It is very interesting how education in the U.S. and particularly in Washington state have been permitted to grow so arrogant and defiant of this federal and state laws.

Washington refused to comply with federal law in 2002 that required principal/teacher evaluations and the current Obama education plan requires principal/teacher evaluations in order to receive federal funding. Now, as education in Washington state was warned, federal funding is to be cut for this state because of their failure to purge their deadbeat, poor performing teachers.

Even more arrogant is the fact that school districts have teacher performance evaluations in their union agreements but will not use them against any teacher.

Well now, whom would you hold responsible for this situation? It can’t be the federal government, they wrote the law requiring teacher performance evaluation in 2002 and school districts have had 12 years to write and use teacher evaluations to comply with federal law. You can’t blame Washington state lawmakers because all they were required to do is inform this state’s education leaders that they had to comply with current teacher evaluation laws.

The field of arrogance and defiance is now narrowed down to the Washington Education Association (WEA) led by Kim Mead. On a smaller local level we see that the arrogance and defiance progresses down hill to the local unions mainly BIEA, NKEA, CKEA, BEA, not to forget SKEA led by Judy Arbogast, who arrogantly and defiantly called for a strike (defiant of the “no strike clause” that she negotiated with South Kitsap School District in their agreement) to force union demands onto the school district at taxpayer expense.

Good news in this area is the fact that SKEA will most likely be operating at a much higher degree of intelligence under the leadership of John Richardson. Bad news in this area is that Arbogast intends to unseat Sen. Jan Angel in Olympia.

Lord help us all if that happens.

Larry L. Mann | Port Orchard