This morning, Crosscut posted Chris Vance’s commentary on the end of the legislative session and the next steps in the separation of powers fight between the Legislature and the Supreme Court in the ongoing McCleary case.
Commentary: Court will have a big say on Legislature’s school shortcomings
Vance sets up the coming storm:
Despite all the momentous and commendable policy decisions they made this year, legislators, by their own admission, failed to comply with the state Supreme Court’s order that they adopt a plan showing how they will achieve full state funding of basic education by 2018. And they adopted a budget that actually increases the unconstitutional reliance on local levies. So now all eyes turn to the Court. Will they take action to force lawmakers back to Olympia to deal with education funding?
He spends much of the op-ed crediting Republicans in the Legislature for the reforms and budget solutions, and then returns to McCleary. Vance correctly points out what I’ve been preaching for some time, that very few, including those in the Legislature, appreciate the profound nature of the constitutional issues involved in this case:
As I wrote earlier this year, despite the fact that this issue has been percolating for decades very few people seem to really grasp what the McCleary decision is all about. This was a common observation among education lobbyists throughout the 2015 session.
Vance gives us a nice, concise review of the details of the case:
So let’s review McCleary:
The Washington State Constitution says it is the state’s “paramount duty” to “amply fund” a “uniform” system of public schools.
Our per-pupil expenditures are among the lowest in the nation. That’s not ample. And school districts rely on local levies for up to one-third of their funding. Given the disparities in local wealth and levy funds among districts, that’s not uniform.
The original, 2012 McCleary decision directed the state to fund a new “prototypical school model” by 2018 without the use of levies. The Court didn’t pull this order out of thin air; they were simply directing the Legislature to actually fund the education model, and meet the timelines legislators themselves established when they passed House Bill 2261 in 2009.
Then, Vance captures the real issues in the case better than any other story I’ve seen to date:
Little progress was made during the 2012 and 2013 sessions so the court justices ordered the Legislature to show them a specific, detailed, “complete” plan in 2014 for achieving full funding by 2018. The 2014 Legislature failed to adopt such a plan. The court found the state in contempt but withheld sanctions until after the 2015 session. But the Legislature, once again, did not pass a McCleary plan this year.
Why is this so difficult? Because actually meeting the court’s order will require billions of new dollars over and above what the Legislature has already spent. And doing away with levies for basic education will impact local bargaining, potentially changing dramatically how we govern our schools.
Yes, the Legislature has put roughly $2 billion more into our schools in the past two budgets. Lawmakers have reduced class sizes in grades K-3, and put money into all-day kindergarten and school transportation, materials and operating costs. But that is just the beginning of the state’s obligation.
There are still thousands of teachers and other educational staff who derive some or all of their compensation from local levies. That’s unconstitutional. The state must pay 100 percent of the compensation for basic education. In addition, the prototypical school model referred to by the court includes lower class sizes in grades 4-12, and the hiring of thousands more paraeducators, administrators, counselors and support staff. The total additional cost to fully implement the model without local levies is over $5 billion per year.
So the Legislature has to find a funding source to replace levies and increase overall education spending by billions of dollars. Ideas have been floated and bills introduced, but to this point there has been no political will to engage in serious bipartisan, bicameral negotiations on this huge issue.
Similarly, there is no consensus on how to limit the use of levies and change education governance. The powerful Washington Education Association, which represents teachers, is adamantly opposed to a law undermining local bargaining, but if you can’t use levies to fund basic compensation, what is there to bargain over locally?
Folks, the Court’s expectation is not simply that the Legislature appropriate a certain amount of new money to K-12, whether in 2015 or by 2018. The Supreme Court expects, in addition to those funding targets, a dedicated revenue source for K-12 and a solution to the levy issue. The Legislature might not ever be able to deliver on this expectation, not in 2015 nor by 2018.
Vance wraps up his op-ed:
The 2015 Legislature put more money into K-12, but it made no progress on these daunting structural issues and the legislators have no plan to show the court. In fact, four years after the original McCleary decision, the State of Washington still has no plan for how to create a constitutional educational funding system.
What will the state Supreme Court do? No one knows. But a common belief in Olympia is that the court must now take some sort of action, and that action will most likely result in lawmakers returning to work for a fourth special session sometime this year. A decision from the court seems likely before Labor Day.
So will the 2015 Legislature be remembered for achieving remarkable bipartisan progress on transportation and higher education, or for failing to avoid a messy constitutional showdown over education funding? Stay tuned. We’re not done yet.
Excellent analysis by Vance. But the real issue here, and one that no one seems eager to focus on . . . yet, is whether the Supreme Court is stepping beyond the constitutional limits on its authority. That’s a bigger question that I’ll take up in a later post.