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Thank you.

It has been a tough decade for the public schools, and Covid took already stagnant test scores and a persistent achievement gap and made them worse with no real sign that those trends can be reversed any time soon.

So is it time to say thanks but goodbye to two term superintendent of schools, Chris recall.

Or is what has happened beyond any single person's control making challenger David Olson's bid a bit of a moot point?

That's the question for voters as we start election coverage on this back to school edition of northwest.

Now.

You.

state superintendent of schools was never a very controversial job.

It might have even been described as perhaps a little boring, but these days the schools are on the front lines of the culture wars, and on top of that, haven't really been able to demonstrate substantial improvement in objective test results despite robust increases in funding that has led to declining enrollments, budget shortfalls, and concerns about how much money is really able to trickle through, administrators and teachers and down to students.

Steve Higgins now with more on the 2425 school year.

Public Schools says it had to slash more than $90 million between the 2023 and 2025 years just to keep the budget balance.

But the district also managed to keep open, at least for now.

A number of elementary schools had been slated to be closed due to low enrollment.

Students will return to campus this week.

In Seattle, Mayor Bruce Harrell says the city and the district will spend millions on mental health and gun violence prevention.

They've been here to the gun violence.

They protected me and protected my brothers.

Even though I've lost them.

I'm more mercy paying down.

My cousin.

Rainier Beach High School senior Ray Proctor Jr shares how community violence interventionist at school helped after losing a loved one to gun violence outside Garfield High School earlier this year.

Shootings outside Garfield injured others this past spring and last fall, and the toll weighs on school leadership.

I want to take a moment of silence for Ebenezer Harley Amara Murphy pain.

Xavier Landry.

Jason Hollingsworth.

Connor.

Doss.

Holly.

Elijah.

Lewis.

In all our students, we have lost to gun violence.

During a media conference in mid August, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell announced more than $14 million more to pay for enhanced security, gun violence interventions and more.

This is in addition to the nearly 37 million investment that we are currently making in violence, interruption and community based organizations designed to address the root causes of violence.

They're dealing with more stress and violence and mental health issues, and kids maybe have ever had to deal with before.

The increased funds and roles for care coordinators and counselors.

At 21 Seattle campuses, including options for telehealth, Washington State Department of Health 2023 Healthy Youth Survey revealed improving outcomes over recent years, but says 30% of 10th graders reported feeling persistently depressed.

Mayor Harrell said Seattle police will increase visibility around campuses and insists partnerships with community interventionists bolsters a system focused on prevention and helps families victimized by gun violence.

In my tenure, I've buried 38 young people who look me in my face and have faith that I was going to be able to spare them from the casket.

I am both emotionally moved, appreciative, but then also motivated.

Every time that I see one of our young people's lives cut short.

In Seattle, Steve Higgins northwest now.

Chris recall is the two term incumbent with all the big endorsements from the state Democrats, the WPA, and scores of state and local officials.

Superintendent Rick Dale, great to have you joining us for northwest now, like you do every year before the school year begins.

And I want to thank you publicly for doing that during your tenure as, the, SPI here in the state of Washington.

I'm going to start because you're in the teaching profession.

I'm going to start you with this question.

Just for a little fun.

Give yourself a grade.

As, SBI, over the course of the past four years, or a B-plus over the last four years, given the pandemic and the complexity of it, leading into it, I'd say an A minus for the four years leading into it.

We're, on par nationally with a lot of the standardized test scores.

But, fourth grade reading and math, as you well know, are in a steady decline along with the achievement gap.

Can the OSP really turn that around or at least sound the alarm?

What role can the OSP have in that and self-critique in critiquing yourself?

What do you need to do to push that?

I think it's more complex than that.

So when we look at Pisa scores, international scores, we see them going down all over the planet.

I mean, literally all of the industrialized, developed nations in the world are math scores are down going back about 15 years, maybe longer.

We know something happened in 2012 or 2013, because that's when we see this decline, both in the world, in the United States and in our state.

We know it has something to do with the advent of social media.

92, 94% of middle and high schoolers now have access to it.

It's changing their attention.

So there's things we can do to focus their energy in the classroom.

And so we're issuing guidance literally, today or early the next week here that's going to challenge every school district by next year to have an updated cell phone policy.

And most of them will say, keep your phones off during the classroom, which is where they need to go.

That still isn't going to change the fact that we're testing the same things we did 40 years ago.

So I ask employers all the time, how important is it to you?

The kids can factor quadratic equations and they say, they say, I like our young students because they're really savvy in technology.

They have problem solving skills, have inquiry skills.

None of those things are hardly emphasized in the exam.

So it's a balance of we can move test scores and keep moving them up because we hit our low three years ago.

But I'm still going to tell you that the end of the year exam is a failed model that we should stop using.

Asking a third grader or a fifth grader or an eighth grader to recall in May or June.

What they learned in September or October is not a good testing model.

And now the whole country started to figure that out.

Per student, pupil spending is pushing somewhere up around 20 grand.

And costs of, you know, spending costs are up, but spending is increased above the rate of inflation.

Teachers averaging something around 85,000 a year, I think.

Do you still maintain, despite the injections of funding we've had in the past decade or so, are we still underfunded?

What's your take on that?

Well, we are we had big infusions in 2016 to 2019, and then the legislature relied on federal one time money to bridge the gap during the pandemic.

That's all gone away.

We're the number one state in the country in spending down and the efficiency of our federal money.

We will be a state that does not seek extensions.

So what's laid to bear now is since 2019.

So five years, in the making here, we're now down $1,000 a year to inflation.

So the legislature made great gains, but they were told to by the court to catch up for 20 years a deficiency if somebody owed Tom $20 and they'd been paying $10 and suddenly they pay you $15, you'd say, hey, I'm still $5 short.

And that person would say, no, I gave you a 50% increase.

I went from $10 to $15 and you'd stay, but you actually, oh, $20 to make this thing maintainable.

So what I'd say is we've got salaries in a pretty good spot, just based on our competition with the private market.

Our teacher turnover is up a little, but nothing like the rest of the country.

So I think we've dialed it in.

What we lack now is funding those programs in mental health and student academic recovery that I use federal money to get boosted.

That's now gone.

That's where the legislature has to step in.

Again, your opponent supports more charter schools and, levy funding.

Those charter schools really tend to help minority students and to and to seem to somehow take the sharp edges off the achievement gap a little bit.

Why not support, charter schools, Chris, and maybe even a little further vouchers for charter schools?

I know the, the unions fear it.

And you know what you might call the establishment fears that a little bit.

But is it an idea worth considering?

Not vouchers, vouchers or segregation tools?

They're euphemisms, really?

For segregation.

If I give you cash payment and you can take it to a religious institution or for profit corporation, as we see in Mississippi and Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, all over the South, we've seen them desegregate schools.

And so the challenge is, number one, the voters lose control of the money, they lose control of locally elected school boards.

And we see no measurable gain in progress for kids, none in charter or in voucher systems at all.

We do see deficits in states because they tend to subsidize people already paying for private school.

So let's go back to charters.

The research on charters is very neutral.

It's barely move the needle.

In math and in English language arts, reading.

But I'll tell you, if any school really focused on those things, they could barely move that needle.

The way charters have much worse access to dual credit programs.

So college level programs for those kids and much worse attendance.

So I would say, on balance, charter schools have not performed any better than public.

What the voters did lose there was the ability to elect their local school board, and they do have their own effect of sort of segregating schools by race.

And I don't think that's a good idea.

So let's invest in public ed and stop the idea that the private marketplace concept will solve this, because it isn't solving it in the two dozen states that have tried it.

Here's another hot one for you, the parents rights movement, which I'm sure you're well familiar with.

I mean, you know, a lot of parents and I talked to them and I'm sure you do, to tell you that they're tired of woke curriculums, violence, not being told about kids issues in some, some areas.

The lowering test scores we've talked about that, you know, you know as well as I do the parents with means a lot of them, not all of them, but some of them are fleeing, the public schools, the Ospi, you know, you don't have necessarily a direct influence on that, but how can you influence that?

Stop it, change it, curb it, or adapt to it?

Well, keep speaking the truth to it.

Right.

So we've got about 88% of our kids in public school in this state, and it's usually around 90%.

So I don't use the word fleeing.

It's been a small fraction of folks, and they have chosen to do that mostly to homeschool in early grades, very, very worried, about school.

And it's it's not just the far right.

It's also focus on the quite frankly, the far left who didn't think we did enough to keep mask on and we didn't do enough on on the Covid virus.

So we're seeing those students start to return and we look at grade cohorts.

So third grade to fourth grade to fifth grade to sixth grade, those cohorts are getting bigger as families come back to public school.

So when we talk about enrollment decline, it's actually a whole lot more about declining birth rate than people pulling their kids out.

But some of that did happen.

And I think what we have to do is remind them, you have a lot of choices in public schools.

You have much more comprehensive options for kids, especially by middle and high school.

Larger schools tend to have more comprehensive programing from career and tech ed to, arts and sciences.

So there's a lot of value there.

And we have to remind people that the state does not pick curriculum and so the moms for Liberty attack the national movement to vilify public it it's landed here.

Some people have bought into it.

But every voter in the state gets to vote their local school board.

If they focus on public schools, that's where curriculum is adopted.

That's where lesson planning occurs.

That's where teacher evaluation occurs.

So I would say double down on your public school, have high expectations for them, no matter your political, angle in the world.

But go get the truth about what's being offered instead of listening to so much national cable news.

I think those are really important things.

And then look at the data.

Highest graduation rate ever.

Kids are taking more math and science and English in high school than we've ever seen record numbers of kids getting college degrees while they're in high school and getting college credit and more industry credentials.

We are producing what we promised, but boy, the culture war has certainly landed and people need to go get the facts instead of believing the rhetoric.

Here's one that I think, you've hit a home run on, which is this idea of helping to educate, the business and finance portion of school board members as they're managing districts.

That is an awful lot to lay on.

A volunteer, basically, who wants to run for school board, and they're managing this multi-million, situate dollar situation in an area with changing enrollments and school allocations and what to keep open and what to close and how the budget works.

It is complex.

Talk a little bit about your idea of supporting as OSP supporting local school boards in that way.

Yeah, we have these really amazing regional educational service districts.

There's nine of them in the state, and they have great leadership.

A lot of them have backgrounds in public and in public and finance.

And so they're pretty regularly training both the administrators and a little bit school board members on managing schools.

And then the school directors in our state have their own association, the School Directors Association.

It's 1477 elected school board members.

They have regular training.

What I think you're going to see is all of us try to normalize that and create a more common framework for that.

And hopefully get the legislature to invest more in that.

We've got some pretty amazing school board members, as you say, who step up in a voluntary role, quite frankly, like most city councils do or anywhere else.

Here's the difference.

If you're in a city or county, your tax base of six and as your service is kind of go up and down as the economy goes up and down, your budget's pretty stable.

The second a public school district loses enrollment to declining birth rate or something else within 30 days, that money goes away for them.

So we are just much more accountable to our changing inputs, our kids, than most juristic ones.

And that's really hard.

So training them matters.

And I still think we should pay these folks.

I do think there's a place in the market for them to get more than $50 a meeting as most of them get.

If you want really talented people to seek this role that are more about performance and less about ideology, I think you need more competition for these school board seats, and that probably means compensating them better.

Last 60s here, we talked about what parents have to say, and I think you've probably heard this too.

One of their big concerns for all parents of any political stripe is school security.

What can OSP do to help improve that sense of school security?

Are there any statewide mandates you're thinking about?

Should that be the role of SPI in terms of encouraging that or sounding the alarm, maybe in terms of getting tools in the school districts to increase security?

Well, our job is definitely working with the legislature.

Who sets that framework.

They create those kinds of mandates.

And we've done a bunch of that, both on investing in more, security staff, school districts get some choice around that.

We've talked about that some can hire on contract, some can be personnel, some can be armed, unarmed.

It's really that local choice.

But we've invested a lot more in that.

We've done a whole lot on what's called threat assessment.

So we have built this framework again through those nine regional districts.

Districts can work with them.

And when there is a student that we think is in crisis of harming themselves or others, we go fast on that.

And then, of course, there's always the need for more investment on this question.

Chris Ragsdale, thanks so much for joining us here on northwest.

Now.

Good to see you.

Challenging.

Chris Wright.

Recall is retired naval officer, banker and Peninsula School Board member David Olson, the only conservative leaning candidate to enter the race for CPI.

David, thanks so much for coming to northwest now.

Great to get your perspective as you run for OSP here in the state of Washington.

You have a very interesting perspective.

In the sense that you're, you work in the public schools but also support the charter schools.

Talk a little bit about how why you support charter schools and overcoming the fear that expanding charter schools would somehow diminish the public schools.

Well, first, thank you for having me on today.

One of the things I've talked about on the campaign trail is that I believe that we should give parents options.

Okay.

The state currently has a charter school law out there.

There's only 17 of us in state.

Entire state.

So it's not like there are going to there is any threat of them taking over public schools.

And the ones that we have fall underneath that publicly elected school board provide oversight.

But, across the state, you know, we have schools that are that are struggling.

Specifically in Seattle, where they're looking to close 20 elementary schools.

Marysville is in dire situation.

And for a parent to only have an option to send their child to a struggling public school, is unfortunate.

Whereas if there was a charter school within their neighborhood that was underneath the umbrella of the school board, then they get options.

And I've had parents tell me that they kind of feel trapped, that their only option is the the struggling public school.

And, recently, the state Board of Education came out after doing an exhaustive study that charter schools actually benefit students of color and students in high poverty areas.

And that's what I've spoken about on my campaign web page and across the state that we need to do more for struggling students in high poverty and students of color.

Speaking of the high poverty problem and that persistent achievement gap, why are we still in a situation where your zip code determines your outcome?

That's been something McCleary was supposed to address, that there have been all kinds of efforts at reform over the years that have come and gone, but you can still tell whether a kid's going to a well equipped school.

All he has to do is tell me a zip code.

How do we fix that?

Well, what's unfortunate is that back during the McCleary, when that bill was being put together, it was done in secret.

If you remember back, there were four members from the four pillars.

Two from the House, two from the Senate, from that Senate, one from each party.

And they met in secret and, sort of Chicago style cigars and scotch.

And they came out in the middle of the night, two in the morning, and said, here's the bill, or here it is.

The the unfortunate piece of that is they didn't discuss how they were going to do it with any of the school superintendents across the state.

They did it in a vacuum.

So when I meet and talk with superintendents as I go around the state, they say that they would have appreciated the opportunity to discuss how that was going to impact them if they move forward.

And so issues around the regionalization factor.

You know, a superintendent recently said it's not about, the enrollment, it's about the wealth.

So if you live in a high net income property or it's a car, you're going to get a lot more money because, you know, cost of living is higher.

Where if you live in a rural school like Grandview, the zip code, the cost of living, the home values are right, much less.

So they can't levy as much money because a home assessed value is a lot lower and the state doesn't have to pay them as much, because the cost of living, isn't as high in these rural schools.

So philosophical question.

You know, I think a per pupil spending now, is is up close to 20 grand average teachers make something around $87,000 a year.

There has been a lot of money put into the system.

Are the schools still under-funded in your estimation?

I believe they are especially, again, in my travels.

The two issues that superintendents tell me and me and a school board member for 11 years and having conversations with my own budget officer, our CFO, the two areas that superintendents across the state are most uncomfortable with as far as funding is the state.

There's a terrible job at funding special education and transportation.

The transportation model is called Stars.

It's an acronym, but they pay bus bus routes as the crow flies.

Not the not the actual route.

So that makes it more challenging for school districts to pay for quality, pay for bus drivers, pay for fuel because you might drive 100 miles circuitous, but only get paid for 50.

So that's one in a special ed.

Across the state, especially to help pay for educators, to help the teachers.

So you have a teacher with 30 students at a class, and maybe a third of them are special needs.

Third on IEPs or special needs.

Yeah, exactly.

And and that teacher has to deal with that entire class alone without parent educators.

How does the ospi help solve that?

Well, I, I oversees the transportation piece solely so they could work to re imagine how that piece is fixed, and I'd like to see that done sooner than later.

My priority would be to use my bully pulpit of superintendent's to go to the state legislature and say it is incumbent upon you, under the state constitution, to fully fund education.

And the Supreme Court said, special ed, and, and counselors and those are part of basic ed.

And the current superintendent is not doing enough to use his bully pulpit.

The state Supreme Court dozen years ago was holding the state legislature in contempt, and it was really costing the state a lot of money till they finally decided to wake up and do something about it.

But the state has punted its constitutional duty for special ed down to the local levy level, because they don't want to pay for it.

And they're you're running into the old problem, right?

Yeah.

And so the local levies, which are supposed to be against the law, are funding special ed because the state does not mean its obligation to do so.

Parents, if you talk to a lot of them are losing faith in the public schools.

Money's up, academic achievement down or stagnant.

What can the OSP really do about instilling confidence back into the public schools and and driving policy that promotes academic excellence?

Well, one of the things that I'm hearing across the state from parents is that the state has dumbed down education.

Okay.

So, for instance, schools are eliminating or highly capable programs.

They're laminating AP programs.

They're saying it's in the name of equity.

But what I believe that's doing is taking opportunities away from high achieving students, but missing the opportunity to instead focus resources counselors, peer educators on the struggling students.

I'm a firm believer I was in the military for 28 years, and, you know, I'm a high achiever.

Don't take away my opportunities.

Let's focus on lifting up to struggling school students without taking away and dumbing down education.

I've taught that parents across the state, there are still schools that are not giving a letter grade below a C. So a mom tells me my daughter letter can put her name on a test, turn it in, and not get a grade or a C. So the current superintendent brags about graduation rates.

Well, I would say no, fool.

And when you're not giving a grade but for lower C. But when that same student takes the same test, they can't pass a reading, writing or math at state standards.

So current superintendent is allowing those kids to graduate with a diploma, but not ready to take on the world.

Give us your take on cell phones.

Everybody knows kids these days.

I sound like an old man.

Get off my lawn.

But right here with the phone, not here with the teacher.

Are here with their studies.

What's your thought on cell phones in schools?

Our school district saw this problem come in a couple of years ago.

We knew that this issue, was a mental health crisis.

Among some things.

It also creates a discipline issue, and it certainly takes away an engagement piece where when the students are in their class on their phone, they're not paying attention to the teacher.

So that that's unfortunate for the teacher and it's not fair for them.

But what our school district did a year ago to combat that, we restricted cell phones in our schools, and we banned social media on the route or so.

Even if they're not on their phone, they can't be on their their school issued Chromebook on social media.

So that really benefited our school district.

And as I've traveled to state in various forums talking about that, other school districts in the state have adopted that same policy.

Just last week, the Spokane School District adopted the same policy restricting cell phones and banning social media.

I tell people if they're worried, if they don't believe me, they should read the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Hate.

It really goes into detail about how especially young middle school girls going through puberty are negatively impacted by social media, social bullying, body shaming.

Yeah.

It's it's horrible.

And so get our kids off cell phones in schools is really, really important.

Last 60s, what do you people what should people know about you that they don't know about you as they're contemplating their votes?

Well, the reason I'm running for this office is to restore common sense to public education.

Over the last ten years, and specifically under the last eight years of our current leader, our schools have gone down, down, down.

Ten years ago, where we were ranked number eight in the nation with our academics.

Today we're ranked number 27.

And I what I say is an analogy is this when a pro football team is losing, they replace a coach.

Our state has been losing for eight years and it's time to replace a coach.

And I hope that the people who elect me to be that new superintendent.

David Olson, thanks so much for coming in northwest now.

Thank you for having me.

I appreciate it.

Many times on this program, I've exhorted people to tune out the noise and look at the results.

The bottom line the results in Washington state schools have been dismal, with reading and math performance tanking, the achievement gap widening, and only 35% of the state's low income kids reading at grade level, with even worse numbers.

In math, the Spy has limited power to affect change in this state, but a loud sense of dire urgency would seem to be a prerequisite for whoever the officeholder is.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

You can find this program on the web at kbtc.org, stream it through the PBS app, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

That's going to do it for this edition of northwest.

Now, until next time, I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.