in a state­ment, “We sup­port the legislation.”

“There is no rea­son to dou­ble-test stu­dents using out­dat­ed, inef­fec­tive stan­dards dis­con­nect­ed from what’s taught in the class­room,” Evans added.

Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Super­in­ten­dent of Pub­lic Instruc­tion Tom Tor­lak­son rose to defend Cal­i­for­ni­a’s abil­i­ty to make its own laws regard­ing stu­dent assessments:

“I’m dis­ap­point­ed some­one in Wash­ing­ton would want to inter­fere in the leg­isla­tive process in Cal­i­for­nia,” Tor­lak­son told The Bee.

Cal­i­for­nia and Wash­ing­ton are not the only states push­ing back against fed­er­al edu­ca­tion man­dates. New York is press­ing the pause but­ton on the Com­mon Core stan­dards man­dat­ed by the U.S. Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion. The back­lash to these man­dates is bipar­ti­san and spans the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum.

States are tra­di­tion­al­ly lab­o­ra­to­ries of inno­va­tion. Wash­ing­ton State has inno­vat­ed a sen­si­ble approach to teacher eval­u­a­tion that is a fair com­pro­mise between many of the dif­fer­ent posi­tions in the debate. No par­ent wants their child’s edu­ca­tion to be focused sole­ly on test scores. Nor do they want their child’s cur­ricu­lum to be nar­rowed to exclude sub­jects that aren’t on stan­dard­ized tests. Wash­ing­ton should con­tin­ue down its own path, rather than have to give in to a fed­er­al man­date that will lead schools to teach to the test rather than teach to the child.

Gov­er­nor Inslee should stand firm in his meet­ing with Sec­re­tary Dun­can in defense of Wash­ing­ton’s inno­v­a­tive mod­el. He should enlist sup­port from his fel­low gov­er­nor in Sacra­men­to, and from oth­ers around the coun­try who are grow­ing con­cerned at a lack of col­lab­o­ra­tion and an unwill­ing­ness to respect local con­trol on the part of the U.S. Depart­ment of Education.