I’ve been swamped with email on education issues and want to consolidate my responses to a number of popular questions as I think it’ll give a better sense of what my positions are on your issues. I’m hearing about:
- Basic Education funding, including ensuring that we adequately fund our McCleary obligation.
- Funding and implementation of Initiative 1351
- The “waiver”, or making use of state-wide assessments for evaluations of teachers.
- Senate cuts to teacher retiree benefits. In particular, a 27% cut to the Medicare subsidy, a flat dollar amount that’s part of the retirement benefit for teachers.
- Testing and our graduation requirements. There are a number of proposals to change (reduce) the amount of testing we do. I address this in a different post.