Inslee joins thousands of teachers in rally at Capitol

OLYMPIA – Thousands of teachers and their supporters crowded the steps of the Washington Capitol’s legislative building for a rally Saturday morning to call for teacher pay raises, smaller class sizes and less standardized testing.

More than 4,000 people attended the hourlong rally. Gov. Jay Inslee, House Speaker Frank Chopp and other politicians spoke about their efforts to improve Washington’s public education system, which Inslee called “the paramount duty of the state of Washington” in a speech that invoked his father’s career as a teacher. He decried the six-year period since teachers received a cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, to raise their pay, and he cited a 12:30 a.m. email from his grandson’s kindergarten teacher as evidence of how hard teachers work.

“Let’s make sure legislators help our educators get a reasonable COLA 24 hours a day, because they’re working 24 hours a day,” Inslee told the crowd.

Most of the teachers and advocates wore red shirts to demonstrate solidarity, and many held up signs to advocate for their cause. Nearly all the political calls for better schools drew loud cheers, but the crowd jeered when Inslee described a compromise figure he had arrived at in pay-raise negotiations.

Chopp, D-Seattle, gave a fiery speech laced with call-and-response sections and spoke out against “the insanity of a federal law that labels every public school a failure.” He told the crowd he would fight all efforts to connect teacher evaluations to test scores and other policies he considers misguided.

“Enacting bad policy at the state level as a result of bad policy at the federal level doesn’t help schools,” Chopp said. “It doesn’t help students.”

An airplane circling over the Capitol campus during the rally also drew boos. It trailed a banner calling for an end to teacher strikes. According to a Washington Education Association estimate, 2,000 teachers in six school districts staged a one-day walkout Friday in protest of the proposed state budget’s treatment of teacher pay and benefits.

Washington State Patrol officers at the rally said they were investigating whether the plane’s tail numbers had been illegally concealed. A call to a WSP spokesman afterward was not returned.