Despite the intrusive role of the federal government in public education imposed by the 2002, No Child Left Behind Act, “All 50 state constitutions require their state to establish and fund education for its children. These provisions are in the constitutions because education is so fundamental to preservation of democracy and a republican form of government,” explains Molly Hunter, Direction of Education Justice at the Education Law Center. Hunter continues: “Yet, too many states across the country are failing to provide fair funding for the essential resources necessary to offer genuine learning opportunities to their students. In some of those states, including Washington, plaintiffs have traveled the long journey through the courts to prove shocking resource deficits and harm to schoolchildren. After court rulings ordering states to bring their funding systems into compliance with their state constitutions, some states enact thorough and effective remedies. But a few legislatures and governors resist, in Kansas and Arizona, for example.” (Last week this blog covered the deplorably inadequate and inequitable school finance in Kansas, the result of tax slashing and austerity measures imposed by Governor Sam Brownback and a far-right legislature.),
The action of Washington’s state supreme court last week is an encouraging contrast to the ongoing school funding catastrophe in Kansas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and a number of other states. The NY Times reports that: “Washington State’s highest court, which has threatened, cajoled and pleaded with the state Legislature and governor for years to close the gap in spending between rich and poor schools, said on Thursday that it had finally lost its patience. In a unanimous decision, the nine-member Supreme Court imposed a fine of $100,000 a day on the state until a plan to reduce the gap was accepted, and in a written order ‘encouraged’ Gov. Jay Inslee to call the Legislature into a special session. The financial sanctions, which started on Thursday with the filing of the order, will be owed every 24 hours, seven days a week with the money going into an education fund.”
Randy Dorn, the state’s superintendent of public instruction is reported by the NY Times to have, “applauded the court’s decision and said that the fines might achieve what previous orders by the court had not. Washington, he said, is near the bottom of the national rankings in class size and in per-pupil K-12 funding. An over-reliance on local taxes—which is at the heart of the case underlying Thursday’s order—has created, he said, a patchwork of rich districts and poor ones. That makes the question not just one of books and teacher salaries, Mr. Dorn said, but civil rights.”
The Seattle Times traces the history of the McCleary lawsuit, filed in January of 2007. The case made its way to the state’s supreme court, which ordered the state to raise spending and required progress reports after each legislative session. The court imposed the fines last week at the end of the 2015 session, while it acknowledged that significant progress has been made in transportation funding, and support for other operating costs, materials and supplies. The state has also made some progress toward providing full day kindergarten for all children and reducing class size in the primary grades, but, according to the court, has fallen short in overall class-size reduction, in capital outlays to provide enough space for all-day kindergarten and smaller classes, and additional funding for salaries for teachers and other employees. In addition to imposing the fines last week, the court now wants a master plan with a phase-in schedule that explains how the legislature plans to bring the state into compliance.
In the 2015-2017 biennial budget just signed into law, the Seattle Times explains, “lawmakers… came up with $1.3 billion in additional K-12 funding, which included spending to reduce K-3 class sizes, expand all-day kindergarten, and pay for materials, supplies and operating costs. The plaintiffs have argued that’s far short of the additional $5 billion a year actually needed. In their order, the justices questioned whether the state devoted enough money to class-size reduction, noting it allocated $350 million while the Legislature’s education task force had recommended in 2012 that about $663 million would be needed this budget cycle… Justices also questioned whether lawmakers provided enough money to help schools build the extra classrooms needed to provide all-day kindergarten and to lower class sizes.”
This year Governor Jay Inslee proposed new state taxes, though the legislature balked. The NY Times reports, “Mr. Inslee this year proposed $1.4 billion in new taxes as part of a nearly $39 billion budget plan that included a new capital gains tax on the wealthy and a cap-and-trade carbon tax system he said would also reduce climate-altering pollution. That extra money, along with a projected $3 billion surge in revenue from existing taxes in a recovering economy, would have been funneled heavily to education. But the governor’s new taxes faltered in the Legislature.”
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