Category: Education

School Levies

For the past two years we’ve had a group of technical experts working on proposals on how to fix school levies. They just released their report, available here. The report is amazingly detailed and is a great introduction into how levies work and some possible approaches to fixing the problems.

I read the immediately previous draft of the report (about 150 pages) and haven’t walked through the differences yet, but the draft did a good job of laying out alternatives, but not such a good job of picking a solution. The basic problems:

  1. We depend MUCH too heavily on local property taxes to fund education. We are very close to the levels of dependence we had in the late 70s that created legal cases against the state for violating Article IXof the WA State Constitution.
  2. Continue reading “School Levies”

Education Funding

I’ve received hundreds of email messages this session urging me to not cut education funding. I agree. I tried very hard this year to have the least impact on K-12 as possible in the budget process. The House budget proposal was better for K-12 than either the Senate’s or the Governor’s proposals. In the final negotiations with the Senate we had to come closer to their proposal, particularly on educator compensation, though the 1.9% reduction we finally agreed to was less than the 3% the Senate had proposed.

Our K-12 investment is between 40 and 45% of the state’s general fund expenditures, so making any significant cuts without affecting K-12 is almost impossible. Specifically, the email messages urge me to “Do not cut education. Create a tax that provides stable, secure, and sustainable funding specifically for education.”

We have work to do as a state to provide an education system that’s adequate to prepare our children to succeed in the 21st century. Until this downturn I had hoped that a strategy of taking a larger share of the normal growth of the state budget would get us to the place we needed to be. I’m no longer sure this is true given the depths of the cuts that we’ve had to sustain over the last few years.

It’s hard to imagine a single tax that would adequately provide for public education, let alone our entire education system, including early learning and higher education. K-12 alone is 43% of the general fund budget. Our forebears thought they had provided for education by dedicating the property tax to K12, but this hasn’t worked out as well as they thought for a variety of reasons.

Had we not adopted the series of property tax limitation initiatives and acts of the legislature we would be generating about $1.5 billion a year more for K-12, and it would be constitutionally dedicated to public education, and not available to be spent on other things.

In addition to the inadequacy of funding at the state level there are a number of other pernicious problems in the K-12 funding system that need to be fixed. In particular,

  1. Grandfathered salaries in a handful of districts. About a dozen districts have salaries for teachers that are up to 5% higher than those for the rest of the state. As you might imagine, districts near the grandfathered districts have a huge uphill fight in bargaining compensation.
  2. There are similar differences in how school levies are figured out, with some districts able to raise significantly more money than others.

I intend to spend a large fraction of my time, and the time and attention of the Ways and Means committee in the House, addressing these problems and proposing a solution. There are a number of ideas to consider, including an intriguing idea called “The Iseminger Education Finance Plan.” David’s plan is worth reading, though there are parts of it I’m not sure will work all that well.

We have more work to do here, including ensuring that the money will be well spent. There are many policy considerations that we can do to make sure we are getting our money’s worth, and to ensure that all the children in Washington have access to an education that prepares them for a productive life. Stay tuned.

Fun visit to Franklin Elementary in Kirkland

I visited Franklin Elementary in Kirkland on Monday and was very impressed with the sixth graders. They had thoughtful questions and were engaged for an hour, even with my wonky answers. One young artist sketched a portrait while I was there.

Visiting schools reminds me of why I do this job.

House Budget Proposal

Earlier this month I released the House budget proposal for 2011-13. Just before the end of the regular session, the Senate released their proposal. I asked for the job of chairman of the budget committee, but it’s clear my timing with the economy might have been better.

This budget is responsible, thoughtful, and sustainable. I’ve also tried to make it consistent with my values and the reason I ran for this job in the first place. I care about children – their education, their health, and their future – and I’ve tried to protect those as much as possible given the situation.

We were well-received critically:

Editorials | House budget passes key test: It balances | Seattle Times Newspaper

HeraldNet.com – Editorials: Serious response to crisis
Apr 05, 2011 · THE HERALD EVERETT, WASHINGTON … Worries that House Democrats were dragging their feet on a state budget … Generally, the House majority’s plan is serious …
www.heraldnet.com/article/20110405/OPINION01/704059973/-1/OPINION03

Continue reading “House Budget Proposal”

March 12 Town Hall

The 2011 legislative session is now halfway through. State Sen. Rodney Tom (D-Bellevue) and Reps. Ross Hunter (D-Medina) and Deb Eddy (D-Kirkland) invite Eastside residents to a Town Hall on Saturday, March 12 for an update and discussion on the budget and other legislation of interest.

When: Saturday, March 12 at 10:30 a.m.
Where: Redmond City Hall (15670 NE 85th Street)

For more information, contact Hunter’s Legislative Assistant Marilyn Pedersen at (360)786-7936.

Education Bills

Many PTA parents have written in about a number of bills and I’m consolidating my responses in one post. The critical decisions we make about education this year will be how we decide to move forward with a long-term budget strategy. We need to decide as a state if we are going to live up to the needs of our children or not. I’ll write more about the options here in another post.

HB 1443 – Education Reform

This is a pretty comprehensive bill that modernizes a number of our funding streams and continues making data about what’s working and not working available to the public in a readable, consistent manner. The summary below is from the bill report: http://apps.leg.wa.gov/documents/billdocs/2011-12/Pdf/Bill%20Reports/House/1443%20HBR%20ED%2011.pdf

  • Requires the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) to ensure that a fairness and bias review has been conducted before implementing revisions to the state Essential Academic Learning Requirements.
  • Requires school districts to adopt a policy defining a high school credit and authorizes the State Board of Education to repeal a seat-time based definition.
  • Authorizes the SPI to require use of a kindergarten readiness assessment in low-performing schools receiving federal school improvement grants.
  • Allows Learning Assistance Program (LAP) funds to be used to support students in science and requires a study of the impact of remediation strategies funded by the LAP on student achievement.
  • Requires student performance data from the Transitional Bilingual Instructional Program to be reported online through the Washington State Report Card.
  • Adopts a definition of a highly capable student and directs the SPI to adopt consistent procedures for school districts to identify, assess, and select their most highly capable students for purposes of the Highly Capable Program.
  • Allows qualified graduates of the Recruiting Washington Teachers Program in high schools to participate on a space-available basis in an alternative route teacher preparation scholarship program.
  • Directs a Compensation Working Group to conduct a comprehensive analysis of educator professional development and mentoring needs.

It seems pretty reasonable and I’m supportive.

HB 1600 – Elementary Mathematics Specialists

I’m not as excited about this bill as I am about 1443. The bill basically creates a new job definition in elementary schools – a “math specialist.” This may be a practical response to the lack of math expertise in elementary school teachers, but I think it goes in the wrong direction strategically.

Across the state we have 40-50% turnover in the first 5 years of teaching careers in elementary school. This is a mixed blessing. Teachers typically improve substantially in their first few years on the job, so losing them so fast is a bad thing – we waste the investment in giving new teachers experience. The upside is that new entrance requirements for elementary school teachers can change the makeup of the teaching corps quickly.

I’d rather see us ensure that all of our elementary school teachers have a very strong grasp of mathematics through algebra and geometry. This does not seem unreasonable, given that many 6th graders are learning these skills and we require them as a graduation requirement from high school.

HB 1412/SB 5227 Math Graduation Requirements

This bill deals with our mathematics graduation requirements. We are in the process of switching from a single large test required for graduation (the WASL) to individual tests that are given at the end of the specific courses, specifically Algebra I and Geometry. The idea here is that you want kids to have the test happen in close proximity to the time they are finishing the course, which strikes me as a good idea. Tenth graders may have had algebra in 7th or 8th grade, or may be taking it in 10th grade and not have had geometry yet. I don’t care when kids learn Algebra, I just care that they know it.

There’s a timing problem when switching over from the older test and this bill allows students to take and pass one of the two tests and graduate. This is probably OK for a limited time period, but there is a huge amount of data that we do our young people a disservice by not ensuring that they learn these gateway skills. Kids who succeed at algebra 2 and take a real math class their senior year in high school are twice as likely to graduate from community college than kids who do not.

HB 1510 – Kindergarten Assessments

Part of our long-term efforts to improve both our early learning system and our K12 system require that we have some knowledge about literacy skills of kids as they arrive in Kindergarten. I think this is a reasonable bill. The goal is to get a baseline assessment of skills, not to create a “baby WASL” and I think it’s fine.

HB 1609 – Teacher layoffs

This is a very contentious bill that does two things:

  1. Allows school districts to use performance evaluations in layoff decisions, rather than totally basing layoffs on seniority.
  2. Creates a “mutual consent” model for teacher hiring. The teacher and principal both must agree before a teacher can be placed in a school building.

To understand this you have to understand how teacher evaluations work. Today less than one percent of teachers are rated unacceptable so this doesn’t have much practical impact. A program that I do believe will have practical impact is our effort to create a real evaluation system that uses student learning as part of the analysis, and that affects more than a fraction of a percent of teachers. Every state that has created a functional evaluation system has taken years to do so, and we will not be an exception. We are at the very beginning of this process.

I support the concept here which is why I co-sponsored the bill. I think we should most certainly consider competence in our hiring/firing and compensation decisions. However, teachers have a lot of legitimate concerns about arbitrary evaluations being used in hire/fire decisions and it’s important to make sure the evaluation system is ready to support decisions of this magnitude. I am not sure that it is at this point. I’m also hoping that we are largely done with teacher layoffs. That would make this part of the bill mostly moot.

The part I really like is called “mutual consent.” Having a culture in a school that works is incredibly important to student success. Allowing principals to construct their staffs to build that culture is important. This part of the bill would require that no teacher placements happen without both the teacher and the principal agreeing to it. A teacher should be able to refuse an assignment to a principal he or she doesn’t think they can work for, and a principal should be able to not hire a teacher that he or she doesn’t believe would be a good fit for the school.

The bill failed to pass out of the Education committee by the deadline and is mostly dead for the session. Sometimes bills come back from the dead, but I don’t think this one will.

1415 – Prioritizing Basic Education in the Budget Process

This is a proposal that has been floating around for several years to split the operating budget into two parts – education and everything else. The education part would have to be done first.

I don’t think this is a good idea for a variety of reasons:

  1. Many of the decisions we make affect both the education budget and the rest of the budget. For example, the level of pension funding we adopt is a critical, and very large, number. It applies to every agency in the budget, and can’t get made until the entire framework is understood.  Compensation decisions also cut across the entire budget.
  2. This would add weeks to the legislative session. It takes a long time to go through the legislative process for a budget. Making our budget decisions in series rather than in parallel is guaranteed to make the entire process take forever.

Adding process that doesn’t improve outcomes isn’t the technique that will produce a better budgetary outcome for education. I’ve chosen a different strategy that I think will work better. What we’re doing is:

  1. Change the structure of the education budget so it is very, very transparent. People will understand how we are spending money and what our choices are. The new budget structure goes into place for the 2011-13 budget.
  2. Create a plan for moving forward, and make it very visible if we depart from the plan. This was the main effort behind my work on the Basic Education Financing Task Force and the major bills we passed in this area in 2009 and 2010.
  3. Make every improvement we add to the education system part of the legal definition of “basic education” so that we cannot move backwards once something has been adopted.

My personal belief is that this strategy will be more effective than just changing the budget process. Every major education stakeholder group agreed with the proposal we brought forward in the last Legislature, including the PTA. I’d like to continue with this effort and not confuse the budget process.

Answering Email

00262911I’m sitting at my desk in Olympia answering email, mostly about the budget. Lots of people are writing in about different subjects, but all have the same theme – protect MY program. This is pretty interesting and useful data, but it’s hard to make decisions based on it.

For example, I get a lot of mail about preserving “gifted education”. The state sends out tens of millions in this category every year, with an equal amount going to every district based on student population. State funding makes up about 15% of what is spent in this area every year, so 85% of the money is coming from local sources, mostly your local levies.  The state budget line item is about $30 million per year, or about 0.3% of annual state school budgets. There are many other programs that distribute money the same way – evenly based on student count.

Ever think about why we don’t just combine all of these small items into one single pot?

Continue reading “Answering Email”

Unemployment trends re-emphasize need for education

Ugly Trends in Unemployment Data

This graphic from an article on the Brookings website is a clear exposition of why a larger and larger fraction of our workforce should engage in higher education. Not everyone is going to get a BA or a BS, but a larger fraction of our students need more education past high school, and we must ensure that our education system prepares young people for success in college or post-high school vocational training.

Tech Jobs in Washington

Last week I met with the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) to talk about their agenda for 2011. No surprise, it’s about jobs here in Washington. What surprised me was how they chose to spend their time in the meeting. We had an hour set aside (but took 2). They started with over 45 minutes on improving the K-12 education system in Washington.

Their bigest complaint is that it’s hard to hire competent people from inside the state. They showed me a job description for a technical support manager from a local high tech company that has been open for 6 months. This is 6 months in the middle of the worst economic downturn in the last 70 years, mind you. The job pays $125,000 a year. It’s risky and expensive to hire from out of state – some fraction of the people they hire don’t like the area and move away, and the moving and recruiting costs are excessive.

Continue reading “Tech Jobs in Washington”

Impact of Early Learning

The New York Times had an article this weekend on the impact of Kindergarten teachers on student success later in life. It’s worth reading for lots of reasons, but perhaps the title is good enough: “The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten teachers.”

 The conclusions of the article are pretty useful:

  • Successful early learning matters: “Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.”
  • Class size — which was the impetus of Project Star — evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25.
  • Quality teaching matters: “Some are highly effective. Some are not. And the differences can affect students for years to come.”

The study goes on to do a present-value analysis of the added income from students witha  good kindergarten teacher and puts the value at $320,000. This is a reach, and there is some normal variance between teachers to be expected, but focusing much of our efforts at improving the craft of teaching, with high-quality evaluations that provide a strong feedback loop about what’s working and what’s not is absolutely critical.

It’s also interesting to note that the article is is in the business section of the paper, and that the author of the study is a respected economist, rather than an education researcher. Making our education system work better is an important part of our economic development strategy, not just a nice thing to have.