Opinion - Top opinion

POSTED: Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008

Education funding should not have to rely on logging

In a more rational world, the Lake Whatcom Landscape Plan would be less controversial and no school district would have had to scramble for a slightly larger piece of a clearly inadequate pie. Nor would anyone try to tie the future of education - which seems likely to become more and more important - to the future of logging - which does not.

The Lake Whatcom plan would be less controversial because:

- Although the lands granted to Washington by the federal government must generate money for schools and other public institutions, I believe they don't have to do so exclusively, to the detriment of environmental and other values.

Article XVI of the Washington constitution states: "All the public lands granted to the state are held in trust for all the people." That must mean something. Do you think the framers of our constitution really wanted the state to endanger a municipal water supply or the safety of its citizens in order to squeeze a few more bucks from timber that people of their era wouldn't have bothered cutting?

- The framers of the constitution did not expect those granted lands to produce maximum revenue.

They received two petitions asking them to require maximum revenue. The framers of other state constitutions did. Ours didn't.

- Certainly, no one expects the granted lands to produce maximum revenue right now. A Chelan County Superior Court said unambiguously that "nothing in the law . . . requires the Department (of Natural Resources) to maximize current income."

- Forest board lands are a different story, of course - just not quite the story that some people assume. Net income from those lands must go to local government, but generating money for local government isn't the purpose of the lands, The purpose is growing trees.

You can look it up. The 1921 law allowing the state to take over forest lands from the counties said its purpose was to further the "acquirement [sic] and designation of lands . . . to be used for the development and growth of timber." A similar law passed two years later referred to "the acquiring, seeding, reforestation and administering of lands for state forests."

Even in the good old days, the forests have never fully supported public schools. Washington's forests made a lot of people rich, but they never made Washington public schools rich.

And neither has anything else. This state has never managed to put its money where its mouth is. No one knows what the framers of the Washington constitution meant when they said it was the "paramount duty" of the state to make "ample provision" for public education (no other state constitution says anything like that), but in 1978 the state Supreme Court - faced with a school funding crisis - decided to take the words at face value. The court said the Legislature had to pay for basic education. Unfortunately, it let the Legislature define basic education. The legislature has used that discretion to shirk its clear duty.

State funding keeps going up, but it doesn't keep pace with costs, societal expectations or a growing list of unfunded - or partially-funded - mandates.

The historian of American education Diane Ravitch has observed: "Probably no other idea has seemed more typically American than the belief that schooling could cure society's ills. Whether in the early nineteenth century or the late twentieth century, Americans have argued for more schooling on the grounds that it would preserve democracy, eliminate poverty, lower the crime rate, enrich the common culture, reduce unemployment, ease the assimilation of immigrants to the nation, overcome differences between ethnic groups, advance scientific and technological progress, prevent traffic accidents, raise health standards, refine moral character, and guide young people into useful occupations."

Americans still want schools to accomplish a whole laundry list of things. They just don't want to pay for it.

Just about every Washington school district is scrambling for operating funds. The Legislature doesn't pay for what virtually any district considers enough teachers or other staff members. It didn't pay the full cost of pupil transportation even before gas prices went up.

The average school district finances some 20 percent of its budget through special levies. But the state caps the amount a district can raise locally. The state won't come through with the money, and it won't let communities come up with it on their own.

There will never be enough money for education. But the schools don't have to be as egregiously under-funded as they are now.

Slightly reducing the property tax burden in one place or another doesn't begin to address the real problem.

Increasing property taxes isn't the only option, but we can't get significantly more school funding without taxes of some kind, and - rightly or wrongly - it's hard to raise taxes in this state. Initiative 601 said in 1993, and Initiative 960 reaffirmed last year, that the Legislature needs a two-thirds vote of each house to pass a tax increase.

Legislators have been running scared. Before the next legislative session, a task force is supposed to come up with proposals for redefining basic education and finding a better way to pay for it. If taxes remain taboo, those proposals will be dead on arrival. Many people who care deeply about school funding believe that specific Band-Aid fixes are a bad idea, because they relieve some of the pressure to find a comprehensive solution to a statewide problem.

For better or worse, all of this state's school districts are in the same boat. Without a rising tide, none of us is going to float very far.

Daniel Jack Chasan is a journalist, historian and attorney who has served on the Vashon Island School Board for 19 years.