Category: Education

What’s in “McCleary?”

In 2012 the Washington State Supreme Court found that Washington State is not funding our education system at anything close to the level the constitution requires. Just before the holidays the court opined again, that

“the overall level of funding remains below the levels that have been declared constitutionally inadequate.” (Washington State Supreme Court, 2012)

On the Legislative side the Joint Task Force on Education Finance report issued in December 2012 detailed an eventual cost of about $4.5 billion dollars per biennium in additional funding needed to meet the court’s definition of “constitutionally adequate.” Arguments that the court isn’t talking about funding are belied by the quote above.

Despite protestations to the contrary, this session the Legislature needs to make steady progress towards completely meeting the court’s requirement by 2018. There are 5 school years between now and 2018, and “steady progress” means we get about 2/5ths of the way to the complete solution, or about $1.7 billion.

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Budget Outline 2013-15

In 2013 the Legislature has three big budget problems to address. It may be that there are other issues for the Legislature (gun safety, mental health, transportation…) but as the budget chair I have an odd focus on what I’m responsible for.

  1. Balance the 2013-15 budget, plus make sure that the 2015-17 budget is structurally sound. We start with a $904 million shortfall and have to address the two issues below, plus comply with the strongest 4-year balanced budget requirement in the nation.
  2. The Supreme Court’s 2012 McCleary decision has major impact on school funding decisions and adds $1.4 billion to the already difficult problem.
  3. The Medicaid expansion called for by the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) is complex, but provides us with the opportunity to cover hundreds of thousands of Washington citizens and save hundreds of millions. Implementation decisions will be difficult given the campaign rhetoric, but I believe we will get there.

The political situation in the state Senate will make resolution more interesting and create a lot of political theater. I look forward to negotiating a rational solution.

For a printable version of this post click here.

2013 Legislative Agenda

My agenda for 2013 is simple to outline here, but I expect great difficulties in working through it:

  1. Produce a budget that balances for 2013-15 and 2015-17, resolves the  McCleary education funding decision, implements the Medicaid expansion envisioned in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and projects rationally into the future.
  2. Inside the education box make some strategic decisions that enable our K-12 and higher education systems to be more productive, including
    1. More thoughtful allocation of proposed new K-12 spending to fund pre-school for at-risk three and four-year-old children. Most research in the field leads me to believe that this is a more optimum spending plan than what we are currently on a path to do.
    2. Create a strategy for how we fund and manage our higher education system so that a reasonable proportion of Washington students can learn the skills necessary to survive economically in the 21st century. Our current path is unattractive. I am concerned (optimistic?) about a radical dislocation in higher education driven by the Internet and think the state should do some planning.
  3. Take a step forward on transportation infrastructure, including finalizing how we will pay for the remainder of the 520 bridge project. (Tolling I-90 is the current plan, and there are not many alternatives.) There are other transportation projects that need to be considered as part of an overall plan, and the business community is pushing us to consider an increase in the gas tax to fund it.

There are lots of other issues that will come up this year. I do not expect to be the lead on most issues outside the budget, but if there is one that will get some of my attention it is taking a rational step forward on gun safety.  What this will be is unclear at this point.

The politics in the state Senate will be interesting, though I don’t think they change the reality of budget votes in any significant way. The mix of votes in the Senate makes it difficult to pass a budget there with 25 Democratic votes, requiring the same kind of bi-partisan budget vote we’ve negotiated in the past few years.

As usual, I’ll try to write about policy developments on my blog at www.rosshunter.info, and will send out infrequent email updates. If I send them out too frequently you don’t read them, so I try to be careful. Of course when I do this they are tremendously long, but you can’t have everything.

Great article on early childhood education

The most leveraged investment, the investment that would have the strongest effect on educational outcomes would be a high-quality pre-school program for at-risk 3 and 4 year olds, with thoughtful attention paid to making sure we don’t damage the child care system for younger kids. (There is a lot of financial cross-subsidization to enable care of very young children.)

Click here to read the article.

 

Who built that?

The New York Times ran a great article in the business section this week talking about the relationship between business and government. It’s a little historical perspective, including a plug for a great book I read this summer “Why Nations Fail.” I highly recommend the article AND the book.

This is another case where thinking about balance is useful. There are extremes on both ends of the spectrum that turn out to be not pleasant places to live. We’re clearly not interested in living a communist country, but we’re also not super excited about living in a world without public investment in roads, libraries, schools, etc.

 

 

Boring post about Joint Education Financing Task Force

For those who are interested the state is maintaining a website with information about the meetings the task force is holding. You can sign up at this website for notifications of meetings, perhaps the most interesting part of what is, for now, pretty empty and forlorn.

http://www.leg.wa.gov/jointcommittees/EFTF/Pages/default.aspx

Budget Reference Material

Every time we start up a new group of legislators looking at how to fund a particular project (in this case the K12 Finance Joint Task Force) there are questions about the budget from members not familiar with it. Here are a set of reference links that should be useful for anyone seeking to understand how the overall budget for Washington State works.

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Tax Incidence in Washington

Map: State-Local Tax Burdens and Ranks by State, 2009 The Tax Foundation
State and Local Tax Burdens as a percentage of personal Income by state in 2009 Source: The Tax Foundation

(9/25/2014 Fixed link to DC study and updated it to the 2012 version.)

There were a number of questions asked in today’s K-12 Finance Task Force meeting about how taxpayers in different income strata experience Washington’s tax system. I’m providing some links to interesting data while we wait for more up-to-date information from the Office of Financial Management, which their representative Julie Murray promised in Sept-Oct.

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School Funding Task Force Work Plan

At the school funding task force meeting this morning we discussed and adopted the a work plan for the exercise. The document describing this work plan is available here: Initial Plan for K-12 funding policy development . Below is the intro text from this document:

In January the Washington State Supreme Court ruled (in McCleary) that the state was not meeting its constitutional obligation to “amply provide for the education of all students residing within its borders…” The decision was unanimous, and came with a very strong enforcement model from the court that is still being worked out.

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