Welcome to our website. In this article, I will explain why I am running for Superintendent of Public Instruction. As a parent and teacher, I believe every child deserves a quality education. Having a Master's Degree in Child Development, I understand how crucial it is that every child has an experienced teacher and a safe school environment. But I also think it was wrong for the current Superintendent to shut down every school in our state regardless of the circumstances in the school district. I am therefore running to restore honesty and integrity to Olympia and local control to our schools. What I mean by honesty and integrity is that the current batch of politicians in Olympia often have not told voters or parents the truth about our schools or our economy. I will provide examples of failures to tell the truth in a minute.
First, I want to explain what I mean by restoring local control to our public schools. I have spent many years studying the history of our state constitution. Here is a picture of the 75 people who wrote our State Constitution in the summer of 1889.
These 75 people wrote the most unique constitution in the nation. Their primary goal was to preserve their local control of their local schools from the danger of corrupt Olympia politicians.
What do I mean by local control? Local control means that each school board was free to set its own policies.
This local control principle was so important to parents that, in 1889, when our state constitution was written, several provisions were inserted into our state constitution to insure that Washington schools would forever remain under local control – rather than being controlled by the state legislature. The most important of these provisions was Article 2, Section 28 which states: “The legislature is prohibited from enacting any special laws… providing for the management of the common schools.”
The reason this provision was put in our state constitution is that the drafters of our state constitution, which were just regular people like you and me, had seen legislatures in other states take control of schools away from local school districts and therefore away from the control of local parents. The drafters of our constitution did not want this to ever happen in Washington state. Sadly, in recent years, the legislature has ignored our state constitution – creating literally hundreds of laws attempting to micro-manage our public schools and taking control away from local school boards. Many of these new misguided laws required hiring more administrators to write thousands of reports to the legislature and compile mountains of data on students.
This mountain of ever increasing state-mandated regulations is one of the main reasons that class sizes in our state have remain among the highest in the nation, even though school funding has nearly doubled in the past 10 years. The money never made it to the students because it went towards hiring more administrators, consultants and bureaucrats rather than hiring more teachers.
I am the only candidate for Superintendent who has made local control a central issue – and who has also pointed out that the failure to honor local control is a violation of our state constitution. I have publicly stated that, if I am elected Superintendent, I will not require any school district to comply with any laws passed by the legislature which the local school feels is harmful to the students in their district.
I also have a degree in Science Education from Washington State University and a Masters Degree in Child Development from the University of Washington. Both of these degrees are important because they mean that I will insist on actual science to make recommendations to local school districts – and I will insist that public policies are aligned with actual child development. The days of asking students to do tasks or learn subjects that are not age appropriate will END.
I also spent 20 years teaching courses in Problem Solving at Bellevue College. Here are the 8 steps I recommend to solve problems.
Being an expert in problem solving is important because the current batch of politicians in Olympia have inflicted a pile of harmful problems on our schools and our kids. Here are five of the most important problems:
#1 Forced harmful vaccinations of children against the will of their parents.
#2 Forced sex education that is not age appropriate.
#3 Federal common core standards that seriously harm the emotional and cognitive development of children
#4 A test called SBAC that is so bad almost no one in the legislature can pass it.
#5 Shutting down our schools for 3 months in a row despite the fact that there was not even a single case of any child in any school anywhere in our state transmitting the corona virus to any adult.
I will clarify what I mean by each of these five problems. But one of the principles of problem solving is to seek out the underlying cause of problems rather than merely focusing on the symptoms. These five problems are a perfect example of this principle as they all have one thing in common – they all violate the local control provision of our state constitution.
Problem #1 - Forced harmful vaccinations of children against the will of their parents. The state legislature recently made it all but impossible for parents to prevent their children from being vaccinated. State mandated forced vaccinations are a violation of parents rights as well as a violation of our state constitution.
The problem with this new state law is that many of the newer vaccines are much more dangerous than vaccines in the past. In particular, the increasing use of Recombinant DNA vaccines has greatly increased the risk of vaccines harming children. Because our federal government prohibits parents from suing drug manufacturers when their children are harmed by vaccines, this decision should have remained with parents and with the local school board – not with corrupt bureaucrats in Olympia who have been bribed by drug companies into passing vaccination laws that have nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with increasing the profits of drug companies.
Problem #2 - Forced sex education that is not age appropriate.
One of the worst laws ever passed in Olympia is the recent sex ed law which requires sex ed be taught in Kindergarten (Senate Bill 5395). State Mandated Forced Sex Education is a Violation of our State Constitution. This new law has caused many parents to threaten to pull their kids completely out of our public schools.
There is a “veto” referendum to repeal this new law (Referendum 90) and I support this effort. But what happens if the Referendum does not get on the ballot, or does not pass? Or worse, even if it does pass in November, there is nothing stopping our corrupt legislature from passing another similar law next January - and then parents are right back at square one. Referendum 90 is at best a Band-aid solution to a much bigger problem. That bigger underlying problem is a state legislature that is constantly passing laws intended to take control of schools away from their locally elected school board. Our time would be better spent addressing the underlying problem by electing a Superintendent who understands that this new law – Senate Bill 5395 - and any other law like it – is a violation of our state constitution and therefore should not be enforced in the first place. If you want to guarantee that Kindergartners will not be subjected to this insane law, then I urge you to support my campaign – because I will actually solve the underlying problem and not just the surface problem!
Problem #3 - Federal common core standards that seriously harm the emotional and cognitive development of children by labeling normal children as failures.
Federal Mandated Standards are a Violation of the US and Washington State Constitutions. I have written an entire book on the Common Core problem. You can read this book for free at my website called Weapons of Mass Deception dot org. I also led the effort in both the Republican and Democratic Parties in Washington state to pass resolutions opposing the horrible Common Core standards.
But despite the fact that BOTH major political parties officially opposed Common Core, our corrupt legislature passed a bill forcing these standards on our schools and kids anyway. If I am elected Superintendent, one of my first goals will be to end these harmful standards and restore local control with learning standards written by teachers and parents here in Washington state.
Problem #4 - A test called SBAC that is so bad almost no one in the legislature can pass it.
The SBAC Test is a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars. The SBAC test is supposedly based on the Common Core standards, In fact, it is not based on anything. It is a random set of tens of thousands of trick questions with different questions given to different students – to the point that no parent will ever know which questions their own child was forced to try to answer. SBAC is likely the worst test ever written. I gave several SBAC questions to many legislators a couple of years ago - and less than 10% were able to answer more than half the questions correctly.
I also developed the website Opt Out Washington dot org to encourage parents to opt out of the harmful SBAC test:
If I am elected Superintendent, student evaluation standards and methods will be returned to the local school districts as is required by our state constitution.
Problem #5 - Shutting down our schools for 3 months in a row despite the fact that there was not even a single case of any child in any school anywhere in our state transmitting the corona virus to any adult.
More than 70 studies from around the world have confirmed that there is not a single recorded case anywhere in the world of a child transmitting the corona virus to any adult. Thus, there was never any need to shut down our schools or businesses in the first place. Here is a link to a summary of these studies. https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/COVID-data-top-10.pdf
State closure of public schools is also a violation of the Washington State Constitution. Never before in the history of our state have bureaucrats in Olympia had the audacity to shut down schools all across the state. Even in the 1918 Flu epidemic – which was 30 times worse than the corona epidemic – the decision to shut down schools was left to the local school board. Only a few school districts shut down in 1918 and they only shut down for an average of three weeks – not three months.
If I am elected Superintendent, the decision on whether to shut down schools will be left to the people who know their schools the best, the local school districts – as is required by our state constitution.
I hope it is obvious by now that the underlying cause of all five of these problems is that Olympia bureaucrats took decision and policy making control away from local school districts – in violation of our state constitution. All of these problems will be solved if I am elected superintendent - because I will honor our state constitution & restore local control to our public schools- as was the case for more than 120 years.
Now that you understand why local control is so important, let’s look at several claims made by Olympia bureaucrats that turned out to be false.
False Claim #1: Politicians in Olympia falsely claimed they needed to close schools and businesses to fight the corona virus. The fact is, thanks to our immune system, corona infections had already fallen 50% before the first lockdown order was issued. Here is a graph from the CDC showing that Corona infections began falling on March 4, 2020 and had fallen 50% by the time the first lockdown order was issued on March 20, 2020, Here is a link to the data for this graph.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/data/senAllregt21.html
The above graph confirms that there was never any need for lockdown orders in the first place as our immune system was already dealing with the virus.
False Claim #2: Politicians also claim they had to close the schools in order to flatten the curve and protect our hospitals. You can see from the preceding graph that there were actually MORE hospital admissions for the Type A flu virus in February 2020 than there was for the Corona Virus in March 2020.
Sadly, hapless bureaucrats in Olympia were suckered into believing a computer model from a Bill Gates funded fake scientist called Ferguson into believing that US hospitals would be overwhelmed with corona virus patients unless all of our schools and businesses were shut down. Instead, as the above graph shows that corona virus admissions never exceeded 7 percent of our hospital capacity and hospitals had so few patients that many were forced to lay off staff.
False Claim #3: These same incompetent bureaucrats also claimed we were going to face a tidal wave of fatalities unless our schools and businesses were closed.
In fact, there have been almost exactly the same number of fatalities this year as there was last year – and the year before that. The corona virus did not increase fatalities and shutting down schools and businesses did not reduce fatalities.
This graph shows that daily fatalities for the past 20 weeks have averaged about 170 and that there was no change from 2018 or 2019 to 2020. Equally important the graph also shows that there was no change in daily fatalities before the lockdown order was issued compared to after the lockdown order was issued. It remained almost exactly the same as the previous two years!
To see CDC State data, go to this link: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Scroll down to options and click on the link called Data.CDC. gov National and State estimates. Then click on View Data. Then click on State, Sort Descending. Then click Next about 20 times to get to Washington State.
What about the Claim that the Lockdown was based on “Science”?
Olympia bureaucrats claim that their lockdown orders were based on “science.” In fact, the lockdown orders were based on computer models created by fake scientists who had been bribed with hundreds of millions of dollars by Bill Gates.
The fundamental tenet if real science is a principle called the Null Hypothesis. The Null Hypothesis states that any claim of a relationship between two elements is assumed to be false until evidence is provided with actual verifiable data that there is a significant relationship.
Therefore, real scientists would assume that the corona virus is not significantly more dangerous than the seasonal flu. This has now proven to be the case. It turns out that the claims made that there would be a tidal wave of fatalities from the corona virus were false. Sadly, Olympia bureaucrats accepted the claim that the corona virus would kill millions of people based on computer models that were not based on any actual evidence. To be clear, I am not saying that the corona virus did not kill anyone. I am saying that it did not kill people at a rate that was greater than the seasonal flu killed people in 2019 and 2018. About 170 people per day died in Washington state in the first five months of 2018 and 2019 and this same number of people died each day in Washington state in 2020. Most of these fatalities were not from the seasonal flu or the corona virus. They were from heart attacks, strokes and cancer.
The Null Hypothesis also requires assuming that Lockdowns are Snake Oil
Similarly, real scientists would assume that any intervention, such as locking down schools and businesses, to stop the corona virus would make no difference. The Lockdown imposed by Olympia bureaucrats is the modern day equivalent of Snake Oil. No scientific evidence was ever offered that shutting down schools and businesses would reduce the transmission rate or fatality rate of the corona virus. We now have a mountain of evidence that lockdowns do not slow down the transmission of the corona virus or reduce fatalities – because the fatality rate in Washington state remained at 170 per day even after the lockdown orders were issued.
The Drawbacks of Locking Down Schools and Businesses Far Exceed any Advantages
In my Problem Solving courses, I stressed that we should carefully consider the advantages and the drawbacks of all options before choosing a course of action. Sadly, while there was no advantage in shutting down our schools and businesses, there were several huge drawbacks. It was predictable that shutting down schools would cost one million students their education. It was also predictable that shutting down businesses would cost one million parents their jobs. And it was predictable that shutting down our economy would put a record multi-billion dollar hole in our budget.
Here is the evidence that more than one million jobs were lost since the lockdown began: Just follow the link to the latest Employment Security Department claims report published on June 4, 2020 for the week of May 24-31: https://esd.wa.gov/newsroom/initial-unemployment-insurance-claims-for-week-of-may-24-30-2020
Since March 7 when Lockdown job losses began, over 2 million initial claims have been filed. As some people filed for multiple claims and since many of the claims were actually from Nigerian hackers, the total distinct individuals claims have been about 1.15 million people. Of these 1.15 million people, 826,123 individuals who have filed an initial claim have been paid a total of about $5 billion. This leaves about 300,000 people who are owed 3 months in benefits who have not yet been paid.
Currently, there are 721,000 ongoing claims that still have several weeks of benefits left. Combining the 721,000 people with ongoing claims with the 300,000 people who have filed but not yet been paid leaves more than 1 million unemployed people in Washington state.
Death of the Washington State Unemployment Trust Fund
In January 2020, the trust fund balance was about $5 billion. However, it will soon all be gone. Here is a history of the Trust Fund for the past 14 years:
Source: https://esdorchardstorage.blob.core.windows.net/esdwa/Default/ESDWAGOV/newsroom/Statistics/mthly-trust-fund.pdf
The latest official balance from ESD was $4 billion on Friday, May 1, 2020. While the federal government is currently covering most of the weekly payouts, the ESD Trust fund is covering about $250 million per week. Since there were five weeks of payouts in May, the trust fund fell below $2.75 billion by June 1, 2020. If it was not for the backlog of 300,000 cases, there would be 11 weeks of payouts left. ESD claims this backlog will be paid by June 15, 2020. Because the 300,000 cases are owed about 3 months of claims, the state portion will be about 1 billion owed. Thus, the balance on June 15 will be about $2.75 billion minus $1 billion owed minus two more weeks at $250 million each = $1.25 billion. Then moving forward from June 15, total weekly payout will continue to be about $250 million. Thus, the trust fund will be completely depleted some time in July 2020.
Let’s take a close look at how $5 billion was depleted in three months.
Currently, the trust fund has less than 3 billion left. In the next two weeks, it will loss another billion. But the end of July, the entire fund will be wiped out. I predict that the legislature will be forced to use $1 to $2 billion from the $3 billion rainy day fund just to keep the Unemployment Trust Fund solvent through the rest of the summer.
One million lost jobs will dramatically increase homelessness, drug abuse and suicide in our state. I estimate that for every person killed by the corona virus, at least 10 will be killed by the economic lock down.
We also face a record budget shortfall due to the Lockdown
On May 15, 2020, Inslee ordered all state agencies to prepare for 15% cut for the coming fiscal year (which begins on July 1, 2020). The annual budget is about $26 billion. However, about half the budget is K12 spending that cannot be cut. This leaves $13 billion that can be cut - times 15% equals about $2 billion in cuts.
On the plus side, the state has a rainy day fund of $3 billion to offset the cuts. But on the minus side is the fact that the current state budget forecast is based on the completely unrealistic assumptions that there was only a half million jobs lost and that the state will have a V-Shaped Economic Recovery.
Here is a slide from the June 2, 2020 Economic Review presentation by the Economic Revenue Forecast Council predicting a V shaped recovery in less than 3 years:
Notice that the slide claims that only 446,000 jobs have been lost in Washington state. In fact, we have just seen that there were more than one million jobs lost. Also, there has never been such a rapid V shaped recovery to any economic crisis in the history of our state. All past recoveries have been U shaped. The recovery from the 2008 Recession took 5 years to recover from the loss of 200,000 jobs. It therefore will take at least 10 years to recover from the loss of one million jobs. On June 1, 2020, the Congressional Budget Office also stated that it will take 10 years for the US economy to recover from this years job losses. https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-06/56376-GDP.pdf
This slower recovery rate means that the actual budget shortfall for the coming fiscal year will be at least $4 billion (at least twice the current estimate of $2 billion). I have already estimated that the legislature will be forced to use $1 to $2 billion from the $3 rainy day fund just to keep the Unemployment Trust Fund solvent through the summer. The remaining one billion in the Rainy Day fund might be just enough to keep the state solvent until the start of the next legislative session in January 2021.
Why a Federal Bailout is not likely
Olympia bureaucrats, along with other states, have asked the federal government for a trillion dollar bailout – which would be three times what states got from the federal government in 2009. One reason why these states might get a bailout is that this is an election year and incumbents might think the voters will vote them out of office if there is no bailout.
As a recap, just a few weeks ago, Congress passed a $3.5 trillion bailout bill that included $1 trillion in aid for states and local governments. Some money went to $1200 stimulus checks for the general public. But most went to bail out the wealthy multinational corporations that control Congress. Washington state got about one billion out of that bailout – an amount which has already been spent on the current fiscal year which ends July 1, 2020.
Congress is now considering another one trillion in bailouts. However, the bill will not pass until after July 20, 2020 because Congress is on an extended summer vacation so they can all solicit bribes – I mean campaign contributions – for their re-election campaigns.
By July 20, 2020, it will become obvious that the original $3.5 trillion did very little to stem the tide of disaster due to the lockdowns. All it really did was add a trillion dollars per month to the national debt.
Sadly, I am going to have to get into politics here to explain why there will not be much of a bailout in August. The issue is that the states that need the bailouts the most are controlled by Democrats. But the US Senate and the White House are controlled by Republicans. These two groups do not like each other. Republicans correctly argue that Democrats made the financial disaster much worse by not opening their states on May 1, 2020 after it had become abundantly clear that the corona virus threat had been way overblown. Republicans ask why they should bail out irresponsible Democratic governors?
One reason is that if the federal government does not bail out these Democratic states, the economy is going to get even worse – even in Republican run states like Texas – because people will not even have enough money to buy gas or food.
At the same time, governors of Democratic states seem to be determined to keep their states lockdown for as long as possible in order to make the Republican leadership of the federal government look heartless and uncaring - and perhaps even take back the US Senate and Presidency. While anything can happen this summer, I think that the Republicans and Democrats in Congress hate each other so much that they simply will not be willing to reach any agreement that might favor the other major political party. I therefore predict gridlock in Congress and only a minor bailout for the Democratic states. Let’s hope I am wrong because, without a federal bailout, the Washington legislature will be faced with gutting $4 billion from the state budget in January 2021.
Where will $4 billion in Budget Cuts Come From?
The next question is where will $4 billion in budget cuts come from? One target will be higher education – which is about one billion per year in the state budget – but it is up to half of all income for community colleges. It appears that the entire $1 billion in higher ed funding will have to be cut in 2021 – forcing colleges to double tuition, cut entire programs and layoff staff. Even this will not be enough. I therefore predict that the legislature will be forced to cut at least one to two billion dollars from public school funding and also raise state taxes by at least one to two billion dollars – all to pay for the ridiculous 2020 lockdown which was never needed in the first place.
I predict the legislature will kick the can down the road to 2021
Gutting higher ed funding is certain to anger the voters – which is why the legislature does not want to meet this summer and instead has formed a committee (the standard practice when the legislature wants to pretend that they are taking action when in fact they are not doing anything). I predict the new committee will be unable to agree on a solution. This will give Inslee the excuse to delay bringing the legislature back until 2021, allowing everyone in Olympia to be re-elected (which is the main goal).
Olympia politicians instead, will use the state Rainy Day fund to keep the Unemployment Trust Fund Solvent and $1 billion in the Rainy Day fund to pay for the rest of 2020. By the end of 2020, it should be obvious that the actual budget shortfall will be much higher than currently predicted ($4 billion instead of $2 billion for the coming fiscal year starting in July 2021). This will force the legislature to gut higher education funding in 2021 leading to huge increases in college tuition in Fall 2021 as well as massive cuts to public schools.
This will be just the beginning of the Lockdown Economic Suicide as the cuts for the 2021 - 2023 two year budget will be even higher as state revenue continues to plummet. Not only will there not be a V-shaped recovery – there will be a plunge off of an economic cliff worse than anything in the history of our state. The needlessly destruction of hundreds of thousands of local small businesses will adversely impact school funding for years to come.
I am so concerned about this needless economic and educational disaster that I wrote an entire 400 page book about it. You can read this book for free at the website common sense book dot org. The book includes a summary of more than 200 studies and quotes from more than 50 doctors.
If you agree that is time to open our schools and businesses, so our students can get back to learning and our businesses can get back to working, then I would appreciate your vote - so we can restore honesty and integrity to Olympia and local control to our public schools.
Please share this article with anyone you know who cares about the truth and about the future of our students and our economy. I will be posting more articles and videos here in the coming weeks on how we can improve our schools here in Washington State. As always, I look forward to your questions and comments.
Regards,
David Spring M. Ed.
spring for better schools at gmail dot com