By Kristin

Today Washington's governor, Chris Gregoire, announced she would like to streamline education.  Currently, she says, “We don’t have an education system in our state … we have a collection of agencies that deal with education."

Her solution?  To group all of the educational agencies into one single, cabinet-level Department of Education, headed by a Secretary appointed by the Governor rather than our current, elected, Superintendent of Public Education.  To see the clear difference between what is and what might be, look at pages five and six of the policy brief.

What might this entail?  What might educators think about this?  How might it affect us?

Frankly, I don't care. I'm too concerned with the budget slashes to social services and education.  Despite Gregoire's promise that "All students will enter kindergarten prepared for success in school and life" (page 4 of the brief), she has proposed to eliminate a number of programs that work directly with families to ensure the safety, well-being, and academic preparedness of young children, and that work to help teachers address the gap between their well-prepared and unprepared elementary students. 

Look at the Proposed Budget Program Eliminations.  Saving $216,000,000 by eliminating the K-4 Enhancement program that reduces class size is a bad decision.  Putting a little extra into K-4 makes sense if the Governor will be able to keep her promise that "all students will attain high academic standards regardless of race, ethnicity, income or gender, and more students from under-represented groups will earn bachelor's degrees."  That's easy to say.  It's even easy to expect, but harder to deliver if you're a kindergarten teacher in a high-poverty school with 34 kindergarteners who don't know their alphabet.  It's even harder to deliver eight years later, when you're a middle school teacher with angry, detached fourteen-year olds who hate school and are starting to commit crimes because it's easier and more fun than doing homework.

The children who are unprepared for kindergarten are often poor children, so let's look at what programs the Governor proposes to cut in the Department of Social and Health Services – an agency many of my students know well. 

Alongside the Superintendent's office, DSHS suffers the biggest cuts, many of them directly affecting young children who live in poverty.  Efforts to prevent child abuse and neglect?  Cut.  Personal, incidental items to foster youth in emergency placement?  Cut, because those kids put in emergency placement don't need that replacement coat, notebook, or backpack, do they?  State supplemental food assistance for those who do not qualify for federal food stamps?  Cut.  School-Based medical service delivery?  Cut.  Children's Health Program, which serves 27,000 undocumented kids?  Cut.  State funding for family planning capacity grants?  Cut.  Subsidized health care for low-income individuals, including children – particularly foster children?  Cut.

I have to question whether streamlining education is going to deliver a "world-class education at every step in the process" when we have children who can't get health care.

Effective public education is hugely dependent on a strong, healthy social services network, and vice versa.  Slash one and you've handicapped the other.

A new-and-improved Department of Education, while I agree with its efforts toward fiscal efficiency, won't be able to deliver if funding to elementary and social services is slashed.  It is full of hollow promises.  They sound good, but they'll be hard to deliver when the bottom's been punched out of the safety net for poor families with children.

Want to let the Governor know how you feel about her contradictory messages?  Here you go.