It's (past) time for action on McCleary

On Jan. 25, Washington’s House of Representatives passed House Bill 2366 by a 64-34 vote, meaning there was support.

According to a story by Washington Newspaper Publishers Association’s Olympia Bureau reporter Izumi Hansen, HB 2366 sets up a task force, with help from a consultant, to look into the issue of teacher compensation and provide recommendations to the Legislature on how to fully fund teacher pay in 2017. The bill also specifies action be taken to eliminate school district’s reliance on local tax levies by the end of next year’s session.

Both elements are part of the Legislature’s requirement to meet conditions set forth in the Washington Supreme Court’s McCleary decision in 2012. Fully funding teacher compensation and school district reliance on tax levies to meet needs that the state should be picking up are two of those conditions.

We hope the task force is less of a study group and more of an action group because the lack of progress by the Legislature on satisfying McCleary is frustrating at times. It seems the state has studied this, and studied this, and studies this and so far without a lot of results.

Sure, they did set aside around $1.7 billion more in funding for K-12 education in this biennium, with promises to find ways to provide the rest of the nearly $5 billion we have been told will bring the state into compliance with McCleary in some ways. But more needs to be done, and what’s frustrating is most of those deeply involved in this issue know what needs to be done.

While putting $5 billion more into education is great, it’s a lot of money and we wonder how that new level is going to be maintained, especially if the state acts to take over more of the job of paying for teachers from districts. While the state economy is improving, will we be able to maintain the new education funding levels should it take a dive?

The state knows what the definitions of basic education are because they wrote them in 2009, putting them into the Revised Code of Washington as law.

(1) Read with comprehension, write effectively, and communicate successfully in a variety of ways and settings and with a variety of audiences;

(2) Know and apply the core concepts and principles of mathematics; social, physical, and life sciences; civics and history, including different cultures and participation in representative government; geography; arts; and health and fitness;

(3) Think analytically, logically, and creatively, and to integrate technology literacy and fluency as well as different experiences and knowledge to form reasoned judgments and solve problems; and

(4) Understand the importance of work and finance and how performance, effort, and decisions directly affect future career and educational opportunities.

We recognize these will change over time as society does, and that can be incorporated into how we fund basic education. That would then free up local levies to be used for programs above what the state pays for as determined by the values those communities view as important in their children’s education.

If the state picks up more of the tab, we would hope the districts would reciprocate by reducing levies and then re-introducing those extra programs for voters to make decisions about their necessity.

It comes down in both cases to identifying wants and needs. The needs should be readily available through talking with school districts and determining how they are meeting the RCWs in both personnel and finance.

We hope this “task force” put together by HB 2366 becomes more of an “action force” in the next several months by correlating all of this information before the next biennial session begins in January 2017. We would like to see them provide legislators with the information far in advance of their arrival in Olympia so they in turn can stage town hall meetings around their districts to gather citizen input.

That way, we can all have input into what are wants and what are needs. In this process, we might be wise to remember the words of the Rolling Stones song that “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.”