Senate Listening Tour is a Thinly Disguised Push Poll
The Senate Listening Tour will be in Everett tonight, October 6 2015. In case you can't make it, we will review a couple of the most important charts presented at this Dog and Pony show. In the title, I have called the Senate Tour a “push poll.” For those who may not be familiar with this deceptive tactic, a push poll is a poll or phone interview where the person interviewing you pretends to be interested in your opinion on an important topic. But after asking a couple of innocent sounding questions, they then ask misleading and even false questions in an attempt to brainwash you into believing things that are not true and supporting whatever agenda is being pushed by the billionaires who is paying for the push poll.
For example, a political poll about the Presidential Race might say, “If you learned that Bernie Sanders was actually a Russian Spy, would you be more or less likely to vote for him?” Of course, Bernie is not really a Russian spy, but just hearing this is enough to frighten many poorly informed people away from supporting Bernie – and that is the goal of the push poll – to use misleading claims to manipulate people.
Here is another one that is harder to spot. Parents have been asked: “Do you support Common Core standards and tests so that all students can be career and college ready?” We all want our kids to be career and college ready. The problem is that Common Core standards written by billionaires and Wall Street consultants and Common Core tests designed to maximize corporate profits do not get students career and college ready. Hiring more teachers and lowering class sizes is the ONLY proven way to help students get career and college ready. The Common Core “Gun to the Head / Test Threaten and Punish” model of education has never helped students learn and never will. Common Core tests are a scam whose only purpose is to increase corporate profits. But you could never tell that from the Common Core push poll question.
How Much Money is Needed to Restore School Funding in Washington State to the National Average?Now that we have a better idea of how the rich and powerful use misleading “questions” to manipulate the rest of us, let's take a look at the subtle mis-information presented to the public in the Senate Listening Tour. The claimed goal of the listening tour is to get input from the public about the best way for the legislature to meet their constitutional duty to fully fund our public schools. Evidence presented during the McCleary Court hearings indicates that it will take $3 billion per year just to restore class sizes and school operation funding to the national average. More than 10,000 teachers will need to be hired just to lower class sizes down to the national average. It will take another $5 billion to build schools and classrooms for these 10,000 additional teachers and their students. This does not include the fact that 100,000 students in our state are currently “unhoused” and spending their school days in particle board boxes – one of the highest rates of unhoused students in the nation. Building real schools for these kids would cost another $3 billion. Then there's the ugly fact that more than half the schools in our state are more than 50 years old and do not meet health code or earthquake code standards – placing the lives of one million students at risk! Building 1,000 safe schools for our kids is estimated to cost more than $30 billion and perhaps more than $50 billion. For more information on the school construction crisis, see the following article:http://washingtonpublicbankcoalition.org/washington-state-50-billion-school-construction-crisis
To even place a dent in the school construction and operation shortfall here in Washington state will take at least $5 to $10 billion in additional funding per year. But this important fact is not even brought up in the Listening Tour.
Where did all of the money go?
Our State used to be 11th in the nation in school funding. Our legislature used to pay 67% of the cost of building new schools. Now, our state is 47th in the nation in school funding and our legislature pays for less Senate Listening Tour is a Thinly Disguised Push Poll: