Washington’s Paramount Duty endorses No on I-2109

Parent group fought for capital gains tax to fund public education, vows to defend it at ballot box

Washington’s Paramount Duty, an organization of parents across the state committed to making the state uphold its constitutional requirement to amply fund public education, has endorsed a No vote on Initiative 2109 at the November 5, 2024 election.

“Washington’s Paramount Duty fought for years to get the legislature to pass a capital gains tax to help fund our public schools, and we finally won in 2021. The capital gains tax is generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the state’s 2,000 richest people for public education and other programs for our children. Taking it away would hurt those students. It’s crucial that we defend this at the ballot box, especially as more and more school districts face a financial crisis that the capital gains tax revenues can help solve,” said Robert Cruickshank, President of Washington’s Paramount Duty.

Washington’s Paramount Duty was founded in 2015 by parents across the state who were furious at the state’s failure to amply fund its public schools as Article IX, Section 1 of the state constitution requires. At the time, the state Supreme Court had held the state legislature in contempt and fined them $100,000 per day for failing to comply with the McCleary decision requiring the state to provide more funding for public education.

Washington’s Paramount Duty urged legislators to pass a capital gains tax in order to help generate more funds to meet the court order and amply fund public schools. Although the legislature failed to do so when they finally complied with the McCleary order in 2017, the legislature did finally pass the capital gains tax in 2021. Washington’s Paramount Duty mobilized the public to send thousands of emails and calls to legislators between 2015 and 2021.

Only the legislature can solve school funding problems

Schools in Seattle and across our state are in crisis, and this is an all-hands-on-deck moment to save them — please take a moment and click here to ask your legislators to fully fund our public schools!

On Tuesday, June 4, Seattle Public Schools will meet with Seattle’s state legislative delegation to discuss the district’s proposal to close as many as 20 public schools. The district also faces a $129 million budget deficit, and acknowledges that closing schools won’t solve that deficit.

This meeting is happening behind closed doors, but it’s still an opportunity for the public to make it clear to the legislature that we expect them to step up with the funding our schools and students need. If legislators don’t, districts are going to balance their budgets on the backs of students.

There have been a lot of claims made recently regarding the state of public education funding, in Seattle and in Washington State. We’ve been working since 2015 to tackle this issue, and along the way we’ve learned a lot about what’s really happening. So we’re going to share some of those insights and facts — and they show that school budget deficits are caused by the state legislature’s failure to fully fund public education.

1. The education funding deal adopted in 2017 to address the McCleary case caused current school district financial problems. It has left our schools without the funding they need to properly educate our students or even meet their ongoing basic education needs, although federal stimulus papered over these problems for several years. It has created a structural budget shortfall for school districts across the state, including Seattle. We went into further detail on this in an article we wrote in 2022.

That deal has underfunded basic education and underfunds educator salaries. Districts are now back in the same situation the McCleary family sued to stop: reliant on the passage of a local levy. The state capped local levies and promised to provide ample funding from the state to replace it. That simply has not happened. Given that it was a deal made with the Republicans who controlled the State Senate at the time, it would seem that a Democratic majority would be strongly interested in fixing our education funding system so that our schools are receiving the funds they need.

2. It’s not just Seattle. Nearly a hundred school districts across the state had to make budget cuts for this school year. Bellevue closed three schools. Schools in Marysville, Yelm, Olympia, Moses Lake, and many other places are facing serious financial crisis. Three districts north of Everett are under fiscal monitoring by OSPI, a number that is expected to grow. Education in Washington State is on the brink of catastrophe.

3. Declining enrollment didn’t cause the budget deficit. SPS’s own numbers show that if the district regained the 4,900 students that it has lost since 2019, they would get an extra $66 million in revenue – but would incur an extra $54 million in costs, leaving just $12 million to balance the budget. This means that SPS’s budget woes do not stem from the loss of enrollment. Even if we brought back 4,900 students, the district would still be in fiscal crisis. School districts around the state are experiencing budget problems without having lost as much enrollment.

4. SEA’s 2022 contract didn’t cause the deficit either. The 2017 education funding deal eliminated previous funding models that sustained adequate pay for educators, and it was not replaced by anything that provided similar resources for districts. The regionalization procedure as adopted and implemented by the legislature fails to provide schools with the funds they need to properly pay teachers and avoid worsening an existing teacher shortage. The result is schools are forced to pit important needs against each other, which is unacceptable.

5. The legislature has failed to keep pace with inflation, and the result is they are slowly defunding the schools. Data from OSPI made it clear that state funding for public education has declined by nearly $1 billion since 2022 when adjusted for inflation. The proportion of the state operating budget that goes to K-12 public schools has fallen from the 50% recommended by the Quality Education Council to just 43%. This is exacerbating the crisis that the education funding deal in 2017 created.

6. Closing schools does not solve the district’s budget deficit. According to SPS’s own publicly available numbers, they face a deficit of about $129 million for 2025-26. Closing 20 schools saves at most $40 million, again according to their numbers. That assumes the best case scenario in terms of savings and the least amount of enrollment loss triggered by the closures. Yet there would still be $89 million or so for the district to have to cut, ensuring that the schools that remain will have more students but fewer resources to teach them. Superintendent Brent Jones has told the public that SPS intends to ask the legislature to close that deficit, and he is right to do so.

Mass school closures have also failed to achieve fiscal stability in cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia that have attempted them, and San Antonio found last year that “closing schools does not make a district more equitable.” More than 1,000 people have signed an open letter opposing SPS’s closure plan.

For our purposes here, what’s most important to know is that SPS will not come close to solving its budget deficit by closing schools. Only more funding from the state legislature can solve this in a way that avoids cutting programs and services for students.

Washington’s Paramount Duty has consistently called for the legislature to uphold its constitutional obligation to fully fund our public schools using new, progressive revenue, rather than taking the money from other important services.

Here are some examples of what form that new revenue could take:

Wealth tax

Polling shows 67% of Washingtonians back a wealth tax on 2,000 of the state’s richest individuals, which can help fund our public schools. Such widespread public support means a wealth tax shouldn’t be difficult or controversial. But legislators failed to act on it in 2023 or 2024.

SB 5486 and HB 1473 would have create such a wealth tax. It was co-sponsored by 43 of 58 House Democrats and 20 of 29 Senate Democrats. It did not even receive a vote in committee in either chamber. But with strong support from the public and legislators, it could return in the 2025 session.

The legislature must pass the wealth tax and ensure that a sufficient amount of the money it raises is allocated to K-12 public school districts to help provide stable long-term funding for our schools.

Corporate tax loopholes

Washington State gives out at least 600 loopholes and tax breaks to corporations. According to pre-pandemic estimates, this costs the state tens of billions of dollars in potential revenue. Our state doesn’t do a good job of tracking their effectiveness. Legislators could close some or all of these tax loopholes to help fund our public schools.

Special education funding

Whatever revenue sources are chosen, the state legislature must also fully fund special education. It’s not only the right thing to do — it also helps solve districts’ budget woes. For years the legislature has capped the amount of funding districts receive for special education. The existence of that cap is appalling. Right now, the cap is 16% of enrollment, after the legislature raised it slightly in the 2023 and 2024 sessions. But quite a few districts have more students than that who need services.

As a result of this cap, the legislature forces districts into an impossible choice between spending their other funds to provide those services or meet other educational needs. Legislators are pitting students against each other. It’s awful and it has to stop.

Please take a moment and write to your state legislators urging them to fully fund our public schools!

P.S.: Want to help mobilize the public to push our legislators to fully fund public education? Sign up here to volunteer!

Save public education: Pass a wealth tax and scrap the cap!

Across Washington State public schools are facing a worsening budget crisis that threatens to spiral out of control, causing cuts to programs, teacher layoffs, and even school closures. The future of our public schools is at stake.

Unfortunately, the state legislature continues to deliberately and knowingly underfund public education, with state spending per pupil actually shrinking in recent years when adjusted for inflation.

The short version of this post: We’re asking you to tell the legislature to step up and amply fund our public schools, as the state constitution requires, by passing a wealth tax as well as eliminating the unconscionable cap on special education funding.

Please speak out now, as the legislature will act in the coming days on important legislation. You can send that message to your legislators by clicking here!

The longer version:

It’s become clear that the legislature’s solution to the McCleary case, adopted in 2017, is failing to provide our schools the funding that’s necessary to educate our kids and meet their needs.

This shouldn’t be surprising. It was predicted by school districts and education funding experts as soon as the legislature adjourned in the summer of 2017. You can read more about this history and how it shapes our present crisis in the report Washington’s Paramount Duty released last fall, “Designed to Fail.”

Since we released that report, we’ve learned matters have grown even worse. Bellevue and Seattle are considering closing schools. Everett sent out an email asking families to help them decide what spending to cut, choosing between smaller class sizes, student courses, extracurricular activities, and even “safety and security.”

Smaller, rural districts are also facing a crisis. After Marysville’s local levy failed (twice) in early 2022, the district had to make huge cuts, laying off 35 teachers and eliminating middle school sports.

This month Marysville is trying one more time to pass their local levy. According to published reports, if it fails, the district may have to impose even bigger cuts, and some are even discussing dissolving the school district.

Districts weren’t supposed to need to rely on local levies after 2017. But the legislature’s deliberate, ongoing underfunding means many still do, as we see in Marysville.

Even Chimacum, home to the McCleary family, is running on budget reserves and facing cuts next year.

A recent report from OSPI shows what happened. The initial increase after 2017 in state funding for public schools has not only stopped, after 2020 it stalled and even shrank when you adjust for inflation. Yet districts have seen their costs rise, especially after the dislocations of the pandemic and record inflation.

An OSPI chart shows that one-time federal funding from pandemic stimulus, as well as local levies, are making up the difference between state funding and actual costs. Once that federal stimulus funding goes away in the near future, districts will face even larger cuts.

Districts have also experienced declining enrollment. But budget cuts will create a spiraling crisis, as program cuts, teacher layoffs, larger class sizes, and school closures drive even more families to leave the public school systems, causing more cuts.

One additional factor causing district budget woes is the state’s appalling cap on special education funding, which even The Seattle Times said is indefensible. The legislature caps special education funding at 13.5% of enrollment. Many districts have more students than that who need services. In Seattle and Chimacum, it’s 16%. In Longview, it’s 18%.

In his budget proposal, Governor Jay Inslee proposed a measly cap increase to just 15%, and the State Senate seems poised to stick with that insufficient amount. Thankfully, there’s a much better bill in the State House that would eliminate the cap entirely.

Clearly, the legislature’s 2017 education funding plan has failed. They need to adopt something new. That requires more funding. The best piece of news is that we can share with you is that legislators in both the House and the Senate proposed a wealth tax last month that would raise billions of dollars and, in part, go toward public education.

We’re at a crossroads right now and we need your help by contacting legislators and urging them to amply fund our public schools.

Here’s the specifics of what we’re asking legislators to do with some of the most important legislation, as well as the budget, in the 2023 session. (When you click the link, you’ll get a form that allows you to send a message to legislators to support or oppose the following bills.)

Special education

SB 5311: Oppose unless amended to remove the cap on special education funding. This is the bill that would raise that cap from 13.5% to 15%, which is an offensively small increase that falls well short of what districts actually need to provide programs and services to students.

HB 1436: Support and do not amend. This bill handles special education funding correctly, eliminating the cap entirely.

Wealth tax

SB 5486/HB 1473: Support. Polling shows 67% of Washingtonians back a wealth tax, so this shouldn’t be difficult or controversial. The legislature should also amend it to provide more assurances that a sufficient amount of the money raised will be allocated to K-12 public school districts rather than simply put in the Education Legacy Trust Fund.

Budget

In a few weeks legislators will propose their budgets for 2023-24. The legislature should adopt a budget that provides at least $1 billion more for K-12 public schools and ensures no district must make any cuts. In addition to passing a wealth tax, they should also raise the capital gains tax rate to 10%, up from its current level of 7%.

Please take a moment and write to your state legislators urging them to use the budget surplus as well as legislation to fund critical needs in our public schools.

Thank you for taking action for our schools!

Designed to Fail: The Legislature’s McCleary solution has collapsed

Five years ago the state legislature adopted a new education funding plan intended to comply with an order from the Washington State Supreme Court. The Court had found the state was in violation of Article IX of the state constitution, which states “It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.”

Here in the fall of 2022, a series of teacher strikes and budget cuts in schools across Washington State have made it clear the legislature’s solution to the McCleary crisis has failed.

While legislators are busy blaming school districts and teachers’ unions, a closer analysis shows the legislature itself is to blame. In 2017 the legislature adopted a new education funding plan that fails to actually fund the elements of a basic education, prevents districts from making up that shortfall themselves, and effectively imposes a spending cap set so low that it creates a structural revenue shortfall for districts across the state.

The shortcomings of the 2017 education funding plan were predicted by many. Despite persistent calls for change, particularly as a result of the pandemic, the legislature has refused to act. The result is a financial crisis in school districts across the state.

What follows is an analysis of how the McCleary case came about, how the legislature resolved it, how its many shortcomings were predicted and have since come to pass, and then suggestions about how to truly fix public education funding in Washington State. This is not meant to let school districts off the hook in their bargaining. Districts can and should still bargain contracts that are fair to teachers even within a system rigged against our public schools.

BACKGROUND

Since the resolution of the McCleary case, many new families have entered the public school system in Washington State, and may not be familiar with the basics of how we got here. So we’ll take a quick trip down memory lane.

In 2007, the McCleary family of Chimacum (near Port Townsend) sued Washington State, claiming that the state was failing to fulfill its constitutional paramount duty to provide ample funding for public education. Like many districts in the state, Chimacum was dependent on passage of a local levy to fund basic educational needs like teachers, support staff, materials, and building maintenance. Like many districts in the state, Chimacum’s levies routinely failed, thanks in part to an absurd requirement that 60% of voters approve levies. Many levies fail even with 50-59% of voters saying yes.

Their case reached the Washington State Supreme Court in 2011, and in early 2012 they ruled in favor of the McCleary family. The Court ordered the state legislature to provide billions more in funding for the public schools. They said that the legislature had to fund the full cost of a “basic education” as defined by the legislature – which includes materials, supplies, and teacher salaries sufficient to recruit and retain educators.

The legislature added smaller amounts of funding and hoped the Supreme Court would be mollified, with many legislators in both parties arguing the Supreme Court had no authority to impose such an order. The Court wasn’t fooled, and ordered the legislature to actually comply with the decision by April 30, 2014. The legislature refused.

In the fall of 2014, tired of the legislature’s refusal to act, the Supreme Court held the legislature in contempt of court. The Court later imposed a $100,000 per day fine on the legislature. The legislature refused to pay. Observers were openly wondering whether the Supreme Court would order legislators to be jailed.

Also in 2014, voters approved Initiative 1351, which mandated small class sizes for all grades, and minimum staffing ratios to ensure there are nurses, counselors, and social workers in every school. The initiative wrote these rules into the state’s legal definition of a basic education. But still the legislature did not act to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling.

In the fall of 2015 Seattle teachers were forced to strike in order to win a contract from Seattle Public Schools that would provide better pay for educators and improved support services for students. Recognizing that the root problem was the legislature’s failure to comply with the McCleary decision, and believing that grassroots pressure was necessary, a group of parents founded Washington’s Paramount Duty to force the legislature to act.

WPD’s goal was to make the legislature adopt new, progressive revenue to add billions more in funding for the public schools. WPD proposed closing corporate tax loopholes and taxing the rich, including a capital gains tax, as revenue sources to provide the necessary funding. In the summer of 2016, WPD co-founder Summer Stinson and Kathryn Russell Selk submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court urging them to suspend more than 600 corporate tax breaks if the legislature failed to comply with the Court’s orders in the McCleary case.

WHAT THE LEGISLATURE DID

In June 2017, after more threats from the Supreme Court, after two special sessions, and after the state government very nearly shut down, the legislature finally adopted its plan to comply with the McCleary decision, in ESHB 2242. Since control of the legislature was split – Democrats held the State House, whereas Republicans had a majority of one in the State Senate – the final plan was an awkward and ultimately unworkable amalgam of Democratic and Republican proposals.

The core of the legislature’s McCleary solution was to implement a Republican demand for a so-called “levy swap.” Originally proposed by failed Republican candidate for governor Rob McKenna in 2012, this involves enacting the largest statewide property tax hike in state history, in exchange for capping local levies. In effect, local property tax revenue was taken by the state, and then returned to districts to cover some of the costs of basic education. This only works if the state provides enough funding to the districts to amply fund the full range of student needs and operational requirements.

Critics charged that this would not actually happen in practice, and the result would be a massive tax hike on residents in large cities without any new funding for public education. In fact, a 2011 report by the state’s Levy and Local Effort Assistance Technical Working Group gave the levy swap their only “not recommended” rating out of the four proposals considered.

By plowing ahead with a levy swap anyway, the legislature put districts in an impossible position. As we’ll see, they did not fully fund the actual costs of providing a basic education. But they also capped how much districts could raise by local levies. The result is to cap school district spending at an amount below which districts can actually meet their legal and constitutional obligations to students.

The legislature’s solution also included a demand from corporate education reformers, who had allies among key members of the Democratic legislative caucuses, that the way teachers were paid and given benefits would change. The old system, a so-called “staff mix” that reimbursed districts for the teachers they had, was replaced by a new model that was more restrictive, designed to hold down teacher pay, and penalized senior teachers. Teacher benefits were also centralized into a new state system known as the School Employees Benefit Board.

Teachers and many parents were concerned that this would lead to a teacher shortage as it would be harder than ever for salaries to cover the cost of living, which was already rising before the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent spike in inflation.

The legislature also maintained a cap on spending for special education services. The state caps the amount of money it will pay school districts for special education services at 13.5% of the overall student population. If more students than that require special education services, which after all are mandated under federal law, the district must fund it themselves. By 2022, at least 15.5% of students in Seattle Public Schools were receiving special education services.

Effectively, districts like Seattle run a deficit to meet the needs of students protected under federal law. The legislature has given school districts a financial incentive to systematically refuse to provide these services. Seattle Public Schools is facing numerous lawsuits to force services to be provided, and the federal Department of Education has opened an investigation into the Seattle district’s failure to provide special education services.

We do not argue that these failures are justified by the state’s own refusal to properly fund special education. However, the state’s refusal is a major cause, and utterly indefensible.

ESHB 2242 also eliminated Initiative 1351, and instead maintained minimum staffing ratios for nurses, librarians, and family support workers that were too low to ensure every school would have those educators in the building.

Soon after the legislature’s McCleary solution was signed into law, it became clear to many that the solution was not only inadequate — it would leave many districts worse off than before. School districts in Tacoma, Seattle, Olympia, as well as smaller districts such as Bethel, all claimed as early as August 2017 that the legislature’s solution left them poorer than if the legislature had done nothing at all.

Larry Nyland, who was superintendent of Seattle Public Schools at the time, warned prophetically that “the state budget would result in budget deficits for Seattle schools, restrict Seattle school officials use of state funding, and fail to fully pay for teachers’ salaries and services for special education and English Language Learner programs.”

WPD’s Stinson and Selk submitted another amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the summer of 2017, urging them to reject the legislature’s solution as inadequate. The brief argued that the legislature’s solution failed to adequately fund public schools, failed to provide for teacher retention (which the Supreme Court had ruled was part of basic education), failed to provide resources for English language learners and special education, and did not rely on regular and dependable tax sources.

Five years later, it is clear that these concerns have all become reality.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court in 2018 washed its hands of the matter. After an initial ruling requiring the legislature to add more funding to pay for the new salary allocation model, and after the legislature acted to comply, the Court dismissed these concerns, ruled that the legislature was now in compliance with the court order, and terminated their jurisdiction – meaning the case was now officially closed.

LEGISLATURE ABANDONS ITS PARAMOUNT DUTY

By the spring of 2019 the teacher shortage predicted in the summer of 2017 had materialized. Shortages were becoming acute for special education instructors, with blame placed on districts for cutting pay and benefits for such educators — just as many observers had warned would happen back in 2017 when the legislature enacted its McCleary solution.

But the legislature was reluctant to make changes to the solution it had adopted in 2017 — even after Democrats regained control of the State Senate and expanded their majorities in the State House. In early 2019 WPD led a statewide mobilization to force the legislature to avoid a “levy cliff” – a reduction in the amount each school district could raise in its local levy. It took a huge mobilization just to get the legislature to prevent delivering another cut to school budgets just one year after adopting their McCleary solution.

In early 2020, as problems with the legislature’s McCleary solution mounted, even the Seattle Times editorialized against “McCleary fatigue” and urged legislators add more funding for our schools, particularly eliminating the special education spending cap. Of course, the legislature did not act to remove that cap.

Even before the pandemic hit in early 2020 the legislature’s McCleary solution was falling apart. The pandemic provided the final blow to the education funding system and sent public school finances into a tailspin.

The first public schools to close in the country due to the pandemic were in Washington State, led by the Northshore school district. By late March public schools across the state closed due to the need to stop the spread of the virus. Eventually, schools across the state began experiencing a decline in enrollment. While researchers are still assessing the causes of the decline, and exactly where students went during and after the pandemic, initial data from across the country suggests some moved to other states, some went to private or charter schools, some were home schooled, and some remain unaccounted for.

In March 2020 Congress passed the first pandemic stimulus and created the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, known as ESSER for short. The 2020 bill gave schools across America $13 billion in funding. In December 2020 Congress passed a second stimulus bill which created ESSER II, allocating $54 billion for schools. Finally, in March 2021, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, which allocated $122 billion for schools. These ARP ESSER funds did include a requirement that 20% of the funds be used to help students catch up academically.

These funds were intended as supplemental dollars to help address the numerous impacts to schools of the pandemic, and were not intended to backfill money lost due to declining tax revenues or declining enrollment. However, federal law did not prevent such backfilling, and Washington State legislators chose to use some of it for backfilling rather than ensure all of it went to address pandemic impacts on schools and students. And this money will run out by spring 2024.

There was one major bright spot in education funding during the most intense months of the pandemic. With T’wina Nobles winning a State Senate seat in Pierce County in 2020, the State Senate had a majority to pass a capital gains tax, and did so in early 2021. WPD’s advocacy helped make this proposal happen, as we had been advocating for it from the start in 2015.

The capital gains tax generates $500 million per year, half of which is deposited in the state’s Education Legacy Trust Account, and the other half goes to early childhood programs. The state chose to delay collection of this tax until 2023, owing in part to legal challenges from billionaires and Republicans.

A judge in rural Douglas County ruled the capital gains tax was unconstitutional in early 2022, but the state has appealed it to the Washington State Supreme Court. It is possible, perhaps likely, that the Supreme Court will uphold the tax. An effort by opponents to put the capital gains tax on the statewide ballot was abandoned once polling showed the tax was widely popular among the electorate.

Given the delays in collecting the capital gains tax revenues and the ongoing legal battles, Washington’s public schools have not yet seen any proceeds from the tax. They could have used it, as the expiration of pandemic stimulus funding restored the structural revenue shortfalls that existed for most districts prior to 2020.

Reeling from lost enrollment, and with finances already weakened by the legislature’s 2017 McCleary solution, school districts pleaded with legislators in early 2022 to provide relief by backfilling the money lost to declining enrollment.

Senate Ways and Means Committee Chair Christine Rolfes refused. Telling reporters she decided to “meet the districts halfway” Rolfes essentially forced schools to begin making budget cuts even as the impacts of the pandemic on students and teachers was becoming clear.

The legislature did provide more funding in the 2022 session to provide more nurses, counselors, social workers, and psychologists at Washington State public schools. HB 1664 is a small step in the right direction, yet still shows how the legislature systematically underfunds basic priorities. For example, the legislation provides funding for 0.5 FTE (full-time equivalent) of a full time nurse at each elementary school in the state:

In other words, the state only pays for half the cost of having a nurse at every school, every day. They expect school districts to pick up the tab for the rest, despite being underfunded for all their other priorities they must provide.

WHERE WE STAND TODAY

Here in 2022, the state legislature fails to cover the cost of a basic education. A recent analysis from Seattle Public Schools demonstrated this vividly:

Legislators and other leaders in Olympia like to argue that they’ve done their jobs well and claim that Seattle is an outlier, with a mismanaged school district that mishandles the money they get from the state. While SPS is indeed mismanaged, the fact remains that the state does not provide ample funding to cover the district’s basic costs. Solving the district’s management woes, while necessary, will not eliminate the structural revenue shortfall.

SPS is not alone. The state is failing to fund actual costs in many other districts too.

Going into the 2022-23 school year districts across Washington — large and small, urban and rural, east and west — have been facing cuts and/or teacher strikes as a result of the legislature’s failure to fund our public schools. Districts that have faced budget cuts include:

Perhaps most damningly, districts are once again finding themselves forced to make sweeping budget cuts due to the failure of their local levies. Marysville had to cut $13 million out of a $185 million budget after voters twice failed to renew a local district operating levy.

Even Chimacum was looking at budget cuts, 15 years after the McCleary family first filed suit.

Districts are also having to make choices that pit students and families against each other in competition for scarce and insufficient resources. Some districts, like Seattle, now have a financial incentive to try and limit the number of students receiving special education services that they are entitled to under state law. As programs of all kinds are slashed and staffing cut, this also has the effect of driving more families away from the public school system.

However, some legislators still claim that our schools are swimming in money. State Senator Reuven Carlyle, who represents northwest Seattle and serves on the powerful Senate Ways and Means Committee, said at the beginning of the 2022 Seattle teachers strike that “Per pupil funding has increased to $12,344 from $8,070.”

That may seem like a large increase. But it merely brings Washington State to the middle of the pack, and we are still being significantly outspent by other states, particularly in New England. According to the US Census Bureau, Washington State ranks 17th in per pupil education spending. New Jersey spends $20,670 per pupil. New York spends $25,519 per pupil, roughly $10,000 more than we do here in Washington State — despite our state being home to some of the world’s largest companies and richest people.

Overall, what the legislature has done is effectively create a spending cap on public education that is far below what is required to actually educate the 1 million children of this state who are enrolled in public schools. They are pushing a growing number of families into the private school system. Unless the legislature fixes this broken system, they will succeed in turning public education into the equivalent of our health care system: a barebones public safety net for those without money or privilege, but where everyone else is expected to pay out of pocket to get their needs met privately.

HOW DO WE FIX THIS?

Several proposals are floating out there that the legislature should adopt in the 2023 session to help address this crisis:

  • Wealth tax: State Rep. Noel Frame has proposed a tax on intangible financial assets of more than $1 billion. The most recent version of this proposal, HB 1406, would put money into a fund to be used to reduce taxes for low income households. It’s possible that the legislature could be pushed to include K-12 public education as part of the allowed use of wealth tax revenues.
  • Fix the overall tax structure: Rep. Frame also led the creation of the Tax Structure Work Group, which is reviewing the state’s entire tax structure. This fall they are scheduled to present proposals that the legislature could adopt in their 2023 session. Depending on the proposals adopted, the legislature could generate billions of dollars more for public education. In 2016, Sen. Carlyle famously stated that Washington State would generate $10 billion more per year if we had Idaho’s tax system.
  • Eliminate the cap on special education funding: While this would not fix the problems of public education funding overall, eliminating the 13.5% cap on special education funding would certainly help district budgets, while achieving the more important goal of ensuring students get services to which they are guaranteed under federal law. Several legislators are expected to propose a bill raising or eliminating the cap in the 2023 session, but details have not yet been finalized.
  • Expand the capital gains tax: The legislature could easily raise the capital gains tax rate to bring in more revenue and thus more funding for public education.
  • Close corporate tax loopholes: Washington State has created hundreds of tax loopholes for big corporations, worth tens of billions of dollars. Closing these would generate more money for public schools as well, with the exact amount depending on which loopholes are closed.

We wish that providing the basic facts laid out in this article to legislators would be sufficient to force them to act. But as the history of the McCleary case and its aftermath shows, it’s not. A majority of the state legislature, including members of both parties, are fundamentally opposed to fulfilling their constitutional requirement of amply funding our public schools. These particular legislators have proven they will resist doing so no matter the impact to our schools.

Seven years of experience has taught us that advocacy is necessary, and it is not sufficient. We believe the crisis facing our schools will not be resolved until the composition of the legislature is changed. Representatives and Senators who refuse to provide the additional funding needed for our schools need to be replaced with those who will. There is also a gubernatorial election in 2024. Jay Inslee is likely to retire, and the people of Washington State will elect a new governor. Education funding must become a central part of that campaign.

Thankfully, change is already happening. Legislators like Reuven Carlyle, a longtime opponent of ample funding for public education, are retiring. Carlyle’s likely successor in the Senate, Rep. Noel Frame, was a leader in getting the capital gains tax approved in 2021, and led the way in the creation of the Tax Structure Work Group.

A combination of persistent advocacy to the legislature as well as a dedication to electing legislators who will fully fund our schools is the only way out of this accelerating crisis facing public education across Washington State.

Federal, state, and local leaders need to step up for students, educators, and families

Our schools are in crisis. The cause is both a pandemic as well as centuries of white supremacy and oppression. As school districts across Washington State rightly choose to keep classrooms closed this fall due to public health needs, we need our leaders to do more and better to meet the needs of students, parents, and teachers, and ensure equity in all forms of education. Visit SoFi for student loan options. 

 

In Michigan, a 15 year old Black girl sits in jail for not having done her distance learning assignments. Here in Washington State, students and families furthest from educational justice bore the brunt of learning loss. Many were not given the broadband and tech tools needed to keep up with distance learning — and often faced other traumas outside of class. Meanwhile, a growing number of affluent parents are planning to use their privilege to break away from the public school system and set up their own “micro-schools,” with encouragement from Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos. We cannot let these and other inequities happen again this fall.

 

It is wrong to ask educators to risk their lives to teach our students. Districts across the state should follow the lead of those that have chosen not to reopen classrooms until it is safe to do so. As distance learning is happening again this fall in communities across the state, districts will need more resources to do so equitably, learning from the mistakes and failures of the spring. This will require local, state, and federal leaders to work together to support the full range of student and family needs.

 

First, Washington’s Congressional delegation needs to help provide urgent and immediate assistance for our schools and students. You can take action here to urge them to ensure there is at least $200 billion for public schools in the upcoming stimulus bill. About half of that funding would go to make up for lost revenue due to the pandemic and recession. The other half would help provide things like nurses for every school, counselors and mental health services, meals, help to clean classrooms, smaller class sizes, and resources to address inequities in distance learning. Congress also needs to provide more support for child care services and economic support for families, including extended unemployment benefits at existing or higher levels, and passing Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Paycheck Recovery Act.

 

We also urge Congress to explicitly exclude private schools and charter schools from getting any of this funding, as the need in public schools is dire and the last round of funding got siphoned off, leaving public schools without the resources they needed. This funding can go a long way toward addressing inequities in schools, dismantling the school to prison pipeline, and rooting out oppression in our schools.

 

Second, the Washington State legislature needs to begin planning now for how to help students recover from months of school closures. We cannot simply expect to turn the lights back on and open the doors to students and assume we can return to normal. Many students and families have gone through a lot of trauma and disruption since March 2020 and will need support and help to recover.

 

When the legislature reconvenes, they need to fully fund social-emotional learning, smaller class sizes, nurses and counselors at every school, finally and fully fund special education, and invest in ethnic studies and equity. Funding needs to include hiring family support workers from different cultural backgrounds who know these communities and students and can help do the work from the ground up. We have been calling for these investments to be made for years now. To protect all these funding and investments from cyber criminals, we also provide government cyber security against all types of cyberattacks.  There is no further time to lose.

 

Legislators will also need to fund additional supports for families and students in order to address the lasting effects of the pandemic, loss of learning, and economic dislocation. We urge the legislature to call off standardized testing so that teachers can instead respond to student needs instead of unnecessary test prep.

 

In order to fund these urgent needs, legislators must tax the richest Washingtonians, especially those like Jeff Bezos who have gotten richer during this pandemic. This is in order to not only prevent cuts, but add more funding to address both the pandemic as well as centuries of racism. 

 

Third, we need local districts to emphasize equity in their planning and delivery of instruction. Schools need to provide more technology and assistance in using it, especially to families furthest from educational justice. Districts need to provide more family engagement, address student mental and social-emotional health needs. Districts also need to partner with and support local child care providers and make space available when and where it is safe to do so. And teachers need to be trained in anti-racist practices, not only for the duration of the pandemic but beyond.

 

We also encourage districts to find ways to move money out of the school to prison pipeline and into programs and services and staffing that are rooted in restorative justice.

 

Distance learning is necessary to protect public health, but it will take our local, state, and federal leaders working together to support students, families, and educators to make it work — and to make it equitable. There’s no time to lose.

 

Some truths about local levies and teacher pay

Schools across Washington State are gearing up for huge cuts and mass teacher layoffs – even as the state legislature claims they have fully funded public education.

Washington’s Paramount Duty has mobilized parents across the state to fight these cuts by pressing legislators for more funds for public schools. We have two main approaches: more funding from the state via a capital gains tax, and restoring some flexibility to local levies.

Unfortunately, some Democratic legislators are blocking both solutions and forcing the cuts to happen. They’ve added poison pill amendments that have derailed a bill to fix the school levy crisis, and are resisting a capital gains tax. And now some, like Senator Mark Mullet, are trying to defend their actions.

Here’s the truth.

To understand this issue, we first need to remember exactly why the McCleary case was filed and what the Supreme Court actually ruled. The Court agreed with the McCleary family that the state was failing to meet its obligation to fully fund public education.

The use of local levies to help districts meet student needs was a symptom of the state’s failure – not the cause. The Court explicitly said it was not ordering any changes at all to the use of local levies for public education. It instead ordered the state to come up with more money for public schools.

So when legislators claim they need to maintain limits on local levies or tighten rules about how they can be spent so as to avoid a “McCleary 2.0″ situation, they are simply wrong and demonstrate they don’t actually understand what the Court ruled. There was no need for the legislature to make any changes at all to local levies in 2017. There is no need for the legislature to limit teacher pay or bargaining rights.

In theory, the levies should be used to supplement the state’s funding of basic education. In reality, the state has rigged the rules so that they never actually fully fund the basics. The state’s definition of “basic education” is so narrow that things we all agree are basic, like librarians and counselors, are still not fully funded in our schools. Local levies have to help fill that gap.

In Seattle, for example, the state’s funding formula is so narrow that it only pays for a nurse less than 1/2 day a week at Northgate Elementary School, which has the highest rate of students on free and reduced lunch in the entire city. The school district must pay for the rest of a nurse from levies. The same is true for other needed specialists at this and numerous other schools across the city and state.

Over the last two years, it has become clear the legislature did not fully fund public education and cut the levies too much. More than two thirds of school districts across the state – urban and rural, large and small, east and west – face big cuts because of those levy caps.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal explained this in the following short video:

Why We Need Public School Levies

In 2018, the Legislature cut $1 billion per year in local voter-approved school levies without approval from voters. This was not mandated by the Supreme Court and must be corrected before the end of the legislative session. Watch Supt. Reykdal explain why.

#WAedu #WAleg #schoolfunding

Posted by Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) on Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Some of the Senators who supported poison pill amendments have made it clear they strongly oppose new, progressive revenue for public education. For example, Senator Mark Mullet emailed his constituents before a March town hall meeting that he firmly opposed any new taxes, including a capital gains tax, even to fund public schools. The State Senate Ways and Means Committee, on which Mullet serves, still has not passed a capital gains tax – and the Senate’s capital gains tax proposal doesn’t even go to public education.

The only thing that would actually cause a “McCleary 2.0″ case is the legislature continuing to fail to fully fund our public schools. The Senators who say they worry about increasing local levies because they want more state funding are often the same ones who block attempts to pass that new state funding.

We have also seen legislators try and claim that the poison pill amendments would not have cut teacher pay. But this is incorrect. The goal of one of the amendments was to slash extra pay teachers receive for duties above and beyond their normal requirements, for extra time, responsibility, and incentive – also known as TRI pay. Many teachers have been able to use the collective bargaining process to get more TRI pay to supplement the state salary structure so they can get something close to a wage that allows them to afford to teach in an increasingly expensive state. This is not a bad thing. Good schools need good teachers, and in our expensive state, teachers need better pay.

As Mark Mullet acknowledged in his Seattle Times op-ed, the amendment was designed to restrict teachers’ ability to negotiate higher TRI pay. The result would have been an average pay cut of $5,000 per teacher in our state. He continues to advocate for cutting educator pay, but not school administrator pay, and for curtailing educators’ collective bargaining rights.

It’s worth remembering that the Supreme Court also ruled, as part of the McCleary case, the state needed to pay teachers enough to attract and retain teachers. Teacher salaries are a state responsibility, but as with other aspects of basic education, the state continues to fail to fully fund the actual cost. Instead they rely on arcane and legalistic definitions that let them claim to the court they’ve fully funded it, even as schools and districts find they don’t actually have the money they need.

Here again, legislators are trying to rig the rules of local levies and teacher pay in order to cover up for their failure to add more state money for public education. They act as if their paramount duty is to keep taxes low on rich people, or cap the state’s education budget. The constitution is instead very clear that their paramount duty is “to make ample provision” for public schools. This isn’t ample. It’s not even sufficient.

The other of the two poison pill amendments would have required the state legislature to hand millions of dollars a year over to charter schools, even as communities across the country are pushing back against the expansion of charter schools. The state still has not fully funded its existing public schools. It is totally inappropriate to add any more money to charter schools until we know that every child is getting an excellent education in our public schools, with the necessary and full state funding to make that possible.

The legislature has two weeks left to stop huge cuts to schools across our state by passing a levy fix, and help fully fund our public schools by passing new, progressive revenue like a capital gains tax. WPD will continue pushing back against misinformation and organizing parents across the state to push the legislature to meet their constitutional and moral obligations to our public schools.