McKenna long on promises, short on details for increased education funding

Attorney General Rob McKenna says he wants to be our next education governor. Specifically, in announcing his gubernatorial bid, he promises to return K-12 education funding to more than 50 percent of the state budget, where it tradi-tionally stood in decades past, and to double funding for higher education.

Those are big promises, and costly ones.

McKenna is right that as a state we are seriously underfunding basic and higher education. Recently a court in King County ruled that the state is violating the state constitution, which mandates “ample funding” for basic education, a case that is now headed to the state Supreme Court.

The problem is that in making this campaign pledge, McKenna is not offering a credible solution to correct the problem. As teachers and education advocates, we are keenly aware of the failure of our state to invest in the education of our children. And we are equally suspicious of the empty promises that fall from the lips of politicians at election time that they are going to wave a magic wand and fix the problem, if only we vote for them.

The headline of a recent article in the Seattle Times stated, “McKenna’s call to boost school funds short on details.” The truth is that McKenna’s promises will continue to ring hollow until he explains where he expects to find the money to realize his goals.

The price tag for the massive funding shift that McKenna purports to support is astronomical. Doubling current spending on higher education to 16 percent of the overall budget would cost more than $2.5 billion over the next two years. Raising the current K-12 spending levels – 41 percent of the budget – to the 51 percent that McKenna proposes would add an additional $3.2 billion to the cost.

Yet McKenna categorically rules out tax increases, even on the state’s wealthiest residents, to pay for his campaign promise to better fund education. He even says he’d consider cutting taxes on some businesses if he is elected, making the budget hole even deeper.

So how does he intend to pay for increased education funding?

The short answer is that he has no answer. When asked, McKenna says he wants to cut the size of the state workforce and reduce spending on state employees. But that adds up to little more than an exercise in voodoo math. Realistic savings in that area – even in the highly unlikely case that McKenna were to get every concession from state employees he wants – would amount to only a few hundred million dollars, still leaving a $5 billion funding gap.

To shift that much funding from other priorities to education would cause unfathomable harm to our most vulnerable populations. Under the McKenna approach, the voter-approved Basic Health Plan and Apple Health for kids would almost certainly have to be eliminated completely. Critical support for ailing seniors and people with disabilities would have to be slashed to the bone. Housing help for lower-income families would be shredded. Prisons and mental health facilities would have to close, and enforcement of environmental regulations would be eviscerated.

It is impossible to imagine those kinds of draconian cuts, shredding the social safety net, would ever pass muster with the Legislature and the public. And we would be far worse off if they did. It makes no sense to say we’re finally going to adequately fund our children’s education, but in exchange we are going to take away their health care or the roof over their heads. Those sorts of brutal trade-offs are neither a prescription for educational success nor for building a just and compassionate society.

The reality is that Washington state has a structural deficit problem: Growth in revenues is not keeping pace with the growth in our economy and our population. Our elected leaders have responded to this funding crisis by slashing education, health care and social services. Where only a few short years ago the state collected about 6 percent of total state income in taxes, that percentage has now slipped to less than 5 percent and continues to decline.

Though McKenna refuses to acknowledge the structural deficit problem, that is the crux of the education funding problem. He’s right that we need to do much better when it comes to education funding, but he – like congressional Republicans during the debt ceiling debate – seems to lack the courage to admit that any real improvement is going to require more revenue.

Wishful thinking and campaign platitudes might get a candidate elected governor, but they will do nothing to get our children the education they need to succeed in the 21st-century economy.

Eric Hougan is a National Board Certified teacher in Renton and a Ph.D. student studying educational leadership and policy at the University of Washington. Allison Wegg teaches elementary special education in Seattle. They are both active in Democratic politics.