WANTED: Knight In Shining Armor

Last Thursday evening I packed Simon into the car with a bag full of Captain Underpants books and and an iPod loaded with Simpsons episodes and headed up to Magnolia to a meeting of the Seattle Council PTSA. These fine people, along with the League of Education Voters, had arranged for Speaker of the House Frank Chopp to come talk to us about funding the education reform bill passed by the Washington State Legislature this year.

A quick recap: this would be House Bill 2261, which grew out of the recommendations of the Basic Education Finance Task Force -- remember them? The bill’s authors sought to increase education spending by 50% and make it more transparent, equitable, flexible, and accountable. The League of Education Voters and the PTA supported HB2261, but the teachers unions, fearing unspecified changes to compensation & evaluation, hated it. The split was bitter & ugly, and in some cases personal: one of the teachers at our school refused his latte on Teacher Appreciation Day because our PTA had urged parents to support the bill. (Note to self: What happens when people on both sides of a complex issue attempt to simplify their message enough to get their busy, distracted constituents to actually pick up the phone and call their legislators? Strident, polarizing sound bites, that’s what.)

Clearly there were problems with the bill, but it seemed to me that on balance it was better than nothing. A step forward, at least. Which, if followed by many more steps forward -- along with several billion dollars -- could eventually lead to a functional system for delivering adequate resources to Washington’s schools. (If you’re not up to speed on the current dysfunctional system & inadequate resources, try going here.)

Since HB2261 passed, I have been wondering if maybe the teachers were right, and the whole “pave the way for more funding later by making these reforms now” argument was a red herring, or a charade. Or worse, a Trojan horse, poised to spring a punitive, soul-killing, test-based “accountability” system upon our beleaguered schools, but not any more money. (For the record: yes, accountability is a good thing, and yes, it can be done badly. HB2261 sets up working groups to develop detailed proposals on teacher compensation & evaluation, which will hopefully provide an opportunity to get the teachers’ concerns addressed. And hopefully not too much room for further punting & inaction.) I have also been scrabbling around for a clue as to how to get going on the really obviously critical next step: funding.

Because really, I think we can all agreed that the giant hole in this bill is money. HB2261 expands the definition of Basic Education -- which the state is obligated to pay for by law -- by upping instructional hours, making kindergarten full-day, and increasing the credits required for high school graduation. But it does not identify a source of revenue to pay for these new requirements. (Instead, in a particularly galling bit of boilerplate, it declares, "basic education shall be considered to be fully funded by those amounts of dollars appropriated by the legislature.") And in fact the legislature, facing a $9 billion hole in the budget, actually cut school funding by $1.5 billion this year.

Now, I may be tragically naïve (one teacher told me pityingly, “You were lied to.”), but I believe that the people who wrote HB2261 intended and expected it to lead to more funding. They wanted to use this crisis moment to deal with the problems that have made it hard to fully fund schools even in good years, and made many of our well-intentioned band-aid fixes backfire or flounder. They hoped to create a simpler system with public support, that would give future legislatures no choice but to expand education funding as the economy recovers. That was the idea, anyway.

And so -- getting back to last Thursday -- I was eager to hear what Frank Chopp had to say about the prospects for finding more money for schools. Not now, I know, but soon -- maybe even before the 2018 deadline set in HB2261. So while Simon (who will be entering his senior year of high school in 2018) watched the Simpsons on a 2" screen, I listened and took notes. Here’s the scoop, friends:

Frank Chopp is personable enough, but it’s clear he’s not going to take the lead on this issue. His presentation was a combination of supportive clichés, slightly defensive admonishments, and painful pragmatism. “I’m for what works,” he said, several times. Which is all well and good, but it’s a far cry from “Yes We Can!”

He said that our first order of business must be to avert further disaster by defeating Initiative 1033, Tim Eyman’s latest effort to hobble our state’s budget process (this one’s a doozy, folks). And if we survive that, we can then go on to fight tooth & nail to wrestle $400 million away from a street fund here, and carve out $250 million in new revenue there -- small steps which could eventually restore the $1.5 billion in cuts (If I-1033 doesn’t make them permanent, that is). And then we can start working on the increases needed to fund HB2261.

Chopp advised us to make a compelling, human case for the positive value of education, rather than coming at the public with a request for “more money for schools.” He reminded us that budgeting is a competitive process, where every request for funds has to be contrasted with the needs of others. “Sure, fixing streets is important. But is it more important than educating our children?” “Give your message some urgency,” he said, citing a pamphlet he’d seen promoting an effort to clean up Puget Sound. “Unfortunately, it had a very nice picture of Puget Sound on it,” he joked. “Where’s the urgency there?”

I’m learning to move beyond the nagging question of why we have to do all this case-making and bargaining and plundering other programs and gathering up little drops in our various buckets, when it says right there in the constitution that the state’s paramount duty is to make ample provision for the education of all children. And I’m reconciled -- almost -- to the idea that somehow it has to fall to exhausted parents and overworked teachers to justify the work of our schools, rather than the people we have elected to represent us in Olympia. (You mean this isn’t your job, Speaker Chopp?)

See, we parents tend to forget that education is just one of many things our state has to pay for, and that there are people out there who actually oppose more funding for schools -- or anything else, for that matter. Before Chopp spoke, Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles told us about an income tax proposal that would have affected only those who earn upwards of half a million dollars a year; it died in committee this year after 5,000 anti-tax protesters showed up on the capitol steps. Five thousand people? As Heidi Bennett pointed out, "the PTA is thrilled if we can get five hundred people to show up at our rallies." I don’t believe we are the minority on this issue, but from the where Frank Chopp sits, we appear to be. Why should he lead us into battle?

So it seems we have to make that compelling, human case for education spending -- with urgency. The whole urgency thing is a delicate matter, though. If we say, for instance, “Look at our pathetic graduation rate!” (69% statewide, 62% in Seattle), people may think, “Wow, that is pathetic!” You can almost hear Tim Eyman sneering: “And these people want more money!?”

At first glance it’s all too easy to attribute the failures to incompetence, or bureaucratic dysfunction, rather than to chronic underfunding. But I’m convinced adequate, stable funding would alleviate most (though not all) of the bonehead maneuvers perpetrated by Seattle Public Schools. Remarkable things happen in our schools, despite the lack of funding. Think what those hardworking, devoted teachers and principals could do for our kids if they weren't constantly dodging budgetary bullets. But we have to do a way better job of explaining where all the money goes, and why it hurts so much when it goes away.

An example: someone asked School Board President Michael DeBell (who was also at the meeting, bless his heart) what SPS would do with more money if they had it. “Er,” he stammered, “Well, we would implement our Strategic Plan…” Now, I have read the district’s Strategic Plan ("Excellence for All," it’s called: who could argue with that?) and there’s good stuff in there for sure -- mentoring teachers & principals, supporting struggling schools & students, better math & science curricula. Unfortunately much of it sounds like this: Develop a school performance framework. Implement effective performance evaluations. Develop budget protocols to ensure efficiency. Deepen project management skills to improve execution of district strategies. These are no doubt useful things to do, and might even lead to better experiences and results for kids in the classrooms. But they don’t exactly put a compelling, human face on school funding, do they? Tax payers are not going to open their wallets and hand over their hard-earned dough so we can improve execution of district strategies.

We need some PR ideas, here, folks. The LEV does this sort of thing -- like their "Ready For Life" campaign. Only we need a message that explicitly makes the link -- which Tim Eyman’s campaigns seem to have severed in many people’s minds -- between taxes and services. Between school funding and what goes on in our kids’ classrooms.

Say you stood a kid in front of us, a regular kid. And started to describe this child’s educational needs: A talented, experienced teacher. Books and supplies. A librarian. Extra help with math after school. A school nurse. Healthy lunch and snacks. Art and music teachers. PE, ESL services, field trips, guidance counselors, whatever. And as you’re talking, all these adults are walking in and standing around the kid, and wheeling in microscopes and computers and piles of books and stuff. And then when the kid is standing there surrounded by all the people and things s/he needs to get a fabulous education, you start to describe the recent budget cuts. And one by one the people walk away, and the books vanish, and so on. Until the student and teacher are standing there looking at each other, a little stunned. And then 35 other kids appear all around the teacher (as you explain about increasing class sizes), and then they all look out at us.

That’s one idea. What’s yours?