The Seattle Times Has Bipolar Disorder

On their Ed Cetera blog the Seattle Times has got a post up looking at the draft report from the Basic Ed Finance Task Force. We love it, sez the Times, because

The reports - there is the main one, a minority report by former lawmaker Dan Grimm and an assortment of add-ons by other education groups - all make the case for a sizeable increase in education funding. The money would come from tying future state budget growth to public education. It is a far-reaching proposal that could return K-12 funding to 50 percent of the general fund, rather than the current 35 percent.

Hooray for money! This is far more progressive than what that other stupid paper, The Seattle Times, said two weeks ago:

Cancel the Initiative 728 money, or most of it. Officially this is for class-size reduction in the public schools, but the schools have folded it into everyday operations. Cutting I-728 money was done in 2003, when the budget was in a crisis, and has to be done again. That is the danger of budgeting by initiative.

I guess the trick is that if you cut the state budget enough then education would get back up to 50% by default, but that would also make it impossible to implement any of the ideas that the Grimm Commission has put forward.

In a related story, if I win this auction from Strangercrombie, I'm totally going to have Eli Sanders write me a long, thoughtful story about school district consolidation in Washington State and why it would be a good thing.