Governor Gregoire Releases Washington Learns Final Report (As Written)

November 13, 2006

Good morning. Thank you all for coming today and for your commitment to our children and the future of this state. And thank you, Bill Gates, for your commitment to excellence in education and for your investments in ideas and programs that will help thousands of kids realize a brighter future.

Bill and I have something in common � and it isn�t our bank accounts or our technology aptitude. It is having parents who recognized the importance of education. I grew up with a single parent. Ma was a short order cook. She didn�t have a chance to get a college degree, but she knew one thing � she would do everything in her power to make sure I got one.

From the beginning she drilled into my head the importance of education and she established a clear expectation that I would be the first person in our family to get a college degree. I was fortunate to have other people who taught me the importance of education.

When I grew up in Auburn, my view of the world was pretty narrow.
But Mr. Reis, my sixth grade English teacher, changed all that.
Vernon Reis opened the world to me through books. He taught me that while I was living in then-rural, blue-collar Auburn, Washington in the 50s and early 60s, I could go anywhere, explore anything, and learn exciting new ideas simply by opening a book.

This room today is filled with people like Vernon Reis. I want to thank all the teachers and school administrators here today for your work. I know you didn�t get into teaching to get rich � you did it because you care about kids and our future. Thank you for all you do for our children.

I believe we have the talented, committed educators in place for our kids. What we lack is a modern education system for them to work in. We have a 20th Century vision for 21st Century challenges. For my time with you today, I would like to talk about a new education vision, a 21st Century vision, created by Washington Learns.

First, some background. Our education system today is similar to one in place when I was a student teacher in the late 1960s. Most jobs then were in production and manufacturing. We made and moved products. The skills you learned were skills for life. Indeed, people would join a corporation and count on the 30-year retirement watch from the same company.

Today you can�t even be sure of the basic survival of a Fortune 500 company � let alone your job. High-tech at the time was the emergence of electric typewriters. Today most of you wear more computing power on your wrist than existed in the entire world when I entered high school.

Our economic competitors were Maine, Missouri and Michigan, not Shanghai, Sydney, and Seoul.

Today most jobs are in the service sector where knowledge is our product. Training, retraining, job-hopping, career hopping are common, and science, technology, engineering and math skills are in hot demand. It is a dramatically different world we send kids into today. But despite this daunting new era, the critical foundation of our education system is unchanged.

Let me illustrate by telling a story about Joe. Joe isn�t real, but unfortunately, as you will see, his circumstances are all too true. Joe is raised by a working, single parent. It is a good home, but there is no knowledge about the power of early learning and regrettably, there is not enough effort to take advantage of his brain�s �sponge-like� readiness to learn.

As a result, Joe, just like more than half of the other children his age, is not ready to learn when he enters half-day kindergarten. He simply is not physically, emotionally, and academically ready to succeed.

Thanks to hard work by his teachers, Joe gets by.

It doesn�t help that he keeps changing schools since his mom is on the move looking for work. In math, for instance, he struggles as he is exposed to three different math curricula in a single year.
As I said, Joe gets by. Like 40 percent of his peers, he could read by the end of third grade, but he could not read effectively.

Joe is fortunate to be in districts with relatively low class sizes. But in reality, class size is not a silver bullet because Joe and some of his classmates simply need more personal attention than his teacher can afford.

After third grade, school was a continuing struggle for Joe. By high school, he tried to take all the classes in the one-size-fits-all regimen needed to graduate. But while his college-bound colleagues breeze through classes and check off their credits, Joe struggles academically, especially in math � things really are catching up to him � and the classes just don�t seem relevant to his life. Not that he has any idea what he wants to do after high school.

Finally, three quarters through his junior year, struggling to keep up in class and bored with classes that have no relevance to his life, Joe, like nearly a third of his classmates, quits school. As I mentioned, Joe�s story is, unfortunately, all too common. Joe�s story points out that despite hard work by our educators, we have challenges ahead of us.

We simply must help inspire kids like Joe to dream big and give them the tools to pursue those dreams wherever those dreams will take them. For the past 15 months, scores of wonderful, thoughtful people have worked on Washington Learns and helped us develop a new vision for educating our kids. A new vision for tapping the hopes, dreams and potential of every child.

A new vision for preparing our kids for the global, competitive, rapidly-changing work environment they face today. A new vision for developing a workforce that will be a magnet for employers so we can put our kids to work here at home. And a new vision that will help keep kids in jobs, not in trouble and in the unemployment and social service lines.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the Washington Learns vision is to retell Joe�s story. Joe is still raised by a well-meaning single mom. She knows she�s Joe�s first and best teacher and that learning starts at birth. But the first turn in our tale occurs at age six months when Joe�s mom goes back to work. Joe spends his days at a learning center where the director and teachers are trained in early learning skills.

It�s a fun, safe, and exciting place for Joe to learn. At age five, little Joe heads off to all-day kindergarten. Significantly, not only is he ready to learn, his classmates, who also benefited from strong early learning experience, are also ready to learn. It creates a vibrant, rich learning environment.

Under the Washington Learns vision, Joe�s story also takes a different turn in his kindergarten through third grade years. By the time he is eight, he is proficient in reading, writing and math, and he has been exposed to science, music, art, and even a foreign language. More importantly, Joe has �learned to learn� and is mature enough to move into fourth grade and beyond.

A significant departure in our new scenario for Joe involves the addition of mentors in his school life. Joe has an adult available to watch his progress, answer his questions, help him with problems, and most importantly, to talk to him about what he would like to do with his life after high school so he could tailor his course work to his learning style, his talents, interests and goals.

There are still times when Joe struggles. But each time, he found an interesting thing happened. Instead of struggling through his studies in the full classroom where it was hard for him to get more help, he found teachers would pull him and others aside into small work groups to help them catch on and catch up.

Joe decides he wants a career in either the building trades or maybe be the first in his family to go to college. Joe knows that whatever path he takes, an understanding of math and science will be essential. Fortunately, the state and school districts had also anticipated this need and ramped up math and science education, so Joe was getting the foundation he would need, and he felt good about it. He had confidence in himself.

Working with his mom and a counselor, Joe selects classes that will prepare him for his two career paths. Better yet, if Joe successfully passes the classes and graduates, he will have an apprenticeship job or a college scholarship awaiting him. The difference for Joe is that his education has rigor, relevance and relationships.

Rigor in that he has academic demands and standards to meet. Relevance in that the classes lead him to his career goal so they mean something to him and are worth the rigor. And relationships in that he has adults who are behind him, guiding him, and helping him when needed.

Part of the vision of Washington Learns is driven by a stark reality: high school degrees no longer are a ticket to a family wage job. At least some post secondary education will be needed for most good jobs. That�s why the vision calls for educating more people to higher levels.

The other reality is that we have worker shortages not only in technical fields that require a college degree, but in the trades. So when we are fortunate enough to have a student like Joe interested in the building trades, we need to be able to respond and train him for these high demand jobs.

Under the Washington Learns vision, Joe finds the state has a tuition policy that allows him and his family to have some predictability about the cost of college, that he qualifies for a scholarship, and he finds a responsive higher education system that offers courses in high demand fields.

That gives you a flavor of the vision of Washington Learns. Let me now approach it from another perspective � some of the values on which this vision is based.

First, of course, is the idea that our children are precious, diverse, and will succeed if we believe in them and help them.
We also have to realize all kids are different and we have to personalize their education. The sooner we realize that future artists, steelworkers, lawyers, accountants, mechanics and physicists have different talents, learning styles, interests, skills and goals, the sooner we can shape educational experiences so all kids can be successful.

Think about it. Today we personalize ring tones on cell phones. We have personalized trainers. We buy ipods � or the soon to be released Zune � for personalized music lists. And car makers even market the ability to program the driver�s seat to your personal size and style.

Isn�t it time we personalized the education of our kids?

The next value underlying Washington Learns is accountability. Certainly the WASL added accountability to the school system, but we need to do more. Today about 30 percent of our ninth graders will fail to graduate on time or won�t graduate at all.

A 300 batting average may be great for a Mariner batter, but it obviously won�t do as a success rate in preparing our kids for life. All of us � kids, teachers, administrators, parents, community members, the governor and legislators have to be accountable for turning these numbers around.

In state government, I am demanding that managers be held accountable by producing measurable results. We need the same performance based approach in education.

One way to hold ourselves accountable is to judge our performance against what are called the Global Challenge States. This comparison will allow us to judge how competitive we are in the global economy.

The third big value in Washington Learns is that prevention pays. Research shows that we can save eight dollars for every dollar we invest in early learning.

We save money on remedial education, special education, abuse and neglect, health care, drop-out rates, teen pregnancy and crime and incarceration by giving kids a successful start. But more important than dollars is the lost human potential. How do we get into a situation where 30 percent of our kids drop out of school or a large percentage who do graduate have no idea what to do next with their lives?

The final value I would mention is that we believe we need to do more to attract and retain the best and brightest teachers and principles. The Washington Learns report calls for better teacher training at all levels, especially in math and science, and it calls for fair compensation, especially for those who are most effective in the classroom. It also recognizes that a great leader in a school can get amazing results.

Before closing, I would like to acknowledge the great work of the Washington Learns team. Our steering committee members have put their hearts and souls in this project. They are:


  • Representative Glenn Anderson;
  • Frank Armijo, Program Director and General Manager for Lockheed Martin Information Technology in the Tri-Cities;
  • Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson;
  • Charley Bingham, a retired Executive Vice President of Weyerhaeuser Company;
  • Amy Bragdon, a retired educator from Spokane;
  • Ann Daley, Executive Director of Washington Learns;
  • Representative Bill Fromhold;
  • Denny Heck, retired as President and founder of TVW;
  • Eric Liu, writer, educator and served as a foreign affairs speechwriter and deputy domestic policy advisor for President Clinton;
  • Senator Rosemary McAuliffe;
  • Victor Moore, Director of the Office of Financial Management;
  • Senator Dave Schmidt;
  • Bob Watt, Vice President of Government and Community Affairs for the Boeing Company; and
  • Karen Tvedt, Executive Director, Early Learning Council/Advisory Committee.


Working behind this extraordinary group were scores of others, please stand and be acknowledged as I identify your advisory committee:


  • Early Learning
  • K-12
  • Higher Education


I certainly can�t forget my policy staff members who have worked so hard on this project: Laurie Dolan, Judy Hartmann, Deb Merle and Regina Jones.

I will admit to you, I didn�t appreciate the enormity and complexity of the challenge we faced when we started our work. The Washington Learns team persevered, and I think they have produced a bold, realistic, workable vision for our education system. But the enormity of the challenge and the complexity of this issue have not gone away.

You do not have before you today a final plan for implementation, accountability and financing. It is simply not realistic to do so. I think government sometimes over promises. We aren�t going to do that. And sometimes reports end up sitting on a shelf and gathering dust. We aren�t going to have that happen either.

What we have produced is a solid vision for a world-class education system. This is no small task.

Now that we know where we are going, we can start making it not only work, but work well and bring about real results. Consider for instance, financing. There is no question that delivering the kind of personalized education I have talked about will cost more money. The report, therefore, calls on the steering committee during the next two years to develop a ten-year implementation strategy for stable and increased funding for a world-class, learner-focused, seamless education system.

Don�t get me wrong. There must be a sense of urgency and we must make every effort to do as much as we can as soon as we can. We must start with a significant down payment, phase in strategies, and fund some demonstration projects.

Let�s see what works and let�s get real results.

In particular, I think this state needs to rally around an emphasis on math and science education. We need every teacher to incorporate math and science in their studies and we have to help students embrace, not fear, these important studies.

In conclusion, let me frame our challenge from two perspectives. The first is a personal one. I am not Governor of just any state. I am Governor of Washington.

We are a state known for quality products, creativity, innovation, and an entrepreneurial spirit. This really hit home to me on several of my trade missions.

I flew in a Boeing airplane. On the drive to the hotel I passed a big Microsoft regional headquarters building. When I got to the hotel, across the street I found a Starbucks. And the local Costco looked just like the one in Tumwater and featured Washington products like wine, beef, potatoes, and cherries, all of which are known worldwide for their quality.

Our challenge is to produce the next generation of workers and leaders who can carry on this spirit of creativity, innovation, and pursuit of quality.

The other perspective comes from Dana, a 10-year-old from Midland Elementary in Tacoma. As part of the Washington Learns process, we asked kids what education means to them. Here is what Dana wrote:

Education is important to me,
Because it helps our land of liberty.
When we all know our multiplication,
It helps grow leaders for our nation.
When we have a spelling bee,
It helps us all be free.
As students become ready readers,
They are growing into great leaders.
Learning might not always be fun,
But our growing minds have just begun.
Education is not only important to me,
But helps our land of liberty.

Ten-year-old Dana gets it. We now have a vision in place for a world-class education system in Washington. Let�s all pledge to work together to put that vision in place and provide Dana, our friend Joe, and every other child in Washington a chance to dream big and follow those dreams.

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