-
Why should you vote “NO” on supermajority requirements?
“The history of every political establishment in which this principle has prevailed is a history of impotence, perplexity and disorder.”“All provisions which require more than a majority of any body to its resolutions have a direct tendency to embarrass the operations of the government and an indirect one to subject the sense of the majority…
-
Proposed Edmonds 2026-27 Budget Released
I attended Edmonds Mayor Mike Rosen’s budget presentation earlier this week. It’s hard to present a 250-page document with multiple fund sources and many different threads in an hour. I thought he did a credible job. I have many, many questions. Some will be answered by reading the 250 pages. MyEdmondsNews.com covered it here. In…
-
Edmonds Fiscal Sustainability Task Force
I’m pleased to be selected to be one of 15 members on the new Fiscal Sustainability Task Force for the city of Edmonds. My Edmonds News wrote about the task force several times recently: Council Sept. 8 set to approve fiscal sustainability task force members; hold public hearing on tree code – My Edmonds News…
-
Great Seattle Times Article on Racial Disproportionality in Education
The Seattle Times has a great article in today’s paper on racial disproportionality in outcomes for kids in the Seattle School District. The article talks about efforts to change things and makes a point that well-meaning approaches if not carried out with rigor and consistency over time don’t have much impact. The data series in…
-
Hard to imagine…
In the Chronicle of Social Change Jerry Milner, Donald Trump’s appointment to the federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees federal child welfare funding and policy, speaks about his priorities in running the agency and improving outcomes for kids. The hard to imagine part is that I agree with almost…
-
McCleary Almost Done
The latest decision from the court is available here. The slide deck this particular image is from is available here. This was used in the November 16, 2017 House Appropriations Committee meeting and is another excellent product from Jessica Harrell, the education expert serving Appropriations – someone I depended on for many years. It’s pretty…
-
Dosage Matters for Washington’s Preschool Kids!
Our goal as an agency is to get 90% of Washington’s children to be “ready for kindergarten,” and to have race and family income not be predictors of readiness. About 20% of Washington’s children are in families at or below 110% of the federal poverty level (FPL,) or about $24,000 for a family of four. …
-
McCleary Resources
The League of Education Voters recently published a page of resources for understanding the McCleary decision and how it impacts school funding. It’s a reasonable collection of items. http://educationvoters.org/2016/07/22/mccleary-resources/ In addition, I would recommend that you look at some of the posts I’ve done over the past few years on school funding and the Supreme…
-
Ross lobbying for budget
I worked hard to lobby Sen. Joe Fain for the Department of Early learning’s budget last week at a reception honoring the ten years since the creation of both the Department and Thrive Washington, our non-profit partner. Someone took a video which Sen. Fain was kind enough to share on YouTube. He may have a…
-
A Different Approach to Breaking the Cycle of Poverty
This is a super-interesting story from The Atlantic Monthly (driven by anecdotes) that raises a lot of interesting questions about how states administer federal childcare money, including how we set up the eligibility requirements in a world of scarce financial resources. (This is the world I live in.) If you think about what we do…