Category: Education

Frustrating but Powerful

This week I attended a meeting hosted by the Mockingbird Society where foster youth and young alumni of “the system” present proposals they’ve worked on in small groups for a year on how to improve their experiences. This isn’t the first time I’ve attended this event, and it won’t be the last.

These young people make incredibly powerful presentations that get right at the heart of how to make our foster care system actually work for the kids instead of the adults. It’s frustrating because the solutions seem like they should already have been done, and some themes repeat year after year. Every year we take some of the ideas they present on and try to get them implemented.

I didn’t take notes on everything, but some of the ideas struck me as immediately implementable and almost criminal that they haven’t happened yet. We will follow up with the youth and the Mockingbird Society to make sure we are taking care of what needs to happen.

Continue reading “Frustrating but Powerful”

Eastside Schools Rock

5 of the top 5 high schools in Washington State and 5 of the top 200 high schools in the nation are in either the Bellevue or Lake Washington School District, acording to the annual US News and World Report 2012 ranking. While not an uncontroversial ranking (it doesn’t include Bellevue’s football prowess, for example) it’s a well thought-through system of measuring how well high schools prepare students for success in college, AND how well they work with traditionally underserved populations.

Trying to figure out how to have this kind of performance in all our schools in Washington is more difficult. A school and a district’s reputation drive population movement. Many people have moved to Bellevue and Lake Washington because of the schools. These tend to be people who value education, and consequently their students tend to do better in school. This drives the performance of the district, further improving in-migration of education-lovers. Interestingly, this also drives up home values.

End of Session Budget Update

Thank you for allowing me to represent you in the Washington State Legislature. It’s an honor and a privilege. This year was pretty “special.” There’s nothing like a little drama to spice up a legislator’s life. This session had it all – defections on budget votes, protesters requiring hearings to be shut down, people being arrested, and a sleep-over to end the session.

This newsletter only addresses operating budget issues. Lots of other interesting things happened or are happening (520 bridge construction, for example) and I will address those in the next document.

The Operating Budget

We left the 2011 regular session with a budget that most neutral observers thought was a pretty reasonable product. It was balanced and had a healthy reserve of over $700 million. The final vote was a bipartisan one, with significant participation from Republican Senate members. Since then we’ve had pretty significant declines in our revenue projections due to the economy and faced about a $2 billion projected shortfall coming in to the December special session.

In that session we solved about $500,000,000 of the problem, leaving about $1.5 billion left to fix in January. We got good news in the forecasts, reducing the problem to about $1 billion, which we addressed in this year’s supplemental budget. Our negotiating process was bi-partisan, as was the final voting pattern.

The budget has no cuts to education. This means early learning, K-12, and higher education were left whole. This is a miracle, and was not accidental. I felt strongly that in light of the Supreme Court decision on school funding we could not in good conscience make reductions here, and as the budget committee chairman my opinion was able to prevail.

Continue reading “End of Session Budget Update”

Educational Goals: penny-wise and pound-foolish decisions

The Ways and Means committee heard a number of contentious bills Saturday, including HB 2538, which is intended to save money for school districts by reducing requirements that the legislature has placed on them without funding. It was requested by the governor, and most of the savings came from lowering the frequency of audits when there has been no problems. I’m OK with this part.

The Education committee, which heard the bill first, amended it to eliminate the required state assessment of writing skills, and consequently the graduation requirement that students must have proficiency in writing. I am very uncomfortable with this decision, as were a number of other members of the committee during the hearing. We assess core graduation requirements because we believe that what is measured is taught. We should not carry this too far, and many skills are best assessed in the classroom, but we assess core requirements to ensure that students have the opportunity to learn them.

Continue reading “Educational Goals: penny-wise and pound-foolish decisions”

Landmark Supreme Court Case

The week before session the Washington Supreme Court decided the McCleary case unanimously in favor of the plaintiffs – two families and a number of school districts who claimed that the state had historically underfunded its primary duty to fund education. As those of you who have followed my writings over the years know, I agree with the plaintiffs and feel like the last decade of my work in the legislature has been justified.

CR Douglas of Fox News interviewed me on the issue. I’d include a nice embedded video here if I knew how to do it. Click here for the link to the KCPQ interview.

I also wrote a piece over the weekend before session while I was still angry about the headline in the Seattle Times about the decision. The text below is a little strident, but lays out my analysis of the issue: cutting basic education, and perhaps cutting ANY education is off the table this year.

Continue reading “Landmark Supreme Court Case”

Post-Special Session Newsletter

Now that the “special” session is over I’ve been motivated to write a newsletter that answers many of the questions I’ve received in email. If you want to print it click here for the PDF version that’s better formatted for your printer (or at least for mine.)

As always, it’s an honor and a privilege to serve you in the Legislature. This will be my tenth year, which I find astounding. I never intended to do this – I thought I’d swoop in and fix school funding, then go back to the private sector. It turns out that some problems are harder to fix than you would think. The “great recession” is also making it a little more difficult…

Gov. Gregoire called the Legislature into special session Nov. 28 to deal with a significant decline in our expected revenue over the remainder of the two-year budget period, which ends June 30, 2013. She released her proposed revised budget Nov. 21.

We finished the special session on December 14th with the passage of a “down payment” bill on the budget, along with a handful of bills that were related to the budget or to creating jobs in Washington. The down payment bill saved a little less than 25% of the overall problem: $480 million. We still have about $1.5 billion to go.

Continue reading “Post-Special Session Newsletter”

K-12 Funding Proposal – Additional Data

I am posting CSV versions of the two data tables as several people have requested the data in searchable formats. We are typically careful about doing this as people can manipulate the data in ways that say different things than the original presentation did, and I’m hoping people are careful with it. The proposal will change over time, and the need to have current data with which to do analysis will be important.

Levy Options by school district Nov4 Table 1 (csv)

Levy Options by school district Nov4 Table 2 (csv)

 

K-12 Funding Proposal – Local Levy Swap

I’m stepping outside my role as Ways and Means chairman to put out a personal proposal for comment. The idea described below is a big one, moving around about a billion dollars in property taxes that are used for the support of public schools.

I’m giving a speech on this topic Saturday morning at the Washington State School Directors Association (WSSDA) conference, and the support files for the proposal are linked at the bottom of this post.

Making changes this significant in how schools are funded is a big deal, and the proposal will require a 2/3 vote in the legislature if it’s to be adopted. It’s revenue-neutral in the beginning, but grows more quickly than the current system does. That will let us step up our funding of schools as we recover from the economic troubles we have today. If enough members are interested in the idea it’ll move through the system. If not, we will be stuck with some very ugly budget choices.

Continue reading “K-12 Funding Proposal – Local Levy Swap”

WA Budget – Proposed Agency Cuts Explanations

I used this document in a caucus discussion of the proposed agency cuts and thought it might be interesting to people. It’s a long PDF with a duplicate copy of the spreadsheet referenced in my last budget post. To understand the spreadsheet you need to read the earlier post first.

There are 6 pages here and it’s a little wonky, but you begin to get a sense of what some of the rather bland descriptions of the impact of proposed cuts actually mean.Click the document icon to the left for the actual PDF file.

This is the document I referenced in the League of Education Voters conference call this morning.

 

Continuing Economic Distress

This is a fascinating chart that shows the difference between the current recession and everything after the Great Depression. As you go further back in time the data become less and less comparable to today’s situation, so we can’t really look at the craziness in the 19th century. I’m reading a lot of economics these days, trying to make sense of where we should go as a state. I’ll let you know if any of the people in the blogosphere have great answers. 🙂 This one comes from www.calculatedriskblog.com.

Continue reading “Continuing Economic Distress”