My great grandmother was a school teacher in Western Washington, she would be rolling in her grave if she new what happened to the institution that she dedicated her life too.
I just read a blog post Jesper recently did about our how bad things have gotten here.
I live near Jesper, just up the street from the school he mentions that was closing; when we moved back to Washington in 2000, we moved into this district and were to be "serviced" by the school in question, we tried for a year to make it work but the education was atrocious, the teachers and administrative staff was apathetic at best.
We tried for another year in the same district, but only under the condition we could get into another school, originally the district told us we "couldn't just choose which school we go to", our response if they would not let us then we would just send him to a private school, the next day they called and told us we could send him to the school we wanted.
We tried one more year and while this school was orders of magnitude better than the prior one, they were not able to get him caught back up with the time he lost as a function of the 1st school.
We ultimately gave up on Washington public schools and put our son in private school, where he will stay until he graduates.
Jesper does good job covering the high-lights (maybe I should say low-lights) of where we are as a state when it comes to public education in Washington, its quite sad.
Back when my great grandmother was a teacher, the community hired and fired the teachers, and for the most part the teachers had the authority to "do the right thing(tm)", and the community had the power to influence the definition of what was right.
Today however we have allowed our government to water down the education our kids get, to create a system that caters only to those in the middle leaving those who are remotely different behind and on average producing kids who are not capable of competing in the international talent market we live in today.