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Washington State Representative Santos was a primary sponsor for yet another nonsensical bill, House Bill 1121. 

From the Washington State School Directors Association (WSSDA) Watch List,  is the following description of the bill:

Directs  the partnership to work with OSPI to  integrate financial ed into common core and career and college standards.

Directs districts to offer a course students can take at school or home (meaning online).

Districts are encouraged to grant credit. Allows the partnership to seek federal and private funds (guess who from).

Do any of the legislators who put their name to the bill know:

1. …that the Common Core Standards are just for math and English? Therefore, adding Personal Finance to math and English makes those the three most important subjects that will be the focus in all schools in our state. What about science, civics, history and geography? Am I missing something here?

We’ve lost nurses, counselors, librarians, field trips, art, band, music and other enrichment classes but they want to legislate “Personal Finance” into the Common Core Standards?

2. …that the Common Core Standards are copyrighted along with the SBAC test and therefore cannot be altered?

Probably not. I doubt any of them knew anything about the Common Core Standards before voting to approve their implementation in our state. In fact, the Common Core Standards had not been completed when the fine politicians in the great state of Washington approved their use.

When a bill doesn’t make sense, what do I do? You know the answer. I follow the money.

Going through the list of Santos’ contributors, as well as Representative Magendanz‘ donors, one contributor pops up, K12 Management/K12 Inc. See This Goes Under “Cashing In On Ed Reform” : K12 Inc.  for more information on this enterprise.

K12 Inc. is a for-profit company that sells online courses to school districts and they are making millions of dollars doing just that although their track record is far from admirable.

And one guess what one of their courses is, the elective “Personal Finance”.

So Santos, et al, want a course that is an elective as part of the Common Core Standards which now consist of math and English.

Not only is this a blatant play for one of Santos and Magendanz contributors but nonsensical…as was Santos other bill that proposes to split Seattle in half along racial and socioeconomic lines.

The worst of it is that Santos and Magendanz did it for so little. If you’re going to sell our kids out, at least make a decent amount of cash from your efforts.

This furthers my belief that politicians need to stay out of the business of legislating education policy.

Dora Taylor

By the way, I haven’t seen any movement on adequately funding education in our state as the Washington State Supreme Court has demanded our legislators to do.

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