Harger: WA pays teachers top dollar for middling test scores. Maybe we’re grading the wrong thing

I’ve been critical of how our public education system is performing, and here’s why. Even when you adjust for the cost of living, Washington has the highest-paid teachers in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We’re spending billions more on K-12 than we did just ten years ago.

Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab found that per-pupil spending grew 110%, roughly three times the rate of inflation. And on test scores, we’re sitting in the middle of the pack, with the Education Recovery Scorecard ranking Washington 34th among states in math recovery and 26th in reading.

Top-tier pay. Record spending. Average results.

That’s frustrating, and I’ll keep saying so. But lately it’s pushed me toward a different question: what’s a meaningful outcome in education, anyway? Test scores matter for a big chunk of our students, the ones headed down the traditional path. But shouldn’t career outcomes matter just as much? Shouldn’t we also care whether an 18-year-old walks out of our schools employable, with a skill somebody will actually pay for?

Right now we grade the whole multibillion-dollar system on testing, built for one path. Why not many paths?

The AI in your pocket just changed the assignment

The AI on your phone can now pass the bar exam at the 90th percentile, score above 700 on both sections of the SAT, and knock out a decent college essay. The education outcomes we’ve strived for aren’t necessarily useful for a sizable number of students.

But you know what that AI can’t do? Rewire a panel. Fix your furnace in January. Pour a foundation. Clean your teeth.

I suppose the robots could eventually upend all of that too. Seems like that’s a long way out. Meanwhile, the jobs we spent a generation treating as consolation prizes are exactly the jobs the machines can’t touch, and plenty of them pay better than the desk work we told kids to chase instead. In the age of AI, every assumption about what school is for deserves a fresh look.

The degree was always overvalued

When I was growing up, and up until a few years ago, a high school diploma was the bare minimum. You shouldn’t expect a great job with one, but if you worked really hard, maybe you’d land something decent and lower-middle-class. The managers, the people who make the real money, the ones getting promoted? You needed at least a bachelor’s for that.

The thinking was, you weren’t a deep thinker if you couldn’t get one. You weren’t dedicated. You weren’t capable of complicated thoughts.

Total nonsense, of course. But that was the thinking, and it gnawed at me for decades, until I finally went back to school in my 40s and finished the bachelor’s, then the master’s. Partly because I worried I wouldn’t be able to find a job if I ever got laid off. I’m super proud of those diplomas.

I’m also basically the same guy.

Same brain. Same curiosity. The paperwork changed. The person didn’t. Degrees have always been overrated as proof of what somebody can actually do, and AI is about to make that impossible to ignore.

Think about what else they told us in school. You’ll need algebra. You need to do math without a calculator, because you won’t just carry one around in your pocket. You need to read a lot of books. None of those are wrong ideas, and for most kids they’re probably still right. But they were never right for everyone.

Give WA families a real vocational track

So here’s what I’d love Washington to start seriously talking about. Fair warning: I’m spitballing. Early stages, open to every detail. But the shape of it goes like this.

First, every student hits a real baseline. Forget the grade-level labels; the floor is functional. You can read a lease and a union contract. You can do the math of an actual life, balance an account, understand how interest works, and why the credit card company isn’t your friend. You know the basic history of this country and how its civics work. That floor isn’t negotiable. Nobody’s getting cut loose.

Then, for families who want it, the learning gets redirected instead of extended. Career-specific training in language, math, and everything particular to a trade, starting in the teenage years, aimed straight at an apprenticeship. Construction. Electrical. HVAC. Plumbing. Welding. Auto and diesel techs, line workers. I’m sure there are many more. Tacoma just opened a maritime training program for high school students. That’s the kind of thinking we need more of.

And we wouldn’t be starting from scratch. Washington already runs Running Start, which lets high schoolers earn college credit early. Take that idea and point it at the trades. Maybe it’s a new diploma type. Maybe it’s beefing up the skills programs we already have. How it works is a conversation worth having, and so is who decides: the family, the kid, some mix, because a 15-year-old and his parents won’t always agree on this. Early days. Let’s argue about it.

Notice the verb, though: “redirected.” The future electrician is still doing math, real math, load calculations and code, because the apprenticeship programs will demand it. The hygienist in training is still reading dense technical material. They’re learning the language and math of their field, the stuff they’ll use every working day, instead of the college-track version they were never going to touch again. If somebody wants to call that “lowering the bar,” they’re telling you what they think of the trades, not what’s being learned.

And the key word in all of it is “choose.” Nobody gets sorted. Nobody gets sent. This is a door any family can open, for the kid who’s years behind on the tests, and just as much for the straight-A kid who’d rather build things than write essays about them. Smart kids might want to be electricians. That sentence shouldn’t sound strange.

Now, some will say a track like this becomes the place certain kids get steered. I grew up in a working-class family, and I flat-out reject the idea that wanting a paycheck and a skill is a demotion. For anybody’s kid. The steering is happening right now. It steers disengaged kids into nothing.

Count the journeyman’s card as a win

Which brings us back to where we started: what we measure.

When a kid is years behind on the tests built for the college track, the system’s only move is to shove them harder down that track. Why wouldn’t we pivot? Why wouldn’t we train young people who want nothing to do with the traditional path to do something the economy is begging for, and then count that as the win it obviously is?

We keep the traditional school experience for everyone who wants it. Nothing gets dismantled. Of course I want to see every kid in America drowning in books. And the doors swing both directions: the kid who picks HVAC at 15 and figures out at 22 he wants to be a lawyer takes the community college bridge, like plenty of people before him.

Because look honestly at what we’ve got now: A kid checked out by seventh grade, sliding through, graduating, maybe, with a diploma that certifies attendance and not much else. That’s what giving up on kids actually looks like. A 19-year-old with a journeyman’s card, a paycheck, and zero student debt? That’s the opposite.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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