Category: Budget

Thanks for attending my telephone town hall

We made almost 30,000 calls to people in the 48th district tonight. Over 6000 attended part of the town hall, with about 500 people on the call for most of the time, and 160 die-hards who stayed until the end. I’ve never had more than 200 people at a town hall before, so this reached people whom I would not have reached otherwise.

I still like the live events, and will mostly do those, but I’ll try to do 2 of these a year. They’re expensive, so I won’t do many.

People asked about spending money in smart ways on K-12 and I said I’d re-post my documents from last year. here they are:

Basic-Ed Funding Proposal 10-1

Basic Ed Finance 4 Page Overview

I also mentioned a chart I included in my newsletter about the growth in the state budget over time. I’ve included that here as well.

Growth of state revenues 9and budget) since 1981
Growth of state revenues 9and budget) since 1981

 

I look forward to returning the phone calls from people who left messages, and of, the rest of you as well.

New Newsletter Available

I emailed out a newsletter today. I’m attaching a link to the PDF version of it – this is somewhat easier to print out and read if you’re a print person.

2009-12-15 Newsletter

I expect to produce much more regular newsletters now that we are approaching the session. Please let me know if there is something you would like me to address. I’ll try to address popular questions that we get in email as well as the stuff I’m working on.

Local School Levies

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.

Race To The Top Funding

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.

Education Funding in 2010

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”

Budget Stalemate in Albany Puts Strain on New York State – NYTimes.com

It’s worth reading this article in today’s NY Times about how dysfunctional the NY legislature is in dealing with their budget problem. We will have a significant problem this year and I hope we won’t display the same inability to work together to resolve the problem.

Budget Stalemate in Albany Puts Strain on New York State – NYTimes.com

Another Bizarre Supreme Court Decision

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.

New Tax Foundation Study – Where do states spend their money?

I find the research this organization does fascinating, which probably says more about me than them, but there it is. The Tax Foundation is the organization that brings you “Tax Freedom Day.” I agree with them on some of their principles about well-designed tax systems, but they have a “less is more” strategy to government that pervades all of their work.

Nevertheless, a report they have just released is pretty interesting. They compare the 50 states on the percentage they spend on various sectors of the economy. It’s worth looking at the summary charts, which are available here:

http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/25452.html

Washington ranks high in the concentration of spending on housing/environment and health, but not on K12. This data is based on 2007 numbers, and I expect it to change dramatically when they look at the 2009 numbers in a few years. We cut everything else much more deeply than we did K12, which will skew the results significantly.

Revenue Collections – October

Every month we get a report on the amount of tax revenue collected over the previous month. We all put it in our teacups and swirl it around hoping to see some wisdom in it, but are usually denied any new wisdom. Compared to our prediction we are down about $20 million for the month, or 2%. This is based on a prediction made last month.

The economy does seem to be recovering in some kind of a global sense, though I believe that we will have a long, slow recovery. Our unemployment rate has tracked to rest of the nation (more unemployment) though it’s a little better than we thought when we left session.

You can read the report here: http://www.erfc.wa.gov/pubs/oct09.pdf

2009 Session Notes – Tax Policy

(I orginally posted this on a different blog in April 2009. I am consolidating into a single presence and am re-posting here. )

A number of key tax policy bills were passed this year. These are interesting to me because I chair the Finance committee and am responsible for making sure the system works.

I sponsored HB 2075, a complete re-write of how sales taxes are figured out on digital products. This was an interesting situation – the tax rules hadn’t been revisited for 30 years, long before Al Gore invented the Internet. My goal was to make sure that the tax system taxes the same thing in the same way – downloaded music should have the same tax treatment as stuff you buy on disks. I worked out a deal with the business community that we all agree on. It protects state revenue from deteriorating as usage shifts to downloaded products and fixes related problems for business, making sure that Washington is hospitable for Internet businesses into the future.

At the very end of the session we had a little fire drill to deal with. One the last weekend the Senate passed a bill (SB 6173) with little public scrutiny that was intended to eliminate some of the fraud associated with misuse of sales tax resale certificates. Businesses are entitled to not pay sales tax on items that they will eventually resell, on the theory that they’ll pay the tax then.

The Senate version of this bill solved the problem by denying anyone in the construction industry the ability to avoid paying the tax up front and giving them a credit they could use when they eventually sold the product. This makes builders and remodelers carry the float on everything they buy for resale. I arrived on Monday to read through the bill and we had an army of angry guys with nail guns outside my door.

I was able to re-write the bill in cooperation with all the business groups to be much smarter about how we went about fixing the problem. We got a solution at the last minute that both the Republicans and I agreed with and that the business community was OK with. It passed overwhelmingly and should help homebuilders by eliminating a lot of the fly-by-night contractors who never pay sales tax, unemployment insurance, or workers compensation premiums.

The Master Builders of King and Snohomish County made me their legislator of the session for my work here.