Have you ever wondered how the ‘inside game’ of a bill becoming a law is played?

Join me for an ‘open’ process, complete with uncensored policy assessments and candid political discussions, and together we will experience the journey in the 2012 session of the Washington State Legislature.

On January 9, 2012 I plan to introduce two bills in the Washington State House of Representatives that continue the march toward radical openness of our state’s educational materials.

This legislation builds on our state’s widely-recognized open course library initiative that is allowing us to greatly reduce or eliminate expensive textbooks for hundreds of thousands of students in our state’s 34 community and technical colleges. By 2013 it’s possible for community college students to save $41 million in out-of-pocket costs per year.

Prior to my election to the Legislature I was honored to serve as a member of the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, where I explored the intersection of technology and education as co-chair of the board’s Technology Committee. With the bold support of the full Board, we set this innovative open course library in motion. Once elected to the Legislature I was able to secure the funding to move the vision forward. The project’s success is reflected in this Seattle Times editorial.

There is an unstoppable movement underway from taxpayers, students, professors, foundations and government about open educational resources, open textbooks, open science and open data — all moving toward a fundamental policy of ‘openness.’ Sharing resources that are paid for by tax dollars is a simple exercise in fairness.

It is tremendously rewarding as a legislator in one state to see this effort rapidly grow around the country and world as evidenced by the courageous leadership of state Sen. Darrelle Steinberg who is building upon the general ideas behind our program to implement a similar project in California.

That is, at its philosophical core, the idea of open educational resources: Together we can build a new model by which taxpayers, students and others receive the legitimate value of their tax/tuition/fee dollar. Like Sen. Steinberg, I do not pretend for a moment that successfully reducing the cost of textbooks is in any way a rationalization or justification for the state’s painful and unwise disinvestment in higher education. Still, it is, at the very least, an exercise in sound education and fiscal policy.

No one politician, bureaucracy, university, foundation, non profit or company should capture the financial, political or educational interests of open educational resources in a proprietary framework–and all current and future students should receive access to the public taxpayers’ generosity through collaboration, sharing and accessibility.

With families nationwide feeling the crush of skyrocketing tuition in higher education, and our K-12 systems struggling to improve quality and save money, we simply must have the courage to acknowledge that commercial textbook interests have consumed our decision-making criteria.

To learn more about the larger effort, please watch this video and visit Creative Commons and other sites here, here, here and here. Other valuable sites include saylor.org, the Khan Academy, iTunes U and, of course, MIT OCW.

Leading the global charge is UNESCO that is striving to convince 172 nations, including the United States, to embrace the open policies of open educational resources.

With the success of Phase I (community college highest enrolled open courses), we are now turning our attention to Phase II of our state’s plan (open policy and K-12 open textbooks).

The first bill in Phase II is to change the default educational policy of our state from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ so that the expectation is that any educational material–K-12, higher education and related–that is created with public tax dollars shall be freely and openly available to the public. This only makes sense: publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources. The public should get what it pays for. This policy is based upon the proven model of the State Board for Community & Technical Colleges’ open course library and open policy.

We are, simply, striving to expand this important philosophically consistent open policy both to the K-12 world and to institutions of higher education at the four-year level.

The second bill in this year’s strategy is to bring free, high quality open textbooks and open course material to our state’s 295 school districts serving one million+ students in our K-12 system. Since Washington has embraced common core standards along with 43 other states, sharing materials makes even more sense. 44 states now share common K-12 curricular standards in math and language arts. 44 states will need new textbooks and new curriculum. Does it make sense to work together to build new and adopt existing open textbooks and open courses that align with those common core standards? I think it does. The amazing aspect of the project is that we do not need to fund the creation of new K-12 textbooks. It’s already being done here and shared under a Creative Commons license. Digital copies of the books are, of course, free and are available in multiple formats – for the web, your Kindle and your iPad. Don’t have a computer or tablet? No problem. Hard copy prints cost a mere $4.25 per book.

Today I am posting working drafts of the two bills to challenge the open community in the U.S. and indeed worldwide to comment, edit, improve, criticize and otherwise tackle the range of public policy issues raised by these bills.

How will this work? Both bills are posted as google docs and can be viewed and downloaded by anyone. Here are the links for both bills:

bill 1 link / bill 1 summary
bill 2 link / bill 2 summary

Please post your suggestions, in the open, as comments to this blog post. I will review your comments and will reply to many. Mostly, I hope you all read and reply to each others’ comments. I will then take the best suggestions and modify the bills to ensure Washington State makes the best use of its citizens’ public tax dollars to maximize access to high quality, affordable, up-to-date educational resources.

Now, it’s your turn. I challenge the OER community–and other stakeholders–and those who believe in the broader vision of saving students money, increasing access to education, and improving our overall quality of educational materials through collaboration to help legislators, educators, superintendents, professors and others who believe in openness. It is not enough simply to advocate for change to public policies at the local, state, federal and international level. We must support initiatives from Utah to California to Brazil and Poland by working together.

Student groups in Washington and nationally also have an opportunity in these initiatives to give voice to a tangible method of reducing costs for students by close to $1,300 a year for virtually every college student in the country.

Specifically, it would be very helpful if you could share FAQs, white papers, case studies and other materials to improve upon these bills and ultimately ensure we send this legislation to our Governors’ desk for a signature.

And, if you are from the publishing industry and may not see the short term financial value of your interests in this exercise, I particularly welcome your engagement, views, insight, data and arguments.

Instead of flippantly instructing legislators to ‘take the sales tax off of textbooks’ as the best way to reduce costs–while textbook costs have grown at more than three times the rate of inflation–you could join with me for a more sophisticated and substantive public policy dialogue. Given our state’s highly successful pilot project and embrace of this policy at the community college level–a policy that will save students a minimum of $1.2 million in out-of-pocket costs in 2012 alone–if you simply arrive in Olympia with a contract lobbyist without experience or policy insight, I suspect you will find an unsympathetic voice from my colleagues.

Instead, I ask you to go deeper, to engage more thoughtfully, to participate in our state’s public policy arena more substantively. If you are unwilling to even post your comments, concerns and views for a public dialogue here, how will you be able to convince 146 of my colleagues that you made every effort to engage in a meaningful public policy dialogue?

Join me in a healthy, engaged, thoughtful public policy discussion so that together we can build a more affordable, high quality path forward in our education system.

Publicly funded educational materials should be open, accessible and available to the public.

You gain power by giving it away.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

Four years ago a strong group of candidates with compelling financial, education and management experience ran for the Seattle School Board. As those board members face voters, many in Seattle are critical of the board’s performance in light of the previous controversial superintendent, financial scandal and underwhelming audits. And yet large numbers of citizens focus on the district’s many legitimate improvements and the impressive growth in the number of families signing up for the Seattle Public School District.

This is, of course, the essence of representative democracy and the voter’s will ultimately make their choices known.

For Seattle’s board, the process of constantly evolving and learning how to be an effective board in terms of fiduciary oversight of the superintendent and bureaucracy, ownership of key public policy issues and aggressive community outreach has been a constant journey. But the group has generally, in my view, performed with a degree of transparency and a willingness to learn and grow with student achievement at the core. I feel that overall the board has been much more united and strategic than previous single-issue boards with narrow agendas.

Recruiting and retaining the highest quality individuals to serve on an elected school board–and to do so effectively as professional, full-time volunteers–is vital to our 47,000 students, the billions in tax dollars they manage and our community at large.

Marian Wright Edelman, founder of Children’s Defense Fund, recently made a powerful speech in which she said, “the single most important public office in our nation is the school board.”

It is exactly because I share the conviction that public policy and political engagement in education must merge that I plan to introduce two modest bills in 2012 that I hope will contribute in a small way to improving school boards.

(For the record, most of my time is, of course, spent as a member of the Ways & Means Committee fighting tooth and nail for the public resources to empower our state’s “paramount duty” to educate young people). Personally as a legislator I rarely find much interest in ‘governance’ battles or arguing over which agency should control what type of program. In this case, however, I think some structural improvements make sense. Ninety-nine percent of my time is focused on the state budget. Still, the challenge of governing in today’s environment does not take other, smaller issues off the table.

First, I am troubled that, to date, our state has not chosen to include school board races in our current campaign financing limits. It is my intention to introduce legislation to require that campaigns for school board races face a limit equalling legislative levels–currently $800 per person per election–beginning next year. Specifically, this means that a candidate could raise $800 per donor in each of the primary and general elections for a total of $1,600 per person in any one full cycle. Today there is no such limit. This is not a reflection on any one race this year or in the past. It’s a systematic structural issue that should be addressed.

Second, I have announced previously that I believe school districts should have the local option of deciding whether their local board directors should be paid. I plan to introduce a bill to allow major local districts to pay directors a salary of up to that of a state legislator. Given that these individuals have fiduciary oversight of hundreds of millions or billions of operating and capital budget dollars, we should allow local communities the opportunity in a permissive model to pay directors for their work. Many of the state’s 147 legislators find it necessary to work full time representing their 140,000 constituents. Many others, myself included, continue to work professionally at or near full time. For school board members in a large district it’s difficult for me to see how we attract anyone who has an obligation to feed a family by paying effectively nothing. The current base salary for a legislator is $42,106. A local district should have a right to allow that level of payment or less.

It’s important to note that I fully realize there is a closely nit subculture of school board directors. They take great pride in being volunteer community leaders and I respect that group ethic. I am not arguing that they are wrong by any stretch of the imagination. School board membership is part of our national ethic. I am merely arguing that such a position may not be 100% right for every community. Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane and other districts are different than Tumwater, Cle Ellum and Orting. Local choices matter. Today’s state law does not allow the option.

A vast majority of my time, energy and effort in education revolves around four core strategies: 1) secure full funding for public education, 2) empower principals with greater authority, accountability and training to exercise effective leadership, 3) strengthen the role, value, support, expectations and accountability of teachers, 4) engage parents in the hard work of educating their kids in a hands-on way in partnership with schools.

These two bills are modest in scope and do not by themselves pretend to be more than they are. While these are certainly not the most pressing ‘system’ issues, and it does not exactly require us to engage in a courageous conversation about our state’s future, I do feel an obligation to take these two steps forward.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

(Disclosure: I work extremely hard to avoid any campaign-related dialogue on this blog so as to maintain the direct link the site enjoys from my official legislative site. In this case, however, I feel an obligation to transparency to disclose that I have publicly endorsed Sherry Carr, Peter Maier and Steve Sundquist in their re-election campaigns. I have not made a formal endorsement in District 3).

Rep. Carlyle at the "Textbook Rebellion" rally at University of Washington

In our relentless exploration of ways to reduce non critical spending and reform how state government operates, sometimes the most crushing barriers to systems change are not special interest lobbies, campaign contributors, bureaucrats or other nefarious if stereotypical suspects. Sometimes the real barriers are simply driven by our own discomfort with change, an unwillingness to think and act in new ways, a recognizable preference for the status quo. For whatever psychological reason you prefer to analyze, I’m intellectually, emotionally and politically disposed to tackling these big ‘system’ issues.

For the past few months I’ve been learning a great deal about the $8 billion textbook industry in the United States.

As far as I can figure out, the State of Washington sends $64,344,99.66 from Olympia to our 295 school districts per year to outfit our 1,034,153 students with textbooks. That does not include millions more that local school districts spend from local levies.

Adi, my 9th grade daughter at Ballard High School, has a pile of old-style textbooks that she couldn’t carry in one haul if she tried: A 300-page World History book from 1998 that has less than 20 pages from 1945-1998 with many of them large photos; an introduction to biology; introduction to French; Geometry and numerous other smaller books. Each of them cost taxpayers, at minimum, $120 or more. So on my own kitchen table alone is easily $500 in textbook costs to taxpayers.

And each of them are by their very nature out of date, expensive, static and educationally generic.

I have written many times about the broader movement toward Open Educational Resources, an effort to use open courseware that is licensed to share and build upon a collaborative model. The U.S. Department of Labor, and many other federal agencies, along with the Gates Foundation and other key players, have embraced the core idea that tax or donor dollars used to create materials should be openly licensed for the public to access that information. The default policy should be ‘open’ not ‘closed,’ collaborative not proprietary and accessible not restricted. There will be some exceptions in the context of non public dollars, and some flexibility is necessary logistically and structurally, but the core idea is grounded in the philosophical idea that the public paid for it and should benefit freely from it.

I’ve blogged about this issue a number of times here and here.

Most of my efforts have to date been focused on higher education. Lately, however, I’ve been exploring in depth the range of policy options around K-12 textbooks and what the state can do to better serve students, teachers and equally important taxpayers.

Fortunately, there is a path forward.

I plan to introduce comprehensive legislation in 2012 to change the state of Washington’s model with respect to K-12 textbooks. Rather than blindly sending $64 million to 295 districts as a general model without regard to content, quality or other factors, I propose that we hold back a small piece of that allocation in order to access the highest quality Open Educational Resources in the world and train our teachers, administrators and districts how to access this extraordinary and extremely low cost resource. The details will be announced closer to the January legislative session.

But one element of this plan to keep in mind: The State of Washington has embraced Common Core Standards. This means that so many of the Open Educational Resources being developed in the U.S. and around the world are already designed, from scratch, to meet those standards. So the ‘customization’ needed in Washington is modest at best.

All of this doesn’t even touch on the possibilities of e-textbooks and partnerships with Kindle, iPad, Tablet PC, Droid and other such evolutions of delivery mechanisms.

The apple to apple comparison of cost, per textbook, will be about $6 for Open Education Resources instead of $120-plus for proprietary, commercial textbooks. For my daughter’s Geometry, World Literature, Biology and other courses, the total cost will hover around $24 instead of $500. Why $6? That’s about the cost of photocopying the pages into an open textbook. And our friends from Utah present some compelling data that even suggest the product itself works better. The content is, by an large, free. Let’s say, for the sake of making it interesting, that I’m off by 3x and the true cost is $72 to incorporate additional costs of training districts. When you have 1,034,153 students in total and a very large number of them in 6-12 grades where textbooks are most prevalent, that amounts to real savings.

Washington won’t categorically eliminate all K-12 and higher education textbooks without regard to depth, value and role. And local districts will always have options to make local decisions if they want to pay out of pocket. This is about a carrot not a stick policy approach. There is some value in some sectors of specialized approaches and, of course, higher education is a bit more nuanced than grades 6-12. There is indeed some legitimate value in the depth of institutional knowledge, content and experience that the textbook industry brings to the table. As a member of the budget-writing Ways & Means Committee, I’m just not willing to spend $64 million per year for it.

I’m convinced the proposal is sound fiscal, policy and educational policy. What do you think?

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

Seattle Times

As my own four children drift off to the sleep tonight, I’m in a reflective mood thinking about the tens of thousands of parents across our city and state thinking about tomorrow–the first day of the new school year. The 47,000 students of the Seattle Public School District have much to be grateful for and appreciate. Parents and students can together appreciate that we have a generous community that supports our public education system. We can be so grateful for the engaged teachers, thoughtful administrators and passionate support service providers from bus drivers to lunch ladies to janitors.

My hope is that my own children will have another wonderful, exciting, supportive and successful school year with tremendous teachers and a support group to match. My eldest daughter enters Ballard High School as a freshman, my second daughter enters seventh grade at Salmon Bay, my son enters fifth grade at the new Queen Anne Elementary School, and my five year old daughter–the boss of the house– might as well be a freshman at Stanford University.

I want to take a moment to say ‘thank you’ to teachers and the entire education community who care so much about our nation’s quality of life, our society’s future, our children. I want to thank the parent activists who attend hundreds of meeting each year to advocate for their own children and all kids. Bloggers for saveourschools and other investigative and advocacy sites, volunteers, PTA activists and so many others build our sense of community and I honor their dedication and service.

As a citizen legislator the tendency is to focus on complex financial and policy issues at the theoretical level. It’s much more difficult to tackle genuine ‘systems’ issues such as education in a hands-on way that engaged stakeholders in finding common ground. It’s about the kids, of course, but the adults sure have a dog in the fight.

I am filled with hope about the new year for my own children and their friends and families who are part of our community.

On a substantive public policy level, however, I dread the cold hard reality that the state economic forecast on September 15 is likely to indicate a dramatic and painful drop in state revenues. More than 41% of all state government spending is on public education at the K-12 level. The pressure to make further cuts to education–an area we generally managed to spare relative to other categories of spending–will be insurmountable. The likelihood of a special session is growing. The inability to substantively explore almost any revenue options–including simply closing grossly unproductive tax exemptions–due to passage of I-1053 paralyzes our state in a fashion similar to Washington, D.C.’s struggles.

The state’s ‘paramount duty’ to fund public education is a precious gift from our state’s founders in 1889. We have not, unfortunately, managed to fully fund public education and I maintain that the state is in violation of that constitutional obligation.

The people of Seattle receive 37 cents back from Olympia for public education for every dollar we send to state government in taxes. While that is noble in a general theoretical sense of a broader progressive society, it is troubling from an equity perspective for our own children here at home. We need Interim Superintendent Susan Enfield to continue to execute upon what I see initially as a productive vision of true servant leadership. My hope is that she can ensure the Central Office builds a new type of relationship with front line teachers and principals as an academic and support service provider, not a disconnected and disengaged ‘one size fits all’ enforcer.

From a policy perspective my own view is that we need strong principals with a stronger degree of control over their budget and personnel; high expectations that all students can learn with the wrap around services and infrastructure of support; highly trained and well paid and respected teachers; administrators with a ‘servant leadership’ approach that puts student interests at the core of their work; a bureaucracy with accountability for financial, administrative and oversight obligations; an elected–and paid–board that oversees an administration instead of the other way around; and data and evidence-driven system of student performance measurement and accountability designed in large part by teachers; and parents and guardians with accountability for their own involvement and vital role to turn off the TV and turn on their time commitment to their kids.

I’ve been a legislator for less than three years. In that time I’ve sponsored, co-sponsored and/or advocated for a large number of major K-12 and higher education bills. Some have succeeded and some have failed. I’ve learned so much, grown so much, changed so much and come to appreciate the opportunity of this journey. Whether we agree or not on individual issues, I hope you feel that I’ve done my best to give voice to the tens of thousands of parents in Seattle and statewide living real lives. It’s a very humbling, difficult and complex job.

I’ve had this honor because of the strong support of the good people of the 36th Legislative District.

I assure you that saying all of this as a legislator is much easier than living it everyday as a parent.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

(NOTE: Michael DeBell, a two-term member of the Seattle School Board, has been a strong proponent of higher academic expectations for children and youth in our city. This is only the second time I have posted a guest commentary on this blog. I do so today with a sense of appreciation and respect for Michael’s commitment as a citizen activist for education, youth and families.)

How can a technology driven State like Washington expect students to to be prepared for twenty first century careers and life if our expectations in math and science are advisory rather than mandatory?

The answer is simple, we cannot.

Instead, we rely on immigrants and well prepared individuals from other states to fill a majority of our jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. Our failure to extend the proficiency test formerly known as the WASL to math and science as a condition of high school graduation exemplifies our low expectations of our students. We are afraid of public individual failure so we institutionalize it – insuring that a majority of our students are not ready for college level STEM classes or jobs in these fields. No public discussion of outcomes is required, its a quiet, collective failure of hand wringing and empty speeches.

I believe that our students need more challenge and especially realistic gateposts that inform them of the lay of the land in 2011. Our students rose to the challenge of passing the Reading and Writing WASL as a graduation requirement. Passing rates jumped dramatically when the test counted and have generally trended higher ever since. Part of this is simply getting students to take a test seriously and do their best. We test students a great deal these days so “test fatigue” is common. The deeper meaning of testing proficiency for our standards in math and science as a condition of graduation requires a genuine embrace of accountability – for students, for educators and for state legislators and taxpayers.

We cannot compete successfully with the dynamic economies of the Pacific Rim (especially the Republic of Korea, Japan and Taiwan) without a statewide push for improved STEM education. Our present system surrenders without a fight, to meeting standards and relies on expensive remedial classes in high school, community colleges and our four year colleges to mask the shortfall.

Our students are capable of meeting standards and passing end of course exams in math and science at very high rates similar to the 80-90 percent we achieve in Reading and Writing. They are also highly distracted, immersed in a popular culture of immediate gratification and fairly sophisticated about attaining goals with the least amount of effort. It does not surprise me that a majority of our students do not meet expectations in STEM, because our expectations have so little consequence. My experience as a parent has taught me that rules or expectations that have no consequences become- a joke, a cause for much conversation and little action, erode parental authority and frustrate all parties. My guess is that many of our high school math and science teachers would recognize these outcomes with their students as well.

The United States, uniquely among industrialized nations, largely avoids the use of proficiency testing to organize its educational system, has no national standards and lets a private company, The College Board create and administer the most important college entry exam. We have a strong case of the Lake Wobegone Syndrome- we want all students to be above average and feel good about themselves and their performance even if they are unprepared for the work world they step into the night after high school commencement. This is unsustainable in the competitive global environment and leads directly to the situation of STEM jobs going unfilled even with %10 unemployment rates.

Our desire to avoid confronting our low expectations is especially damaging to our poor students. Black and Hispanic students, Free and Reduced Lunch status and English Language Learners have the lowest pass rates presently. This is probably the most common argument raised against a math and science proficiency test for graduation. I believe that these students will rise to the challenge as ably as their middle class peers if they get the extra tutoring and help they need and deserve. Our institutions need clear and honest demands to drive real change and this is a prime opportunity. We are denying poor students access to the well paid STEM jobs in our state without their even knowing it . They met our requirements for graduation but not for competing in an increasingly complex world.

Whose responsibility is that?

Yours,

Michael DeBell

(End of guest post)

Director DeBell’s biography:

Michael DeBell is a parent, community leader, and businessman with years of experience in the Seattle School District. He has served as Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) President for a total of six years: two years each at West Woodland Elementary, Whitman Middle School and Ballard High School. He served on the Gates Foundation-funded Transformation Planning Committee at Whitman Middle School, attending several seminars on strategies for school reform, and helped draft a Small Learning Communities model transformation plan.

Michael and his family have worked actively on many Seattle Levy Campaigns and the Education Funding Initiatives. He has been a member of the Ballard High School Biotech Academy Steering Committee for the past three years and is also a member of the Ballard High School Foundation, helping to promote academic excellence and achievement at Ballard High School. Michael received the WSPTA Golden Acorn award for outstanding service to Washington youth.

Michael has been a youth soccer coach in Seattle Youth Soccer for 12 years working with boys and girls teams. He received Boys Coach of the Year Award from Woodland Soccer Club in 2002.

Michael is married to Marie who is a School Nurse and current President of Seattle School Nurse’s Association. They have three children: Denny, Lyle and Elle, all of whom are current or alumni students in Seattle Public Schools.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

Part time citizen legislators in Washington earn $42,000 a year. By comparison full time legislators in California earn $120,000 a year. There is something idealistic and even romantic to the noble idea of citizen legislators living regular lives who travel to Olympia for a few months a year to serve the public.

While the job is not easy and I am running on empty at the end of this long Legislative Session, I find myself pondering the day to day reality of members of the Seattle School Board.

School board members work untold hours year round. They must attend a large number of evening meetings away from their families. They must campaign for office city wide. They are paid next to nothing. They face very serious technical, policy, political, financial and academic challenges and a workplan that no one envies.

The Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat, quietly becoming one of the most thoughtful voices of reason and middle ground in our city, has discussed the difficulty of the job many times.

Prior to our district’s dismissal of the previous superintendent, I considered introducing a bill this year that would have allowed the large districts in our state–say those with more than 20,000 kids or so–to pay their school board members a salary of up to $25,000. It was intended as a true trial balloon. I actually do not have a strong sense of the wisdom of this policy but I did feel it would help generate a legitimate public conversation about the training, staff support and fiduciary actions of our school directors statewide.

I raised this issue with a member of the Legislature widely considered one of the leading authorities on school boards who was wildly unenthusiastic about the idea. The idea, in this person’s mind, is that serving as a school board director carries a strong social ethic and expectation of volunteerism. I admire that this expectation is part of the social fabric itself of the school director community.

But–again from a systems level not individually or even Seattle alone– I question whether that ideal isn’t, in fact, promoting a model by which school boards members defer to the paid professional bureaucracy with overly broad acquiescence. On some level it feels that structurally in our state some school directors have lost an important element of the passion for aggressive citizen activism in public education.

Yes that means questioning the status quo, negotiating hard with the many labor representatives, and questioning the quality of outcomes for students on all fronts. The bureaucracy of any large enterprise is by nature willing to accept the status quo. It is the job of passionate citizen activists–from parents and bloggers on the outside to school directors on the inside–to push and prod for continuous improvement.

Much is made of the salaries of the professional staff from superintendents to teachers, yet little dialogue ensues about the financial issues associated with attracting highly skilled and qualified individuals to run for school board slots.

My ‘systemic’ concern, however, is that the depth of fiduciary issues facing Seattle and any large school district–graduation rates, academic rigor, equity of performance expectations, teacher and labor relations, financial controls, audit problems, corruption, relationships with public and private funders and much more–are beyond trivial.

The difficulty of working full time and volunteering full time as a member of a big city school board cannot be overstated. I simply don’t know if it’s possible to maintain any sense of consistency or to build institutional knowledge at the board level with the intense pressure. Most members serve only one term or two at the maximum.

The public policy question I would submit for a public dialogue is whether we can reasonably expect the best of the best to serve as volunteers while overseeing an enterprise with 46,000 students and an operating and capital budget more than $1 billion of your tax dollars.

Your thoughts appreciated on this one.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

If winning a competitive state grant of $250 million was the goal, the first round of the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top was wildly unsuccessful for our state. In fairness, to those who opposed the approach, our failure to win a pot of money was no failure at all. Tucked in the new agreement to keep the government operating through September, however, there looks to be a second chance at $700 million nationally that can hopefully unite all factions in our consensus-driven state.

A major difference this time is the Administration’s focus on early learning, a topic of enormous importance to our Legislature, Governor, stakeholders and so many others. Governor Gregoire has wisely and impressively made the creation of the Department of Early Learning a hallmark of her service.

Regardless of the tactical issues, regardless of differences between labor, reform activists, funders, business and others, given our state’s passionate embrace of early learning we should rally the troops now to prepare for the early learning piece of Race to the Top 2.

And almost regardless of the policy or political battles to come, my sincere hope in this era of massive budget cuts is that we as a state can unite behind a bold, focused early learning program to help lift up our state’s strategy of investing in the earliest years of learning.

Surly we can unite behind our state’s early and bold drive toward early learning success.

The impact of the state budget cuts on early learning is simply devastating. It is terribly uncomfortable to see our state retreat from our obligation to provide a level playing field of opportunity for our youngest and most vulnerable children. Surely we are a more just, moral and engaged society than to divest from incredibly successful early learning programs? Surely we care enough to invest in our youngest and most vulnerable?

From a financial perspective the return on investment for early learning is simply beyond measure. Even in an era of the highest standards of fiscal discipline we can and must find the graciousness in our hearts and minds to fund services for our most needy youth that help them arrive in kindergarten healthy, safe, curious and ready to learn. A hungry child can’t learn well. A young child hungry for attention, crying out for support who is already far behind surely deserves our literal and figurative investment.

I know a little bit about rough beginnings.

I spent the first five years of my life living in various homes as my mother struggled with mental illness. As she recovered and I lived with her full time, I still first enrolled in a traditional school in second grade and even then for only part of the year. In third grade I sat in humiliation in the back of the classroom for much of the year quietly wearing earphones learning my ABCs and numbers. In fourth grade I was given a basketball as a gift from dear friends. It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge publicly but I misspelled my own name when writing it on the basketball in permanent ink: Rueuven.

Much more than academics, however, was the struggle that ensued to learn the cognitive control to connect emotionally with other kids and adults when I didn’t have the social skills. The fear I felt in those early years defined my path. I can remember the feelings of inadequacy in every pore of my body. On the deepest spiritual level it was only after I married Wendy that I found the strength and confidence to move beyond the shame of that journey.

I found my way forward not because of outside resources or my internal skills but because so many others cared deeply about helping a young kid struggling to survive.

When I don’t follow a traditional liberal Democratic path in Olympia, I am sometimes criticized for failing to care for those in need. I do care, of course, but I feel a strong push not only to support vital human services programs but to spend tax dollars wisely. Because of my personal journey being a progressive means doing more than parroting old fashioned cliches that feed red meat to the left or right. Being a progressive means pushing the institutional infrastructure of the power establishment outside of the comfort of the status quo to care for real kids living real lives.

Let us find the way to capture an “early” win in Race to the Top 2 without discord. Let us hope we have the courageous honesty to challenge old assumptions and stereotypes, to reform the bureaucracy when wrong and support it when right: To pursue good public policies that invest in the most critical years of children’s lives.

We are so much more than what we’ve become.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

One of my passions in K-12 education policy is advocating for the core notion that highly trained principals– with control over their school budgets and a real say in teacher evaluations and placement–makes sense.

Strong leaders matter.

Last year, through the support of the entire Seattle legislative delegation, I was able to include a provision in the painfully ineffective Race to the Top legislation that ultimately eliminated tenure for new Seattle principals.

This year I introduced a bill to create an alternative certification route for principals with strong backgrounds in community service, business and many other categories outside of the traditional education route.

As the regular Legislative Session concludes, it’s worth noting openly that efforts this year to pass the alternative certification bill were a total, complete and fantastic failure.

After a very heavy lift from Rep. Marcie Maxwell, the bill passed the House after being slightly weakened during the committee process. But the core policy idea stood firm. In the Senate, the bill was eviscerated with such tremendous force that it actually managed to go in the very opposite direction than originally intended. It was so weak that the message wasn’t lost on anyone. Still, I initially managed to include funds to implement the politically motivated fiscal note that a state agency tagged onto the bill in the House budget.

No matter. I put the bill out of its misery.

I have to admire the ferocious political force of the education industrial complex that made it clear that failure for them–meaning passage of this bill–was not an option.

A united front of the Association of Washington School Principals, Washington State Professional Educator Standards Board, Washington State School Directors Association, Washington Association of School Administrators, Washington Education Association and others were actually good natured in their powerful slap down of the bill.

I am not, of course, personally or professionally unappreciative of their view that opening the door to those from outside of education is an unacceptable intrusion upon the grip of the institutional infrastructure of education. I happen to believe that the light of new ideas, new energy, new approaches and new methodologies is a positive and not a negative, but during these tough budget times I do actually understand their argument.

My view that principals from outside of the current status quo add value is not a religious conviction, it’s just a policy position. And perhaps I’m wrong about the policy itself.

Upon reflection, the part of the journey that genuinely disappointed me about this political defeat was that last year during the interim I actively and aggressively reached out to the stakeholders and asked them to work with me to craft legislation for the 2011 session to strengthen the role of principals. They politely declined the invitation. And then when the session began and I introduced the legislation, they kicked into high gear to kill it without reservation.

I certainly did discover what the opponents found objectionable about the bill’s core idea. They were very clear about that. Unfortunately, I just never was able to discover what they actually support in striving to improve the role and value of principals. They never actually got around to answering that question.

The bill’s life was a glorious, unmitigated, unrestrained failure. But at least we were willing to risk failure to discuss the role, value and impact of principals on teaching and learning. And I hope, on some level, that victory in 2010 and failure in 2011 is at least an indication that I care enough to continue to try to strengthen both the accountability and authority of principals.

The beauty of representing the good people of the 36th District is that I can continually attempt to force open the door to courageous honesty about the power and comfort of the status quo. As all parents strive to teach our kids, through failure comes the light of opportunity for success.

I do want to thank the Excellent Schools Now Coalition, League of Education Voters, Stand for Children, Partnership for Learning, Seattle Public School District and many other supporters of the proposed legislation who were willing to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions about what it takes to carry one of the most important education titles: Principal.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

Now is the time for a bold community summit to seize the opportunity of the crisis facing Seattle Public Schools. We should embrace the rage, disappointment and anger of parents, teachers and others to raise equally uncomfortable and complex issues facing the larger education system in our city: Lack of academic rigor, underachievement, dropouts, lack of access to higher education, transition to college and the workplace, a disconnected central office and more.

Simply, let’s use this important window of discomfort to raise the real deal systems issues that need the spotlight as much as the financial scandal.

We are a community that thrives on process and open public dialogue. Instead of patronizing that trait, as is often the legitimate response, let’s embrace it now when we need it the most. We need to bring community leaders, educational advocates, parents, teachers, media, students, administrators and elected officials at the city and state level together to outline an action plan for change and to learn the right lessons.

And I want to particularly point out the important oversight role that many of our city’s educational advocates, bloggers, parent activists and others played in exposing this scandal. Openness and transparency does not come easily but it usually does come.

I believe the school board acted with courage, clarity and forcefulness in addressing this crisis.

The new superintendent will, of course, hold community meetings. Let’s use this opportunity not to return to normal as rapidly as possible but to turn up the heat of energy, passion and engagement to ask equally important questions about the direction of our district.

We have 47,000 students in the district, a number that is growing year by year in an impressive fashion. We’ve just instituted a new neighborhood plan. We have acknowledged that the central office has long been disconnected and disengaged from a ‘servant leadership’ model of work. We have an important opportunity to keep stakeholders engaged and we should seize it. In some ways we were going in a good direction. We need to keep what was right and fix what is dreadfully wrong.

The Legislature is preparing major cuts to the state budget and we are working night and day to hold the reductions to public education to a minimum. But with a $5 billion projected deficit it is not easy and there will be very real budget cuts.

Due to our hands-off model, the political infrastructure of the City of Seattle has long been disconnected and disengaged from our school district except when it comes time for campaign season. With the massive Family and Education Levy potentially heading to the ballot, we should make a decision together as a community of whether it makes sense to go forward in the same fashion as previously planned.

What would a genuine education summit accomplish? I don’t know specifically but I do know that returning to the rigid comfort of the status quo–where too many believed the district’s central office treated students, teachers, parents and principals with disengaged contempt–is not an option.

In Olympia, we just finished a 12 hour marathon session on the floor of the House of Representatives passing a number of education bills. I’m fighting day and night as a member of the Ways & Means Committee for funding resources for Seattle Public Schools and districts statewide only to be humiliated not merely by the outright theft but by the arrogance of the downtown bureaucracy.

It’s time for the education industrial complex to realize that we are so much more than what we’ve become.

We are an innovative, entrepreneurial, engaged, open, honest, objective, progressive and educated city. Let’s act like it.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

Last night the House Ways & Means Committee voted for an ‘early action’ bill to reduce spending by $222 million for the current fiscal year. I voted for the bill despite my fierce internal opposition and efforts to prevent a $42 million reduction in funding for a bureaucratic sounding program called “K-4 enhancement” that is very, very important to Seattle.

For me as a new member of the powerful budget-writing Ways & Means Committee, this tough vote was a cold shower of reality.

For Seattle schools, the K-4 enhancement program–which translates into funding for 58 elementary school teachers–means that the district will be forced to use their reserve account to keep paying the bill for the rest of the year. My sincere hope is to maintain funding for this program in the 2011-2013 operational budget. If it is not, the jobs of at least 58 elementary school teachers in Seattle will be endangered.

While K-4 dollars flow equally to districts statewide, Seattle and other districts that do not receive levy equalization dollars value the funds a great deal. Statewide about 1,500 teachers are funded by K-4 dollars.

In higher education, we painfully took $2 million from both the University of Washington and Washington State University out of their research budgets.

Watching so many efforts to restore funding fail, I am proud of aggressive efforts inside and outside of Olympia to restore $7.2 million for the highly capable program, equating to $400,000 for Seattle schools. The APP program in Seattle is funded primarily by local dollars but the state funds are essential to maintaining the APP infrastucture.

Parents saved the highly capable program. Hundreds and hundreds of email to legislators from parents statewide made the difference. I am so proud of 36th District education advocate Janis Traven of Magnolia who helped energize parents citywide to reach out to legislators.

It made the difference.

While many legislators care deeply about highly capable and worked hard, Rep. Jamie Pedersen deserves enormous credit for his steadfast support and thoughtful, quiet work to support restoration of funds.

My particular focus today in this post is on education but we made substantive reductions in a wide range of programs. It was a sobering introduction to the front lines of budget writing.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

restore $7.1 million in state funding for the highly capable program. For Seattle this cut would have been an additional $400,000 but the impact would have been particularly painful. I fought tooth and nail for restoration of the funds and am so grateful for the hundreds of emails from parents that made it all possible. While this cut doesn’t make up for the awful $5.4 million cut made to Seattle Public School District overall, it was a small moral victory for parents.