An Open Letter to Our Washington State Legislators

I am a high school physics teacher and robotics team mentor in the Everett School District. I know you are hearing from many teachers about the WEA position on school funding, class size, and teacher evaluation. Rather than simply repeat themes that others have probably expressed better, I would like to share with you a personal story about meeting a young woman with a degree in electrical engineering who is thinking about becoming a physics teacher.

When I hear an incredibly bright, passionate, motivated young woman express a desire to share that passion with younger students, I am of two minds. The heart that brought me to teaching has never forgotten the yearning for a journey of discovery shared with young, inquiring minds. I would like very much to encourage this young woman to go into teaching because our profession, our students, our society would benefit from her choice. But would she? How can I, in good conscience, encourage an intelligent, capable young woman to leave a highly paid STEM career track for a profession that is becoming increasingly deprofessionalized, for a job whose demands and dictates are driven by non-educators who presume they know better than teachers what is in the best interests of our students?

Our state has adopted the national narrative of failing schools and underperforming teachers, while refusing to address the systemic long term effects of underfunding both public education and the social safety net. There are too many articles that address both of these issues for me to cite them all, but belief in and response to ideas promoted by education “reformers” are addressed in this scholarly report by The Economic Policy Institute: Fact Challenged Policy by Richard Rothstein. Even if you buy into the notion that most schools are failures, starving them into greater failure hardly seems like a reasoned response, not to mention that it puts the legislature in contempt of the McCleary decision.

Our most grievous concern when it comes to the education of children should be the number of children in poverty. As a scientist, I rely on evidence and data, and the science is very clear that socioeconomic factors are the biggest predictor of academic success. The devastating effects of poverty are well documented in a recent study featured in Nature: Poverty shrinks brains from birth by Sara Reardon.

If you choose to dismiss my previous points by invoking the need for the NCLB waiver, I would respond by saying that many states have figured out it will cost them more to implement the tests and evaluations demanded by DoE than the states will receive in federal funding. The legality of the waivers are questionable at best and, I would argue, unconstitutional. But, since they apparently fit the “reform” agenda of both parties, they go unchallenged.

Integral to obtaining the waiver is an agreement that teacher evaluation be tied to student test scores. There have been many news reports describing how these methods have been poorly implemented in other states. There are many scholarly articles that raise scientific concerns about using test scores for evaluations. I provide one from the Economic Policy Institute: Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers by Richard Rothstein, et al.

Perhaps it may be more meaningful to end as I began, with a personal story. I believe in assessment as an important evaluative and diagnostic tool. I have for my entire career tracked student learning with pretests and post-tests. New technology makes it easier for me to compare students from one year to the next with similar or identical tests. Each year I have seen decreases in student motivation, increases in distractions due to electronic devices, and test performance is consequently worse. I am working as hard as I can to help students learn material late in the semester because they weren’t willing to keep up with the work when they were supposed to. I have become so disheartened by the attitude of so many who believe that if students do not do well in my class it is my fault. Elected officials and many in the media have become so disrespectful to teachers that I would be hard pressed to recommend this profession to anyone.

I hope that Washington State will not follow the path of other states that are destroying their public schools by using unscientific evaluation systems and diverting public funds to untested charter schools. Lastly, briefly, I will suggest that we begin to address long term funding shortfalls by implementing the Washington Investment Trust once championed by Senator Bob Hasegawa (see Washington State Joins Movement for Public Banking by Ellen Brown).