COMMENTARY

February 5, 2004

Governor Locke calls for $1 billion annually in new education spending

Today Governor Gary Locke will announce a proposal to increase the state sales tax by nearly 15.4% to raise an additional $1 billion per year for education spending. The governor, using the visual power of his office, waited until the last few days possible to introduce a proposal that has little chance of staying alive because of the compressed legislative timetable. It is no coincidence that at his side will be advocates of a taxpayer initiative to increase education spending. The premise of today’s announcement is that student academic achievement will increase if we spend more money on education.

If we could significantly increase student learning by spending more money, most of the children in our state would be highly literate by now. The legislature and taxpayers have increased spending by up to 13% (inflation adjusted) during this past ten years and the academic results have been very disappointing. Besides, we’re spending money in the wrong places in education, so directing more of it to the same wrong places won’t help.

Currently, Washington state allocates somewhere between $8,600 and $9,400 per student—state officials don’t seem to know the exact number. Much of that money never makes it to the classroom. Some of our lowest performing schools in the state receive the highest per student allocations, such as T.T.Minor in Seattle that averages more than $10,000 per child per year.

Advocates of increased spending insist they want measurable outcomes, but they have been saying this since the early days of education reform. At the insistence of education “experts,” we have spent billions recreating academic expectations, realigning curriculum and assessments around those expectations, training and retraining teachers, allocating money to reduce class sizes, etc.

Also at their insistence, we have refused to purge the system of poor teachers and pay more money to good teachers. We have made schools larger and more institutionalized. At what point do we admit that the intentions were good, but didn’t pan out.

Our current education system is bulky, cranky, inefficient and expensive. It issues mandates and dictates policies that make no sense. It is mostly unaccountable. For the sake of the children we purport to care so much about, why do we tolerate this?

Our society’s survival depends on a literate citizenry. It depends on young people who are equipped to participate in and help create our country’s economic, political and cultural future. We risk losing another generation to educational mediocrity or worse because this governor and many lawmakers are more willing to protect the institution of education than the students who are warehoused within it.

Contact: Lynn Harsh | Senior Education Analyst | 360.956.3482

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org