Referendum 55 and Initiative 884 Have Failes, So What Can We Do about Education?
2004-22
On November 2, 2004, Washington voters made one thing clear to policymakers with regards to education: make it work with what you’ve got.
During the 2004 Legislative Session, lawmakers approved and Governor Locke signed a bill authorizing the creation of 45 charter schools over six years. These schools would be independent public schools exempt from many of the burdensome state and federal regulations that govern traditional public schools. Opponents of the bill gathered enough signatures to force the measure on to the November 2004 ballot. Voters then rejected Referendum 55, thus vetoing charter schools, by 58% to 42%. It was the third time Washington voters rejected charter school ballot measures.
On the same day, voters defeated Initiative 884. This measure would have increased the state sales tax rate from 6.5% to 7.5%. Generated revenue would have been placed in an education trust fund. Of the $1 billion that the tax increase was projected to raise annually, $500 million would have gone to K-12 education, $400 million to higher (post-secondary) education, and $100 million to preschool education. Supporters of I-884 argued that all of these areas are under-funded. This measure would have made Washington’s sales tax the highest in the nation, and voters rejected it soundly by 60% to 40%.
Most Washingtonians today believe that the state’s education system needs fixing. Student performance is down, and teachers complain of low pay for long hours worked. Both R-55 and I-884 were heralded by their respective supporters as necessary reforms to the system, and yet both failed.
The message from the voting booth is that state lawmakers and administrators need to fix the education system, not move away from it or simply pour additional funding into it.
But what do we currently have? Washington has a public education system that spends more than $9 billion per year on K-12 education alone. That comes down to approximately $9,500 per student per year. The majority of K-12 public employees are not teachers but administrators and other workers. Washington also spends more than $3.5 billion on four-year university and community/technical college education. Between 1970 and 2003, public K-12 and higher education enrollment increased by 29%, from just under one million to 1.3 million students. During the same time period, the state’s population nearly doubled. The result has been a steadily growing tax base supporting a comparatively stable number of students.
Given the numbers, one would expect that the per-capita cost of education in Washington would have decreased between 1970 and 2003. Instead, Washington continues to spend more per-capita dollars each year on education. For example, between 1980 and 2000, state and local spending on K-12 education increased by 94% in inflation-adjusted dollars. We spend and we spend, and supporters of I-884 wanted us to spend even more.
For the 2005-07 biennium, proposed state general fund spending is projected to be $1.8 billion more than will be collected from citizens in taxes. Now is not the time for the education system to ask for more money in the form of higher taxes. It is, however, time for the state to consider some meaningful cost-saving reforms. The following are some sound, practical policy changes that will free more money to improve education without raising taxes.
Competitively contract services not essential to classroom instruction
Less than 40% of the 100,000 K-12 employees in Washington are teachers, and in 2002-03 only 42% of the education operating budget went towards classroom instruction. In 2001-03 the state’s universities spent nearly $210 million on physical plant operations alone. Private companies and contractors could provide schools in Washington with routine services such as maintenance and bookkeeping at a much lower cost, as has been the case in other states. The state’s schools would then be able to focus on their core mission: educating students.
In 2002-03, the state spent more than $1.1 billion on K-12 employee benefits. Offering tax-free individual health savings accounts (HSAs) backed by low-cost, high-deductible catastrophic insurance as an alternative to the current restrictive and expensive health benefits system would reduce costs significantly for school districts and give employees greater control over their own health care dollars.
In rejecting R-55, voters said no to charter schools, but they may be open to the streamlined operations such schools enjoy. Right now school principals have no control over three things: their budget, hiring, and firing. The Common School Manual, containing the regulations all principals in Washington state must follow, is over two inches thick and one thousand pages long. While the central mission of each school is the same – educating students – each district and each school face different demographic circumstances that require unique responses. Common sense reforms would allow the sort of decentralized autonomy necessary for such responses, an autonomy that the current education structure does not allow.
It is almost impossible for principals to replace low-performing teachers. Using fair and objective measures of job performance, principals should be given the authority to hire, fire, and promote teachers, and be held accountable for the quality of their teaching staff.
The current pay schedule rewards teachers based solely on seniority and training level. The pay schedule should be changed to reward and retain top-performing teachers and attract talented teachers to high-need schools.
These are just a few of the sensible changes that could make the state’s public education system more cost-efficient and more effective at educating students. That is what Washingtonians want, and just throwing more money into the current system is not going to achieve those goals.
R-55 and I-884 have come and gone, but the problems they were meant to address are still with us. Washington’s lawmakers and administrators now have an opportunity to affect serious, meaningful reforms that will benefit students, teachers, and taxpayers. That is what we should do, and it is what we can do.