By Steve Gunn
EAGnews.org

OLYMPIA, Wash. – In politics it’s always smart to dance with the person who brought you, even if that means doing the wrong thing.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is providing a sickening reminder of how that works.

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During his recent campaign for governor, the Democratic Inslee said he supported more accountability in public education and liked the idea of assigning A-F letter grades to schools.

“We have a quarter of our children who are sort of forgotten children and that’s going to be unacceptable when I’m governor,” Inslee was quoted as saying by the TheOlympian.com. “It’s one of the reasons I’m proposing for every school to have a letter grade that will be given and disseminated to the parents in the district so we can hold ourselves accountable.”

But now state Sen. Steve Litzow, R-Mercer Island, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, has proposed a bill that would assign letter grades to schools. Given the governor’s previous statement, Litzow might have expected smooth sailing for his legislation.

But the Washington Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union and a huge donor to Inslee and other Democratic candidates, came out against the bill. Suddenly Inslee announced he couldn’t support the legislation and it was blocked in the state House, the news report said.

Mary Alice Heuschel, Inslee’s chief of staff, told the media that the governor couldn’t support the bill because it allegedly uses vague terms and has a short timeline for implementation, according to the news report.

Heuschel went on to suggest that Inslee doesn’t necessarily support letter grades, and is looking for “an effective and efficient way to communicate school performance … whether that is a grade or number or label or anything else.”

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What she meant to say is that the governor is looking for a school accountability system that the union approves of. He liked the idea of letter grades, but his union sponsors don’t, so now it’s not such a great idea.

Just who do you work for, governor?