12:00 am
December 1, 2014
The Associated Press reports that the coming legislative session will likely feature a continuation of the No Child Left Behind battles that cost districts control of some $38 million in federal funding. Here’s the crux:
At issue during the 2014 legislative session was whether to require that student scores on statewide tests be used as one of many factors to evaluate teachers and principals.
State law already says that student test data must be used as part of teacher and principal evaluations, but school districts can choose which tests they will use: school-based, classroom-based, district-based or statewide.
After the Legislature failed to make using state tests mandatory, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan pulled Washington’s waiver.
The U.S. Department of Education on Monday reinstated Oklahoma’s No Child Left Behind flexibility waiver for the remainder of the 2014-15 school year, a move that frees school districts from significant spending restrictions.
The federal government pulled the waiver in August after the state Legislature repealed Common Core academic standards for English and math. Without the waiver, schools across the state stood to lose control of how to spend up to $30 million in federal aid.State schools Superintendent Janet Barresi expressed her gratitude to the federal agency during a news conference Monday at Education Department headquarters at the state Capitol complex.
The WEA-backed class size reduction initiative, I-1351) will also be the subject of controversy in the next legislative session. We’ve written about it before. Recently The News Tribune added its editorial voice to criticism of the measure, calling it a “smart bomb aimed squarely at Washington higher education and social welfare systems.”
Unless the Legislature musters the gumption to override the initiative, Washington’s colleges, early learning programs, child protective agencies, and other essential welfare and education services will be lucky to wind up with table scraps — assuming they don’t have previous servings scooped off their plates.
Anticipating the challenge, Stan Barer and Hugh Spitzer write in an op-ed for the Seattle Times that higher education does enjoy constitutional protection.
Many assume that the state’s constitutional funding obligation is solely to K-12 education. But that assumption is wrong. A careful review of two intertwined state constitutional provisions, Articles 9 and 13, reveals that the state has a companion financial obligation to its universities. What this means, from a practical standpoint, is that the Legislature cannot lawfully throw our public universities under the bus in meeting its duty to finance K-12 education.
Read the whole thing. The writers appear to be setting the stage for possible lawsuit. Consider the last graf.
The Washington Supreme Court is fully engaged in pushing legislators to honor the state’s obligation to amply fund K-12. But if the Legislature robs the universities in its quest to pay for pre-college programs, the court might, in an appropriate case, use the “foster and support” standard to define a minimum level of constitutional support for higher education and other Article 13 institutions. A continuation of the recent trend of legislative cuts to higher education might invite such a case.
Not too subtle, that.
Tags: Budget , class size , class size reduction