With every election and every legislative session, we the voters are responsible for getting the schools we want for Washington’s students, writes guest columnist Lisa Macfarlane.
By Lisa Macfarlane
EVERY candidate lists education as a top issue, so how do you find out who shares your values about opportunity and equity in Washington state schools? How do you tell whether a candidate has the leadership qualities to help change the education conversation in Olympia?
When candidates show up at your door or when you have a chance to ask a question at a forum, ask what was most important to them when their children were in school. Chances are it was that their kids had great teachers every year, in a safe place and left school with every opportunity to succeed. Parents desperately want that for their kids.
Then ask the candidates what they would do to ensure that each and every child gets those same opportunities. And finally, ask them how they propose to pay for the improvements our state schools need.
Heaven knows change is needed. It has been more than two years since the state Supreme Court ruled in the case that the Legislature has failed to fund the expanded definition of basic education that it adopted in 2010. Now, the court is holding the state in contempt for its ongoing violation of its constitutional duty “to make ample provision for the education of all children.”
That is the “paramount duty” of the state, as written in the state’s Constitution, and it is a duty that is not being honored.
Current legislators are the only ones who can solve the funding problem because they write the state budget, but they certainly are not the only ones who created the mess. Every legislator and governor who has served in the last 30 years shares some of the blame, as they forced local taxpayers to pay an ever-increasing share of the state’s obligation with inequitable and undependable special school levies.
With every election and every legislative session, we the voters are responsible for getting the schools we want for Washington’s students. If we want more opportunities for each and every child, then we must insist on them.
As a former juvenile court public defender, I feel a fierce urgency to do better, much better, by the children who are growing up in our region.
Ask legislators to make policy and funding decisions based on what is best for our students, rather than letting stand the preferences of special interests that have been woven into existing state policies.
Ask the candidates how they would amply provide for the education of our children — and how they would do so without cutting early learning and higher education. Ask the candidates whether they would avoid cutting the social services that families need to thrive and children need to come to school ready to learn.
According to the nonprofit Thrive by Five, less than four percent of public investment in education and child development occurs during the first three years — the time when children’s brains grow the fastest and the most.
At the other end of the educational ladder, career and technical schools, community colleges, four-year colleges and universities open doors of opportunity for Washington residents, and help drive our 21st-century economy.
Unfortunately, the state has shifted the cost of public higher education onto students. In 1990, the state covered 82 percent of what it cost the University of Washington to educate an undergraduate; in 2014, it will cover just 30 percent.
The state’s representatives, senators and governor are facing a brutally difficult legislative session. They need the voters’ help and our engagement. Fixing the finance system for state schools when the underlying tax structure is broken will be impossible without strong public support. Voters need to elect legislators who can educate and persuade the public that public schools are an essential and urgently needed investment.
What the state does not need is a revenue patch-job from legislators that ends up on the ballot and is rejected by voters. What will the Supreme Court do then? Hold the voters in contempt?
More is possible. It is time to raise the public’s ambitions and investments for the sake of our children, their futures and the future of our democracy.
Lisa Macfarlane is the Washington state director of Democrats for Education Reform and the co-founder of the League of Education Voters. She sponsored education-funding initiatives in 2000 and 2004.
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