Time for a Leap

This morning after an Orca Space Team meeting (six moms tossing around exciting, exhausting ideas for murals and mosaics and benches and arbors and banners and so on while their kids ate bagels, raced each other around the library on rolling chairs, and finally settled down to watch "Night at the Museum" on the laptop about ten minutes before it was time to leave), Melissa and I piled our kids into our cars and hauled them down to Olympia for the Basic Education Finance Task Force's big press conference:


I know, I know -- Thrill-O-Rama. Sigh. It did strike us that a few 12-year-olds in ballgowns might have injected some much needed pizazz into the proceedings.

Still, it was kind of thrilling for us, frankly. This is the Task Force charged with redefining the "basic education" our state should be funding ("amply" according to the constitution), and figuring out how to pay for it. After eighteen months of research and discussion, they have come up with a plan that completely restructures our state's education finance system -- making it more transparent, equitable, flexible, and accountable -- and proposes a 50% - 75% increase in school funding, to be phased in over six years.

Naturally that last bit doesn't pass what one representative called "the straight face test" in the current budget climate (the state is $6 billion in the hole, and counting). But as others on the panel said so eloquently, more money actually isn't the most important part of this legislation. The problem goes deeper than that: even during recent flush times, we haven't found the will to fund education in our state adequately, let alone amply. What we're trying to do here is fix our broken system so that when more resources are available, we can increase funding for schools. With a straight face. And with confidence that it will be used wisely, to teach our kids the things they need to know.

This is a big, ambitious plan with lots of interlocking pieces -- I hear the House bill is 111 pages long. (A four-page summary is available here, if you're interested.) I am not in a position to analyze the many sweeping changes being proposed here, but what I have seen and heard makes a lot of sense to me. The Task Force's bills -- House Bill 1410 and Senate Bill 5444 -- are now working their way through the legislative process: committee hearings, amendments, etc. If you can, please call or e-mail your legislators and urge them to do whatever then can to get this plan enacted. And then call them again in a month or so to see how things are going. (Don't worry, I'll remind you.)

Important as all this is, the press conference didn't exactly outshine the riveting drama of, say, "Night at the Museum." By the time it was over, our patient children had more than earned a little treat, so we took them to the cafeteria and indulged their Dorito & SoBe fixations. Then we gave them a mini-tour of the Capitol, which mostly involved looking up at the gorgeous inside of the dome:



and then down at the empty House Chamber.


We overheard a guide telling someone that the aisle separating the Democrats from the Republicans is exactly two sword-lengths wide, because it is based on the design of England's Parliament -- which dates back to a time when, apparently, opposing Members had to be physically separated in order to keep their legislative disagreements from ending in bloodshed. This little anecdote certainly caught the wandering attention of certain members of our party, who had so far been somewhat unimpressed with the spectacle of Lawmaking in Olympia.

And then it was time to go home. We stopped at the Bread Peddler for a coffee and some pastries for the road, and then headed north on I-5 at a slightly statelier pace than we had come south on it earlier. On the way back we visited Robert Morris's Johnson Pit #30, an earthwork in Tukwila that our friend David Perk turned us on to a few years ago. It seemed like a suitable setting to debrief our experience, somehow.


I've always kind of wondered -- and sometimes even regretted -- that Morris chose to shape this piece as concentric rings instead of a spiral sloping gradually down to the floor of the pit. The journey to the bottom and back out again always feels slightly awkward and disjointed, as you make your way around each level's rim to the place where the narrow wooden staircase takes you down -- or up -- the steep slope to the next one. It often makes me think of something Truman Capote wrote in "The Grass Harp":

I've read that past and future are a spiral, one coil containing the next and predicting its theme. Perhaps this is so; but my own life has seemed to me more a series of closed circles, rings that do not evolve with the freedom of a spiral: for me to get from one to the other has meant a leap, not a glide. What weakens me is the lull between, the wait before I know where to jump.

Today this image -- which I normally associate with tortured personal transitions -- seemed fittingly applied to our efforts to reform school funding. Our system has not managed to evolve to meet the social, educational, and financial changes and challenges of the last twenty years. Instead we have glided into a downward spiral of failure and finger-pointing that is crushing our most vulnerable children. Incremental tinkering will not get us where we need to go on this one, folks. And the longer the lull, the weaker we'll be when we finally decide that it's time to make the leap.