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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…
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Speech at NW Educational Service District
Slides from today’s discussion. PDF version: Education Funding in 2012 PPT version: Education Funding in 2012 Excel spreadsheet showing examples Excel: Example – Levy Swap
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Today’s speech at Redmond Chamber of Commerce
A super crowd at the Redmond Chamber today. It was great to see everyone. I said I’d post the slides from today’s talk and here they are. WA State Budget Preview (PDF, requires Adobe Reader.)
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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…
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Black helicopters, other fascinating emails
One of the great joys of being an elected official is the unsolicited email you get from people. The Internet (thank you Al Gore) gives everyone a platform to say whatever they want and broadcast it the world over, for free. My favorite from the last few years was one that was seriously worried about…
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4-year budget outlook released
The Office of Financial Management (OFM – the gov’s budget office) just released their 4-year budget outlook. This will be the basis for our new 4-year balanced budget requirement. You can see the spreadsheet here. It shows a “shortfall” of about half a billion dollars ($496 million) by the end of the next biennium, in…
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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
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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…
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Tax Incidence in Washington
(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…
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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…
