Author: Ross

School districts are allowed to raise local levies to fund things that are not “basic education.” The state limits the amount they can raise to a percentage of the total they receive in state and federal funding. This is so that districts like Bellevue don’t raise twice as much as districts like Yakima. The standard formula is that districts can raise up to 24% of what we call the “levy base,” the total state and federal funding. Some districts are allowed to raise more for obscure historical reasons. For example Bellevue is allowed to raise 30%, Lake Washington 25%, and Seattle 34%.

The amount districts get resulting from initiative 728 and 732 is substantial – it could be as much as $750 or more per student. We’ve had to suspend these initiatives this year, which means that the levy base for the district goes down. If the levy base goes down, the amount that a district can collect in local property taxes goes down, even though voters have already voted to approve the higher amount. It’s like the voters wrote a check that the districts are being prohibited from cashing.

HB 1776 allows districts to compute their levy base as if they were still getting the 728 and 732 money. This doesn’t cost the state money and allows local voters control over what they do.

We tried to pass this bill last year right at the end of the session but it got hung up in the budget discussions. We had it up for a vote on the last day but did not have time to finish the debate. There are complex timing issues about school levy planning that make it important to pass in December for districts that have levies on the ballot this year.  To make this happen the governor needs to call a special session. We are in Olympia for a few days in December anyway and this would therefore cost very little money and should be relatively non-controversial. For her to do this she will need to be convinced that the House and Senate are willing to pass only this bill and not get sidetracked doing other stuff that can wait for January.

Waiting for January will needlessly complicate the lives of districts that have local levies in front of voters in February.

The Obama administration under Education Secretary Arne Duncan has made $4.35 billion available to districts that demonstrate they are making progress in four areas:

1. Standards and Assessments
2. Data Systems to Support Instruction
3. Great Teachers and Leaders
4. Turning Around Struggling Schools

We have real work to do in order to have even a remote chance of winning any of this money. There are two absolute requirements: 1) approval of state applications in Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, and 2) no statutory or regulatory barriers to linking data about student achievement to teachers and principals for the purposes of evaluation.

Governor Gregoire has decided to not spend the time necessary to prepare an application for round 1, as we are assured of not winning. Winning in Round 2 will require the legislature to pass some changes. Fortunately we have met the absolute requirements. I inserted an amendment to a bill 2 years ago that requires school districts to report data linking students to teachers, classes taken, and principals. It’s taking a while to collect this, but we are getting there piece by piece.

To get any of this money we believe that we will have to make the following changes:

• Allow the Superintendent of Public Instruction to intervene in schools that are chronic failures. If a particular school fails children for generations, the state should be able to take action, relieving the local district of control if necessary. This has been blocked by state law for more than a decade.
• Make changes to how teachers are assigned to schools to ensure that there is equitable distribution of highly-qualified teachers to low-performing schools. The opposite tends to be true. Marguerite Roza at the University of Washington has done interesting work in this area.
• Report on the effectiveness of teacher and principal preparation programs. I expect this to be difficult, as there isn’t much data available. A lot of the data about teacher certification is still stored on microfiche in the basement of the OSPI building, making it difficult to link the student achievement data together with the information about which school a teacher went to.
• Differentiate teacher and principal effectiveness based on student growth and use that data for compensation, evaluation, and tenure decisions. This sounds like a no-brainer, but is really, really difficult to implement in a fair way. I was part of a group of legislators made a proposal on this last year as part of a comprehensive plan to revamp our compensation system. We may have reached further than people were willing to go, but to get this money I believe we will need significant effort here.
• Promote charter schools. This won’t happen. I am hopeful that the scoring system doesn’t depend totally on this, but after the defeat at the polls in 2004 I don’t expect any significant change here.

I’m not particularly hopeful that we’ll get any of the money, but agree with most of the proposals, or at least in their direction. We are still working out how these changes will be proposed in legislation. More as we work out the details.

This will be a difficult year for short-term funding of education in Washington, and in almost all of the other states. In 2009 we cut everything that moved in the budget, but made the smallest cuts in the K-12 budget. I expect this to be true in 2010 as well, and will work hard to keep it that way.

Last year we passed HB2261, the start of a long-term process to re-write how our state funds public education. As is typical, I am willing to make changes more rapidly than many of my co-workers, and much more rapidly than the many, many vested interests in the existing system. I’m learning to be more patient, though it’s very painful. In reality, getting it right is pretty important. Last year we approved the outline for about half of the changes that need to happen, and set up a process to get the other parts closer to decisions.

Continue reading “Education Funding in 2010”

Today the WA State Supreme Court issued a decision in the Federal Way school district case. Federal Way sued the state complaining that our distribution of funds did not meet the constitution’s requirement for a “general and uniform” way of funding schools. In specific, the district complained that since allocations to school districts for teacher salaries were based on historical patterns from over a quarter of a century ago it was effectively arbitrary and capricious.

I personally agree with Federal Way – there is no rational basis for the distribution other than political expediency.

The Supreme Court disagreed. I have not completely read the opinion, but it seems convoluted to me.