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Budget Update and Thoughts on Teacher Compensation and Levy Reform
I write this on Tuesday April 21st. At this point I do not expect that the Legislature will agree on a budget before the regular session ends on Sunday April 26th. The Seattle Times published a lot of articles this weekend about the budget, and I’m structuring this newsletter around them. The first article in…
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WA Budget 2015-17: High Degree of Difficulty
When writing about the budget it’s important to share good news as well as bad. First the good: (it’s short) the revenue forecast picked up a little bit. The bad is that we face one of the most difficult budget cycles of my time in the Legislature, and perhaps worse than we’ve seen in many…
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Senate Budget – Unconstitutional Fund Transfer?
In the Senate Republican budget they transfer $166 million of the “Common School Construction Fund” into the operating budget. The Treasurer does not believe he has the constitutional authority to make this transfer and has said so publicly. The Senate Republicans are waving a letter from their staff attorney that says it’s all right. I’m…
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Education Bills and Background
Lots has been happening on the education front this year, though the most important thing is happening in closed rooms as the House and Senate work out their budget proposals. I sat on a school funding panel in front of the Washington State School Directors Association today with Sen. Bruce Dammeier (R- Puyallup), Rep. JT…
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Legislative Update
We’ve gone through the first week. The governor and the state-wide officials have all been inaugurated, I fit into the same tuxedo I got married in 23 years ago for the inaugural ball, the Senate is in uproar about Senator Tom’s defection and the consequent change in partisan control, the sun came out (briefly) in…
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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)…
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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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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…
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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…