What about education reform?

With all the hysterics, misrepresentations (from the right, the center and the left – mostly the left) and downright nastiness circling around legislation to reform health care in the United States, it’s nice to see a thoughtful local columnist focus on an issue that often sneaks under the radar.

What Peter Callaghan does in his column yesterday is, basically, ask one, simple question: what will it take to fill our schools with teachers who are held accountable for their students’ success?

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Why Alex Rodriguez Makes More Than a Teacher

A favorite philosophical question often asked is, “Why does your average teacher earn a little more than one percent of what Alex Rodriguez does in a year?” There’s a simple market-based explanation for this. Alex Rodriguez can play the game of baseball like few other people and his services come at a premium in a free market.

However, Alex Rodriguez would earn far less if only the Major League Players were represented by the National Education Association and they applied the same principles of labor to the Major Leagues that they do to education.

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Are Murray, Cantwell, Dicks, and Baird Out of Touch?

KOMO 4 has more on Rick Larsen’s town hall event held yesterday in Mt. Vernon:

As has been happening in many places across the country, the event drew an overflow crowd of attendees. But an important point was made in the news segment, that shouldn’t be lost on us.  ”It’s important to have these town halls,” said one attendee, even if no minds are changed.

Why?  It’s democracy, stupid.

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Gipson: The “Public Option” and Small Businesses

By Carl Gipson

For years, the number one policy issue for small businesses has been how to afford health care for their employees. In today’s economy, if you want high-quality workers, as a business owner you must offer health insurance benefits. But years of skyrocketing premiums have made this option difficult, particularly for small businesses.

Unfortunately, some small business owners are falling for the latest health care reform bait and switch – the “public option” plan. There is no doubt that the status quo is not good enough for employers, employees or the health care industry in general. Health care costs continue to jump year after year towards an unsustainable future. Not only are employers, especially in Washington state, handcuffed because they are limited in the choice of health benefits they can offer their employees, but employees suffer from the same lack of choice and control over their own health care.

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Finding the Middle Ground on Environmental Policy

On Wednesday in Seattle, Climatologist Patrick Michaels discussed the science and the politics of Climate Change at the Washington Policy Center’s 7th Annual Environmental Policy Luncheon and Conference. His qualifications include being a “research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” He knows his stuff and recently has published a book entitled “Climate of Extremes.”

He claims to operate in the middle ground of those in the ongoing debate over Climate Change and the policies that organizations around the world and in the United States that are currently determining. In his presentation, he pointed out the flaws from what the left would call “global warming deniers,” and also those who are sounding the alarm because of what they perceive as a crash course for planetary destruction. As a result, he angers both extremes.

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