KIRO radio host John Curley believes Seattle’s teachers’ union is more concerned with preserving its own influence than safeguarding students, and as teachers prepare to cast votes on strike authorization Wednesday, he is seizing the moment to press Washington Governor Bob Ferguson into action.
Curley’s remedy is the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, a $1,700 dollar-for-dollar credit against a taxpayer’s federal tax liability that can be steered toward any school or tutoring program of the donor’s choosing.
“So then I got an idea,” Curley said on “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio. “Why doesn’t the government, and why doesn’t Ferguson allow people in the state of Washington, the federal scholarship tax credit, the FSTC? It’s a $1,700 dollar-for-dollar credit.
“It’s not a tax, and it goes right to you,” he continued. “You could take $1,700. You could give it to anybody or any school you want, private or public. You can give it to anything you want to be able to send it into for tutoring. Thirty states have already signed up for it. The states that have not primarily tend to be blue and have great, strong teachers’ unions that don’t want it.”
Curley projected the credit could deliver approximately $790 million to Washington schools.
“If you really did have the kids in mind, and they had their best interests in mind, why not let a bunch of taxpayers get the tax credit for $1,700 and direct it to whatever school they wanted to direct it to?” Curley said. “The unions are saying, ‘Absolutely not.’ They don’t want them to have even one taste of the freedom to determine where your money is going.”
He directed an explicit challenge at Ferguson, who he said faces a year-end deadline to decide whether Washington will opt in.
“Come on, Ferguson, grow a pair of sideburns,” Curley said.
Curley says the budget crisis is self-inflicted
The Seattle Education Association and Seattle Public Schools remain in negotiations over a new contract, with the school year slated to begin Sept. 2 and 50 bargaining items still outstanding, according to The Seattle Times. The union is pushing for wage increases and reduced class sizes while the district contends with an $87 million budget shortfall.
Curley argued the district engineered its own predicament when it tapped COVID-19 relief funds to bankroll a labor deal it could not sustain long-term.
“So Seattle, when they got COVID money, so this was in 2022, teachers had a strike, and the district ended up giving a $231 million labor agreement,” Curley said. “Well, it took some of the COVID money, and then it had some other money in there, and what happened was they had all the money. They gave the teachers a bump off of the COVID dollars, but then they didn’t have additional money coming in in order to continue to fund at that level. So now they’ve got about an $87 million deficit that’s in place.”
Curley defends teachers but questions the union’s motives
Curley conceded that teaching ranks among the toughest jobs in the country.
“I always say to people like, when people, ‘Oh, the teachers,’ yeah, they only work 189 days, and they’re making like $60 an hour. It’s like, you go in and do that job,” Curley said. “You imagine what it would be like your first day on the job? You’re walking into a classroom, a bunch of third graders or fourth graders, or worse, eighth graders, and how they treat you, and then as a teacher, you can’t send them down to the principal’s office or the vice principal’s office. There’s no discipline. They’re screaming and yelling at you.”
Still, he drew a distinction between educators and the organizations representing them.
“The unions want smaller class sizes because they get paid by the number of employees,” Curley said. “They want to increase the number of employees. They don’t have to worry about it. The Seattle teachers don’t need to worry about classrooms going up. They’re already losing the number of students. That’s part of their other big problem.”
KIRO producer Joe Wallace observed that the profession has only grown more difficult with the rise of student devices and social media.
“Not just kids using devices in class, but also having this secret language where they communicate with each other and bullying each other and shaming teachers online, and there’s all these websites where they get rated,” Wallace said. “It was bad enough when kids were just mean.”
Curley pointed out that Seattle teachers have walked off the job eight times since 1976, even though strikes are prohibited under state law.