OSPI candidates talk accountability, pay in debate

BLAINE - The two candidates for the office of superintendent of public instruction, Washington's only statewide non-partisan post, debated today at the Association of Washington Business' annual policy summit.

 In the hour long back-and-forth, moderated by the Seattle Channel's CR Douglas and the Tacoma News-Tribune's Peter Callaghan, incumbent Terry Bergeson and challenger Randy Dorn touched on a number of issues ranging from the role of career and technical education and the appropriate types of math to require to achievement standards, the idea of differential pay and how best to test Washington's students.

But mostly, it was a debate over whether to stay the course, as Bergeson suggested, or give the state a change in the visage of Randy Dorn.

Dorn, who was a Democratic state Representative from 1988-1994, touted his legislative accomplishments as chair of the education committee as well as a bipartisan group of over fifty legislative endorsements.

Bergeson went on to say it was Dorn's legislative framework from the early 1990s that was crucial to putting the state in the difficult position it was in today.

Later in the debate, Dorn stood by his record and hypothesized that state government had lost faith over the years in the superintendent's office to the point of giving more budgetary responsibility to the governor and more planning responsibility to the state school board.

When it came time for the candidates to ask questions of one another, Bergson asked Dorn how he would keep the promise of his education bill that called for accountability, implying that jettisoning the WASL would make that difficult. He answered by telling an anecdote Ford Motors going back to the drawing board after recognizing a mistake and creating the Mustang to reiterate that he knew when to admit when there was a mistake.

In his closing statement about Dorn told the audience, made up almost entirely of business leaders, "Washingtonians have to stand up and know that this is what builds the economy...To have the intellectual ability to move to the 21st century."

Bergeson, for her part, said, "There isn't a single young person who doesn't need a high quality education. I can't be bought. I'm smart. You can trust me to think every single day in the next four years about the young people in the state of Washington."

Bergeson won the August 19 "top two" primary with 39 percent to Dorn's 34 percent.