Yet Another Reason Not to Like HB1410 and SB5444

From The Oregonian, via Horse's Ass:

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman gave a far more dire economic forecast in Portland last week than Oregon experts continue to present.

Krugman, a Princeton University economics professor and columnist for The New York Times, predicts — at a minimum — several years of a depressed economy. He calls the recession’s resemblance to the Great Depression “extremely frightening” and finds new signs of collapsing global trade shocking.

That vision starkly contradicts the opinions of Oregon economists, who generally predict the economy will bottom out this year and begin recovery in 2010. The discrepancy is partly philosophical, but could also reflect pressures on local economists to avoid presenting nightmare scenarios.

Making wholesale changes in the education system with the promise of future funding is a stupid thing to do when there's a very real chance that the 2010 legislative session could be just as difficult as this one is and 2011 may be flat.

I understand what the League of Education Voters is getting at, that this really could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink how we do the entire system. What I see is one long series of expensive changes without a financing mechanism to make them happen, and that's the poison pill that should give any one of our legislators enough reason to vote no.

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BEFTF Watching Party In My Hizzee, Yo.

Really interested to see what comes out of the Basic Ed Finance Task Force in these next two days. I've read through the draft recommendations, and it looks like the group lead by Rep. Ross Hunter is carrying the day, but we will see. The piece that could be the most profound change is to see what comes of the changes to collective bargaining that Dan Grimm has been championing.

This week it's the Basic Ed Finance report; next week it will be the Governor's budget proposal. The Christmas "holiday" would be a good time to watch the list of prefiled bills, and on January 12th the Legislature convenes. I'm also looking forward to seeing the various legislative previews come out of the professional organizations, namely Washington Association of School Administrators and the State School Director's Association.

It's going to be a hell of a session to watch. I wonder if Postman and Mullick have any regrets about bailing?

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The Hardest Working Man in Washington Education Award: Jim Kowalkowski

He's the director of the Rural Education Center at Washington State University.
He's one of the Superintendents on the Basic Education Finance Task Force that's currently looking at how to overhaul the whole ed finance system here in Washington.
And in his spare time he's Superintendent of the Davenport School District, which is currently trying to get community support for a project to build an expansion on to their elementary school.

I wish I had that sort of energy.

Update (11/29): He's also become an unstoppable man/machine amalgamation, according to the most recent Davenport Times, which unfortunately isn't online. Jim Kowalkowslki is the Lawnmower Man.

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The Work of the School Funding Taskforce

I am a total school policy nerd.

Oh yes. I tape legislative hearings off of TV Washington and watch them in my spare time. It's educational, it gives a good sense of where school reform in Washington might go, and it's a cheaper hobby than most. Recently it's been the work of the Joint Committee on Basic Education Finance, also called the Grimm Committee (after it's chair) by some who don't think it'll accomplish much.

So I'm sitting here working on my term paper on the effects of full day Kindergarten, the satellite won't work because it's covered in ice, and I think to myself, "Self, let's work on the paper AND blog about the tape of the committee hearing! Multi-tasking, baby!" So that's what I'm doing--let's see what nuggets we can find!

(Sidebar 1: If you're interested, I'm talkign about the November 19th committee meeting here. You can access it off of TV Washington.)

(Sidebar 2: I've got a bit of self-interest in this as well. This week I'll be attending a dinner with Dan Grimm, the chair of the committee, so I'd like to be able to make some informed comments when I meet with the man.)

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To start this day of the hearings John Ahearne, a lawyer with the Network for Excellence in Washington Schools (NEWS), prepares to give a presentation on his side of the school funding debate. Last meeting they heard someone who has fought for the state side in some of the lawsuits, so this is the fair and balanced piece.

Chairman Grimm really isn't interested. He lets Laura Bay of the Washington State PTA say her piece, but after she's done she reminds the other speakers there representing NEWS that he really wanted to hear about the legal side of school funding, not take the sort of testimony that had already been had during Washington Learns. The representatives from the League of Women Voters and the Urban League for Metropolitan Seattle burn through their time, and then it's turned back over to Mr. Ahearne to give his presentation.

It's a good talk, too, and I would encourage anyone with an interest in school finance in Washington to download his powerpoint from the committee website and follow along on TVW while he gives his presentation. He identifies some key principals that should be understood about funding:

1. No other state constitution has a stronger education mandate than our state constitution. This is the much-discussed "paramount duty" clause (Article 9, Section 1 of the Washington State Constitution) that every group from the WEA to the WASA has used to urge increased school spending.
   
   
2. Article 9 Section 1 is mandatory and imposes a judicially enforceable affirmative duty. This is why we've had events like the Doran Decisions on school funding, the Federal Way lawsuit, etc.
   
   
3. "Paramount" means "paramount." In his presentation Mr. Ahearne gives a dictionary definition of paramount as being "superior to all others." If we believe that the paramount duty of the state is education, then it follows that education should get all the funding it needs before any other need of the state. I'm not sure I agree with this, but it is what it is.
   
   
4. "Ample" means "ample." Here the argument is that ample means more than adequate, not just enough to get by. Former Spokane area journalist Tom Boyer has also made that point in a statement for the WEA, discussing how his new home in Pennsylvania has a "culture of abundance" compared to Washington.
   
   
5. "All" means "all." I don't know that there's necessarily a fight over this point, but I would suggest that WAETAG might want to try arguing that the gifted kids aren't getting an ample education experience the way things are now, and thus we aren't serving "all" the way we could.
   
   
6. "Education" means substantive content beyond mere reading, writing, and arithmetic. Here Mr. Ahearne made the point that the judicial interpretation of the paramount duty clause has been that education goes well beyond mere basics, covering civics, critical thinking, and the ability to find success in the labor market as well.

Mr. Ahearne's 7th principle actually had four points attached to it, so I'll break it off into another post for another day. There's also a piece coming up about just how many education studies and task forces we've endured in Washington in the past 30 years, which is a point that Representative Skip Priest has been pushing for a while now.

Stay tuned!

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