This is inside baseball, unless you’re maybe mentally ill. But the Department and Social and Health Services and Pierce County look like they’re working out a smooth shift of the county’s mental health services to the state.

This is happening because county leaders, especially Executive John Ladenburg, got fed up with state and federal funding for psychiatric care. The county’s been squeezed in recent years, and Ladenburg said it needed $3.65 million more a year to meet its contractual obligations to the mentally ill.

The money wasn’t forthcoming, so the county has kicked those obligations back to

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Saturday:

A teacher strike is on in the Bethel School District, and the potential for long-lasting damage is real. Nothing splits the community like a prolonged school strike. Whatever the merits of the strike issues, the best outcome is a speedy resolution.

Sunday:

The No Child Left Behind Act is an overly rigid and unforgiving standard for schools to meet; it cuts no slack for districts like Clover Park and others where educators are focused and working hard to raise student achievement. But it has also been a valuable tool for keeping school systems from letting low-achievers

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Tacoma-based Russell Investment Group played a big part in bringing about a independent review of the state’s discredited math portion of the WASL. (Our editorial on the review will be posted here Friday morning.)

Fred Kiga, director of corporate and government relations for Russell, confirms that the company donated $50,000 for the review. The donation, channeled through the business-backed school reform group Partnership for Learning, helped prod the Legislature to act.

An objective assessment was essential. The math WASL blew up last year when only 57 percent of the state’s 10th-graders passed the test. The

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There’s a sad story in yesterday’s Peninsula Gateway: the discovery of scores of dead dogfish sharks on the Purdy Spit. Nearly 100 were actually counted; many others were probably washed away by the tide and current.

Almost certainly, they were tossed there by net fisherman cleaning commercially worthless “trash fish” from their nets.

What’s trash and what isn’t is in the palate of the beholder, though. England uses dogfish in its fabled fish and chips (one of the few English dishes that are actually edible). Having been there

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Congressman Adam Smith, D-Tacoma, has already endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now he’s been named Washington state chairman of the candidate’s campaign.

The press release announcing the appointment quotes Obama as saying: "Congressman Smith is a strong Democratic voice on foreign policy and works in Congress to help our nation fight the spread of terrorism. I am pleased Adam will be bringing his innovative, common-sense approach to our Washington State campaign for change."

Congressmen Norm Dicks and Jay Inslee are supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Here’s the rest of the release:

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We devote our entire editorial column today to a story bigger than the actual WASL results released today. While the reading and writing scores look good, a legislature-ordered review of what went wrong with the WASL math standards is a devastating portrayal of incompetence by OSPI. If this was a different culture, Terry Bergeson would fall on her sword.

About our editorials:

If you have comments or questions about these topics, please email them to david.seago@thenewstribune.com. Editorials represent the consensus view of The News Tribune’s editorial board.

Want to sit in on a daily

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