Opinion - Whatcom View

POSTED: Monday, Nov. 17, 2008

Panel wants education funding taken seriously

The mediocre record of success for government task forces is so ingrained that even members of task forces begin to question their effectiveness.

During last week's meeting of the state Basic Education Finance Task Force, several members said they hope their report doesn't end up on a shelf, that it not become yet another futile attempt to find consensus.

Task forces, after all, make recommendations; legislators make policy. And if legislators had the means and interest to solve big problems, they probably wouldn't give the task to a task force in the first place.

This one, however, has a few things going for it. First, a lawsuit out of Federal Way will force the Legislature to deal with some weird district-by-district differences in school funding.

Second, it has a chairman, Dan Grimm, who wrote budgets as House Ways and Means Committee chairman and knows the politics behind the current system. He has taken on the role of provocateur - challenging conventional politics.

Finally, it has some of the Legislature's most pragmatic members. A bipartisan group of six lawmakers has been applying some new thinking to persistent problems.

More money? Sure. But in return, the group - sometimes known as the Big 6 - wants to simplify the funding system and look at different rewards and punishments to get better performance out of schools.

They would base pay on surveys of other workers in each region with similar education and skills. They would offer more pay for math, science and special education teachers who have been harder to find (perhaps the most controversial element).

And they would offer bonuses to all staff members in schools that perform well (perhaps the second-most controversial element).

Last week, the task force began making decisions, slowly.

"We now begin the exciting part of the process," is how Grimm put it.

Continuing next week, it will tackle issues such as teacher pay, collective bargaining, merit pay, differential pay, performance measures, and the difference between state funding and levies.

It will then write a report and hope the next session of the Legislature isn't too distracted by budget shortfalls and a looming recession.

Some of the discussion surrounded the relationship between better funding from the state and what the state could expect from schools in return. Most proposals have measurements and some intervention for schools that don't measure up.

At one point, Rep. Ross Hunter, D-Medina, asked fellow task force member Jim Kowalkowski what should happen if a school continued to fail after getting more help from the state. Kowalkowski, the superintendent of the Davenport School District, is part of the Full Funding Coalition - made up of the associations of school board members, superintendents, principals and unions, including the Washington Education Association.

After saying that the details of the plan would come from experts in those organizations, Kowalkowski said: "If that would eventually involve a takeover by the state, then that's what it has to be."

"I don't think your experts are going to say that," Hunter said.

They didn't. The coalition's proposal focuses primarily on getting more money into school districts and increasing pay for teachers and staff. It pays for it by getting more out of the state's share of the property tax and devoting at least half of any growth in state spending to education.

Grimm, during a break, said such growth may not occur for awhile. In fact, the mostly unspoken word hanging over task force meetings is "deficit." That is, there won't be any new money to spend, and there will be cuts to many state programs next session.

Any funding gains may be phased in over six or eight years, long enough to see an economic recovery. At least they hope it's long enough.

Peter Callaghan writes for The News Tribune in Tacoma.