In a pair of stories earlier this week, the Seattle Times looks at the prospects for education funding during the downturn. They are both good discussions of the funding challenges in store for higher education and K–12.

First, Katherine Long writes about higher education:

Washington’s public colleges and universities are bracing for a money crisis this fall that is likely to decimate higher education budgets.

Not only will schools likely lose some students — and the tuition money that comes with them — but the state is expected to slash funding, since higher education dollars aren’t protected by the state constitution in the same way K-12 dollars are.

Indeed, during the Great Recession, state near general fund appropriations for higher education decreased by 25.2 percent on net while spending on K–12 increased by 0.2 percent. During that time, there were several rounds of cuts to higher education institutions, but tuition was allowed to increase. (Thus, including tuition, funding for higher education increased by a net of $38 million from FY 2008 to FY 2012.)

Second, Dahlia Bazzaz and Hannah Furfaro write about K–12, and how the McCleary decision on school funding will make it even harder to cut basic education than it was in the Great Recession: “. . . state leaders face a budget challenge of unknown proportions that will test their ability to preserve education funding, as the state Supreme Court ordered them to do in 2012.”

During the Great Recession, 34.9 percent of the state’s policy level spending cuts came in K–12. These included suspending two major education initiatives, I-728 (student achievement program) and I-732 (teacher cost-of-living adjustments). A class size reduction enhancement was also eliminated. These programs were outside of basic education. With the substantial increases in state spending on public schools since the McCleary decision, the portion that is within basic education has also increased. This means that although K–12 makes up a bigger share of the state budget today, it will be even harder to cut. (We wrote about how much of the state budget is sheltered from cuts in a recent policy brief.)

The state Supreme Court specified that the definition of basic education should not be cut for fiscal reasons, but it’s still possible funding could be cut. The Times quotes Marguerite Roza, an education finance policy professor at Georgetown University: “There is a lot of precedent across the country of the court ordering the state to do things, and the state saying, ‘We don’t have the money.’”

The Times also quotes Sen. Rolfes, who makes a good point about how, ultimately, everything is on the table:

The more realistic vision isn’t wide-scale cuts, but little or no increased spending, said Democratic Sen. Christine Rolfes, the Senate’s budget writer who worked on the McCleary fix. This was mostly the case during the last recession.

“If the budget were to completely collapse on itself, you could say everything is open [to cuts], but with everything we’re seeing is that it will be a temporary recession, not a decade long,” she said. “I can’t imagine we would redefine our constitutional obligations for K-12.”

Opportunity Washington has more on these issues here.