Changing the world, one little kid at a time!
California’s issues are in many ways similar to Washington’s. Doing a constitutional re-write to allow the locals to carry the costs of education would be interesting, and his solution would probably result in more funding across the board. I would have to play with some numbers (a lot) to see if met my fairness bar, but it’s worth pursuing.
Ross
The Seattle Times wrote an interesting article in this morning’s paper about the budget question facing us about higher education. Both House and Senate proposals do terrible things to the higher education system in Washington. It’s worth the read. We have to decide if we want to allow the universities to raise tuition, or just continue to reduce the state’s investment in higher ed – something that will have devastating long-term consequences for economic competitiveness of the state if we do so.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2009063657_tuition16m.html
HB 2343 does a number of ugly things to the K12 system as part of the terrible, devastating budget cuts to education and everything else the state does. One of the proposed changes is to permanently eliminate the inflation adjustment to the bonus we pay to teachers who have achieved National Board Certification. I do not support this change. I will attempt to amend the provision out of the bill. While we are not able to provide the cost of living adjustment in this year’s budget, we should re-start our commitment next year. The bill is permanent. My amendment makes it temporary for this budget only.
The National Board system is the one performance-based element of our compensation system. There is reasonably strong experimental evidence that students who have a National Board certified teacher learn 7-14% more material in a given year than students who have a similarly situated teacher who is not certified. I worked for 5 years to get this element into the law and will work equally hard to keep in play. We cannot expect teachers to make the investment in the training and the extensive application process if we are going to frequently change the availability of the funds for the bonus.
For more information on the bill click here.
The chairs of the House and of the Senate budget committees both introduced their budget proposals this week. The committees will vote on them soon, though none of us can say exactly when at this point. Typically the bills are introduced and passed in about 3 days. The minority party always whines that they don’t have enough time to even read the bill before it passes. Not this year. It’s not clear to me that we have the votes to pass the budget in the House Ways and Means committee, nor is it clear in the Senate.
Both budgets make deeper cuts than we’ve seen since the early 80s, and would be like we saw in the depression if it were not for the federal stimulus plan. Our revenue projection would be almost a billion dollars lower if not for the plan’s predicted effect on the economy, and there is about $3 billion in direct aid to the states. It all comes with stringent rules for its use (“strings”) and is hard to track in the budgets.
For the first time in modern history, this budget is less than the previous 2-year budget, by about $1 billion. This is despite significant inflation in the costs we face and increases in population. For example, there are more students in public school, and not just because of population increases. When the economy tanks, people transfer from private schools to public ones, increasing the caseload even more. This happens in other areas too – our Medicaid caseloads are up, as are many other costs of providing the same services we did last year.
What this means is that we won’t provide the same service we did last year. Current budgets include:
I can go on. You can find the budgets online if you want, or you can read the news stories about what we’re cutting in the papers, should we still have any next week.
The Senate released their budget yesterday. The House releases its today. I’ll opine later on the differences. Both are mostly no-new-revenue budgets. The Senate packages up closing some tax loopholes. The House comes out later this morning so I can’t comment on it now.
Both bodies have passed a version of the Basic Education Finance Task Force bill. The House bill was the stronger of the two. HB 2261. You can get details here: http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=2261&year=2009
Our staff has written an analysis of the two that may prove helpful.
summary-of-sen-striker-to-2261 is a short summary of changes made to the senate bill in committee.
comparison-house-senate-as-passed-comm-2 is a longer summary of the differences between the original House bill and the bill as it passed out of the Senate Education committee yesterday.
We still need to decide what form the bill will take in the end game and how we convince the Governor to sign it. There is much resistance to a bill that creates serious stakes in the ground for education.
The House and Seante passed VERY different versions of the reform legislation. Below is a staff summary of the differences in language that’s reasonably easy to understand, though still somewhat “inside baseball.” The Spokesman-Review in Spokane captures it in language that makes more sense to the casual reader when they say
What’s emerged in the Senate is a “We Love Education” bumper sticker.
The hollowed-out bill states an intent to really, really do something about this issue in the next biennium. The following have been removed: Core 24 (the state board of education’s wish to increase the number of required graduation credits from 19 to 24), all-day kindergarten, preschool for low-income children, an increase in transportation dollars, school accountability and changes in teacher certification, assessments and pay. Spokesman-Review full editorial
It’s too easy to demonize one side or the other in this debate, and difficult to come to an agreement about the most important thing we do as a state government. We’ll keep working on the overall plan and try to get to a final agreement that makes sense and does more than just move the ball forward.
Last night the House approved the current incarnation of our ed finance reform bill – HB 2261. I’m including links to some summaries of the bill, including the AP story from the Seattle PI site (out of nostalgia). It’s depressing that Curt Woodward was the only reporter physically present on the floor when we passed the bill – there used to be many, many more.
AP Story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The bill includes an amendment from me that creates the strong legal definition of “basic education,” a key element of requiring the Legislature to step up to the level of funding required to provide students with the opportunity to earn a meaningful diploma.
We have more work to do as you can tell from the following comparison of this bill to our initial proposal. I can guarantee that we won’t do a bill exactly like our first proposal, but we need to address all the same categories of decisions. We are making progress and I hope to continue.
For the entire 6 years I’ve been in the legislature I’ve worked on school funding. I’ve tried to improve the amount and the efficacy of use of the money. This year a bipartisan group of six legislators introduced a package of reforms coming from the Basic Education Financing Task Force report. I’ve written about it in this blog before (http://s485995026.onlinehome.us/?cat=3) and will in the future.
We’re in the middle of a tumultuous period in the evolution of the bills. Our original bills (HB 1410 and SB 5444) were a 110 page first draft that we expected to engender a robust discussion. We were right about part of it – the discussion was robust, but unfortunately not substantive. The Olympia-based education groups have been very negative on the proposal, with most outside groups supportive. The legislation changes distribution of billions of dollars, and we were probably naive to expect change of this magnitude to go smoothly.
We’ve taken a new approach – we’re starting with a blank slate instead of a large first draft. We’ve introduced two bills with similar titles but no real content. The new bills are HB 2261 and SB 6048. We will move these bills through the system while we work on re-crafting a comprehensive bill. This is the strategy we used successfully in fixing the math standards last year.
Behind the scenes the House and Senate are working daily on trying to build consensus around the big pieces of the package. We’ll recapitulate the process we used to build the original legislation with the six of us in a room, but with many more people involved. I expect this to be painful, but it’s a necessary step. Pat, Skip, Rodney, Fred, Glenn and I spent hundreds of hours learning and working with the alternatives. We’ll try to lead everyone through the same process, but in less time.
This will be a circuitous process. We need your input as we move forward. Thanks for staying engaged.
I’ve had a lot of questions from teachers on HB 1410 that seem to indicate some misunderstanding of our intent and I believe a misreading of the bill. 1410 is a serious attempt to address school funding inadequacies and the structural problems that have built up over 30 years since the last major revision. The worst structural problem affecting teachers is the legislature’s inability to give raises to teachers without bankrupting school districts. This occurs due to the interaction between TRI pay and the number of teachers local districts have to hire to meet even a weak definition of “basic education.” This is crazy, and not in the interest of anyone in the system, most particularly teachers.
Our seminal observation about the current system is that it’s resulted in a pretty serious decline in the relative competitiveness of teacher salaries over the last few decades. The stat I use with some frequency is that the SAT scores of students entering teaching programs at universities have declined 75 points over the last 25-30 years. The number is national, not specific to Washington, but is an indicator that we’re losing our attractiveness to the top students. This is a recipe for failure of the system, as we totally depend on teacher quality for any results. The first thing we MUST do is start with competitive teacher salaries. Our proposal includes a comparable wage survey of the labor markets in Washington, comparing teacher salaries to jobs that have similar educational and talent requirements.
Peter Callaghan wrote about our tremendous hearing in the House yesterday. We had 120 people testify, of whom only 13 were opposed. The most amusing juxtaposition was when a panel of 4 superintendents delivered a letter from all 35 school district superintendents in the Puget Sound region endorsing the bill was followed by the director of the WA Association of School Administrators opposing it. The 35 districts in Puget Sound have about 40% of the students in the state. 🙂
We have a lot of work to do on the bill still and will report on it as we go, but Peter Callaghan’s piece is nice coverage.
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/columnists/callaghan/story/609854.html
