Boeing and the dumbed down education system in
Washington State
December
9, 2005
On
February 2, 1993, the Seattle Times
published an article “Big business helped solidify push for revamping
education.” The following is a quote
from that article:
“When Gov. Mike Lowry wavered in his support for the
reform plan, [Frank] Shrontz, legislative leaders and other reform advocates
visited him. Boeing executives told the
new governor they wouldn’t support a tax increase if it didn’t include funding
for education restructuring — a message that brought the governor solidly back
into the fold.”
Frank
Shrontz was then the CEO of the largest manufacturer of commercial airplanes in
the United States — Boeing — based out of Seattle in western Washington.
In the
years following, Shrontz and other Boeing executives sat on every education and
workforce training committee, council, board, commission
and restructuring team brought together by Washington State elected
officials. They donated space at their
Tukwila facility to house the Washington Commission on Student Learning. They donated hundreds of thousands of dollars
to various projects, including those in which the National Center on Education
and the Economy (NCEE) and its founder and head, Marc Tucker, were involved,
such as the Washington Alliance for Restructuring Education (WARE). Boeing employees would leave their jobs with
Boeing to accept governor appointed high-paying jobs in the Washington State
bureaucracy in Olympia. Monetary
concessions were made to Boeing at the expense of Washington taxpayers to
include the establishment of the Employment and Training Trust Fund providing
$70 million in taxpayer money for the benefit of laid off Boeing workers.
From the Boeing website comes the following revelation regarding Boeing and
education:
“In addition to school support, Boeing is committed to a
performance-based educational system and is involved in initiatives at local,
state and national levels. The company contributes to educational reform
through corporate and personal leadership and financial support. “
Frank
Shrontz also held powerful connections outside the state, including sitting on
the board of the New American Schools Development Corporation or NASDC. In that capacity, Shrontz helped choose the
design teams that would implement a “thorough-going redesign of America’s
schools.” One of those design teams was
the National Alliance for Restructuring Education (NARE), a project of Marc
Tucker’s National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE).
On
February 2, 1992, Booth Gardner in his capacity as the Governor of Washington
State and Member of the National Education Goals Panel; Judith Billings in her
capacity as the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction and
Member of the New Standards Project Board of Directors (another organization of
NCEE); and Brian Benzel in his capacity as Chairman of the Governor’s Task
Force on Schools for 21st Century, Superintendent of the Edmonds
School District and Member of the National Council on Education Standards and
Testing, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with NARE and Marc Tucker to
oversee the “design of ‘break the mold’ public schools” in Washington
State. This was before the Washington Legislature passed ESHB 1209 officially
bringing education reform to Washington State in 1993.
Remember
that it was a commission of NCEE — the Commission on the Skills of the American
Workforce (CSAW) — that wrote the infamous America’s
Choice: high skills or low wages! report in
which it is stated,
“But in a broad survey of employment needs across America,
we found little evidence of a far-reaching desire for a more educated
workforce.”
In 1987,
when then Governor Booth Gardner was encouraging the Washington Legislature to
pass legislation bringing the Schools
for the 21st Century pilot project for education reform to
Washington State, Gardner also brought his friend, Marc Tucker, to the state to
testify before the Legislature in the matter.
At a hearing held by the Senate Education Committee in February 1998,
citizen researchers in Washington State exposed the failure of the Schools for
the 21st Century pilot project; a pilot project which was the
springboard for education reform in Washington State and across the nation.
Shrontz
sat on the Governor’s Council on Education Reform and Funding (GCERF) in
Washington State, created on May 16, 1991, by then Governor Booth Gardner by
executive order. Marc Tucker acted in
the capacity of “expert consultant’ to GCERF.
In 1994,
when then President Clinton signed the Goals 2000: Educate America Act into law
at the Zamorano Fine Arts Academy in San Diego, California, Clinton’s speech on
that occasion recognized the presence of Frank Shrontz at the ceremony.
On
September 19, 1996, Ron
Woodard, President of the Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, made the
following remarks at a Seattle Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting:
“…25 percent of Seattle’s high school students dropped out
of school in 1995 — that’s a frightening prospect for Boeing or any other
company here to consider.
… To continue to be the world’s No. 1 manufacturer of
commercial airplanes, Boeing must have the best educated and mostly highly
skilled people in the world working for us.”
To this day Boeing continues to give it’s time, energy,
and money to implementing education reform in Washington State.
In March 1996, the nation’s governor’s and top corporate
leaders came together at the National Education Summit at IBM’s conference
center in New York. From this summit
came a new organization, Achieve, led by six governors and six corporate
leaders. Frank Shrontz was one of the
six corporate leaders appointed to head this new organization. On March 28, 1996, The Washington Post published “Corporations Vow to Favor
States That Boost Academic Standards” which states, in part,
“Most of the nation’s governors and more than 40 corporate
chiefs approved the idea at their national education summit here to put
pressure on states to demand more from students. They said, ‘We commit to considering the
quality of a state’s academic standards and student achievement levels as a
high-priority factor in determining business location decisions.’”
Achieve’s website would, in 1997, confirm
this commitment on the part of businesses, stating in its Annual Report,
“Generally, business location decisions take years of
careful research and planning, and few such decisions have been made in the
year since the Summit. Still, a handful
of companies have demonstrated their commitment to base such decisions, in
part, on whether states and communities have high academic standards and/or
student achievement levels.”
To this end, Achieve vowed to establish and make available
to businesses state and school district standards and “academic” achievement
levels. In return business vowed to not
locate in states considered to have unacceptable standards (exit outcomes) and
achievement levels (measured by the state assessment tool).
In 2001, after many, many years
and a multitude of tax incentives and concessions to the company, Boeing moved
its corporate offices out of Washington State, relocating them to Chicago, Illinois. It was not the first or last economic blow
dealt Washington State by Boeing. Since
1998, Boeing has laid off 20,000 workers in Washington State.
In that same year (March 9, 2001) John Warner, a Boeing
executive, wrote a glowing opinion published in the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, in which he claimed that “Nationally,
Washington is often cited as a model of how to do school reform right.”
A scant twenty-one months later, however, on December 21,
2002, bold headlines appeared in the South County
Journal: “Boeing may build new, efficient jet out of area – State
must become more competitive, Mulally
says” further stating, in the article,
“Boeing Commercial Airlines CEO Alan Mulally
told reporters Friday that the company could build the plane at its Everett
plant, but warned that it ‘absolutely could build it out of state’ if
Washington can’t find ways to deal with transportation issues, education
and tax structure.” (underlining added for emphasis)
Education researchers across the state were understandably
incensed by this sudden charge on the part of Boeing that Washington’s
education system somehow didn’t measure up.
After all, it wasn’t parents sitting on all those committees, councils,
boards, commissions, and restructuring teams; parents weren’t invited.
But Boeing was. And
through its participation on all the various committees, councils, boards,
commissions and restructuring teams, Boeing has had more influence on the
direction education has taken in Washington State than any other entity in the
state.
To now point to education as a consideration of whether
Boeing would build the 7E7 Dreamliner in Washington State was an open admission
that the very education system Boeing pushed for and helped build in Washington
State isn’t measuring up.
Adding
insult to injury, citizen complaints of undue influence by Boeing, made in 1997,
were ignored by the Washington State Legislature.
In an
eleventh hour deal, most of the details of which have been kept from Washington
citizens by the governor’s office in violation of the Washington State Public
Disclosure Act, then Governor Gary Locke made a multitude of concessions to
Boeing to keep the manufacturing of the 7E7 Dreamliner in Washington
State. What citizens do know is that
Boeing will benefit from …
For the
sake of all the children of Washington State who are not getting an education
by any measurable objective standard in the government schools, and in lieu of
stopping the undue influence being afforded Boeing in the area of education,
maybe it would have been better to have helped Boeing pack its bags.
© 2005 Lynn M Stuter – All Rights Reserved