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In Our View: Do Better, Legislature

Continuing inaction on McCleary shows politics outweigh compromise

The Columbian
Published: January 8, 2017, 6:03am

The people of Washington deserve better from their Legislature. They deserve more than empty rhetoric. More than obsessive gridlock. More than simply a plan to make a plan and another round of partisan finger-pointing.

In short, they deserve lawmakers who can devise a formula for fully funding public schools and adhering to the 2012 state Supreme Court ruling in McCleary v. Washington. That is the ruling that determined the Legislature has spent decades falling short of its constitutionally mandated “paramount duty” to provide basic education for all students in the state, and it is the ruling that some lawmakers have openly derided while some others have simply attempted to ignore.

And as the 2017-18 legislative session opens Monday, the residents of Washington — including more than 1 million schoolchildren — deserve better.

Yes, there has been progress over the past four years, as lawmakers have substantially increased funding for schools without raising taxes. Yet nobody, including the Supreme Court, has deemed those increases to be adequate, and last year’s Legislature responded by forming an Education Funding Task Force to study the issue.

Nearly a year later, last week’s meeting of the task force demonstrated that little has been accomplished. Democrats and Republicans on the bipartisan committee presented their recommendations separately rather than indicating they are approaching some sort of agreement, and those presentations clung to well-worn party tropes. Democrats suggested that $7 billion is needed for school funding over the next four years; Republicans declined to suggest a dollar amount but insisted that schools should be funded first before any other priorities.

The frustration comes from the fact that the arguments have changed little in the four years since the McCleary ruling was handed down. Sen. Ann Rivers, R-La Center, a member of the task force, said Republicans hope to get colleagues on board before committing to specific funding amounts. “We need to make sure we’re not setting ourselves up for failure on the front end, and that’s the attitude I carry with me in getting this done,” she told the Associated Press. “When I say that I will continue to work in a bipartisan, bicameral way, it is with the best of intent that I will do so.”

The technical phrase for Rivers’ statement is “gobbledygook,” and it does little more than give rise to questions about what the heck the task force members have been doing for the past year. Webster’s tells us that a task force is comprised for the “purpose of accomplishing a definite objective,” and the definition says nothing about collectively kicking the can further down the road. It doesn’t take a constitutional scholar to determine that the best course of action is to reach a bipartisan, bicameral agreement and then sell it to the members of your party by pointing out the areas in which you achieved your goals and acknowledging the areas in which you compromised. The time for politicking and negotiating was during the task force meetings, not once the general session opens.

That represents the difference between governing and clinging to talking points. While constituents can disagree with the Democrats’ call for $7 billion over four years, or with Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposal for billions of dollars in new taxes, at least those are concrete plans that provide a starting point for the discussion. But it is impossible to assess that discussion if one side remains mute.

The people of Washington deserve better.

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