Washington State Senate passes Republicans’ school levy swipe scheme on a party-line vote

Thanks to the arrival of new­ly-mint­ed Sen­a­tor Shel­ley Short (R‑7th Dis­trict; north­east Wash­ing­ton) and the return of Doug Erick­sen from the Dis­trict of Colum­bia, Repub­li­cans in the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate were today able to pass the school levy swipe scheme they intro­duced late last week with no votes to spare.

Sub­sti­tute Sen­ate Bill 5607, con­cern­ing edu­ca­tion (see text), passed out of the Sen­ate on a par­ty line vote just a lit­tle bit ago. The roll call was as follows:

Roll Call: SSB 5607
3rd Read­ing & Final Passage
2/1/2017

Yeas: 25; Nays: 24

Vot­ing Yea: Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors Angel, Bai­ley, Baum­gart­ner, Beck­er, Braun, Brown, Erick­sen, Fain, For­tu­na­to, Hawkins, Hon­ey­ford, King, Milos­cia, O‘Ban, Pad­den, Pear­son, Rivers, Rossi, Schoesler, Shel­don, Short, Walsh, War­nick, Wil­son, Zeiger

Vot­ing Nay: Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Bil­lig, Car­lyle, Chase, Cleve­land, Con­way, Darneille, Frockt, Hasegawa, Hobbs, Hunt, Keis­er, Kud­er­er, Liias, McCoy, Mul­let, Nel­son, Palum­bo, Ped­er­sen, Ranker, Rolfes, Sal­daña, Takko, Van De Wege, Wellman

Por­tions of SSB 5607 have a ref­er­en­dum clause, because Sen­ate Repub­li­cans appar­ent­ly aren’t com­fort­able mak­ing the changes they seek them­selves. (They were elect­ed or appoint­ed specif­i­cal­ly to leg­is­late, but they’d rather pass the buck…)

Were SSB 5607 to become law in its cur­rent form, a ref­er­en­dum would be sub­mit­ted to the peo­ple of Wash­ing­ton this autumn for their approval or rejection.

The por­tions of the bill with the ref­er­en­dum clause would only go into effect if a major­i­ty of the elec­torate vot­ed Approve.

It is impor­tant to under­stand that SSB 5067 would lead to a net loss of rev­enue over­all. Yes, you read that cor­rect­ly: the bill the Repub­li­cans call an edu­ca­tion fund­ing plan would actu­al­ly take mon­ey away from our schools. What a scam!

The Bud­get & Pol­i­cy Cen­ter explains:

The Senate’s plan, called the Edu­ca­tion Equal­i­ty Act, fea­tures as its major fund­ing source a new Local Effort Levy – basi­cal­ly, an increase to the statewide prop­er­ty tax of $1.80 per $1,000 of assessed val­ue. As details about the plan emerge, how­ev­er, it appears that the plan does not actu­al­ly raise addi­tion­al dol­lars for schools. That’s because the pro­posed statewide prop­er­ty tax increase is cou­pled with cuts to local prop­er­ty tax levies that cur­rent­ly fund a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of basic edu­ca­tion costs. As we’ve said in the past, levy swaps like this are schemes that change the source of the mon­ey flow­ing to schools but don’t actu­al­ly make new invest­ments in Washington’s kids.

As it is struc­tured, the plan could deep­en the short­fall in school fund­ing because the plan does not pay for itself. It leaves a $1.4 bil­lion hole in the 2019–2021 bud­get, for which its authors have yet to iden­ti­fy a source of fund­ing. Promis­ing to pay for edu­ca­tion with­out iden­ti­fy­ing a fund­ing source is a pre­scrip­tion for dam­ag­ing cuts through­out the rest of the bud­get. And while the plan would ded­i­cate future rev­enue growth to fund­ing basic edu­ca­tion, it would use any rev­enue growth in addi­tion to the ded­i­cat­ed funds to decrease  the new Local Effort Levy to a rate of $1.25. In short, the pro­pos­al is not only short on rev­enue now, but it is also designed to restrict rev­enue growth for schools and oth­er pub­lic invest­ments in the future.

Pret­ty Orwellian. We call SSB 5607 a levy swipe scheme because it would change where exist­ing dol­lars are com­ing from, but not result in any new invest­ment in our schools, which is com­plete­ly and total­ly unac­cept­able. It’s smoke and mirrors.

If that weren’t bad enough, the bill is loaded with bad pol­i­cy pro­vi­sions. For exam­ple, at the end of Part I, in Sec. 106, there’s a num­ber of sub­sec­tions which are intend­ed to ensure that tax­pay­er dol­lars are fun­neled into char­ter schools, even though the state Supreme Court has ruled that char­ter schools are uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.

Lat­er on, there’s Sec­tion 505, which kills off state-pro­vid­ed bonus­es for Nation­al Board Cer­ti­fied Teach­ers such as my father, who have under­gone the rig­or­ous process of demon­strat­ing mas­tery of their sub­ject mat­ter and effec­tive­ness as instruc­tors. This bill is a slap in the face to our state’s hard­work­ing educators.

And there’s more. There’s so much bad stuff in here I’ll have to do anoth­er post.

Whether you’re a par­ent, teacher, stu­dent, or con­cerned cit­i­zen, you should be appalled by this trav­es­ty of a bill that Sen­ate Repub­li­cans have cooked up.

Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors spoke elo­quent­ly against SSB 5607 dur­ing floor debate. After, they lament­ed Repub­li­cans’ unwill­ing­ness to accept any of their amendments.

“Real­ly hard floor time today,” Sen­a­tor Lisa Well­man wrote on Face­book after the vote. “[The] Repub­li­can Sen­ate major­i­ty forced pas­sage of an edu­ca­tion bill that is loaded with ele­ments I can­not sup­port — ever! Includ­ed is a pro­vi­sion for allow­ing any­one pass­ing a back­ground check to teach your kids. No cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. No edu­ca­tion degree. This is so dis­re­spect­ful to the tal­ent­ed, com­mit­ted men and women in the pro­fes­sion — I’m beyond words. How­ev­er — please know this. I will nev­er stop fight­ing for teach­ers, schools and most of all, for all our children.”

Democ­rats in the House have sig­naled SSB 5607 is unac­cept­able to them. They could either ignore the bill, or gut it and put their own leg­is­la­tion in place of what is there now with a strik­ing amend­ment. The Sen­ate would need to agree to any changes the House makes for SSB 5067 to move out of the Legislature.