Education Reform Advocates and Teachers’ Unions Team Up to Save K-12 Funding in Special Session

Perhaps the death of the education reform-teacher union coalition has been greatly exaggerated?

The powerful, informal coalition of parents, teachers, administrators, and policy advocates that helped pass Initiative 728— a successful initiative in 2000 to hire more teachers to reduce class size in public schools, primarily in K-4 education— appeared irreparably broken during the 2009 legislative session. Reform advocates successfully lobbied the legislature to revise seniority-based pay scales to accommodate merit pay and to make it easier to fire teachers, both over the strenuous objections of the Washington Educators Association (WEA). The political divisions between reformers and unions was intense, and sometimes devolved into name-calling that seemed personal.

So when education advocates distributed a letter to the state legislature yesterday with a four point agenda for saving state funding for K-12 during the special session, it showed the potential of both groups to still collaborate during difficult times to help preserve school funding. It also highlighted a classic truism in politics: that dividing lines that seem deep and permanent on one issue can be anything but on other issues.

The letter was signed by the Washington state Parent Teacher Association (PTA), the League of Education Voters, two major education unions (the Washington Education Association (WEA) and SEIU 1948), and three major groups of administrators (the Washington State School Directors Association, the Association of Washington School Principals, and the Washington Association of School Administrators).

In it, they laid out a four point agenda: “K-4 class size reduction,” “maintain the enhanced classified employee staffing ratio,” “all day kindergarten,” and “levy equalization.”

“Pretty much the entire k-12 education community is united in protecting funding for these four crucial programs,” says the WEA spokesman Rich Wood.

While two of the four issues seem taken care of, both the House and Senate are still in negotiations over K-4 class size and levy equalization.

The House budget would cut $11 million from K-4 education, but still allocates $103 million. The Senate’s budget would zero out that fund entirely. Advocates claim that that difference alone would increase class size “by as many as 5 students” in some classes. “That money is just crucial to keeping smaller class sizes,” says Wood. “It’s money that’s been around for 20 years, and it pays for 1500 teachers.”

The cuts to class size would be especially difficult to manage after the Legislature repealed I-728 in 2009, and cut 75 percent of the money in the Student Achievement Fund created by the initiative in order to plug the state’s budget deficit. About $78.5 million remains in that fund, and both House and Senate budgets propose diverting it into the general fund this year.

According to Scarola, “We get intonations that they have agreement on K-4 class size. It’s not perfect, but mostly protected. It’s easier for them to resolve those [spending] differences— they’ve had more success than that with than revenue.”

The Senate’s budget proposal would also cut $11 million from “education support professionals,” or “classified staff.” This may sound technical, but is also crucial, Scarola says. “Anyone that could have been let go was let go a while ago.” The most vulnerable public school staff to further cuts, he says, are “mainly instruction aides.” If funding isn’t saved for these staff and K-4 class size reductions, “what you’re asking teachers to do is work in larger classes with less help.”

But according to state Rep. Pat Sullivan (D-Kent), who is on the House’s budget negotiating team, that issue is already taken care of. The “education and new prototypical school model [passed at the end of the legislative session] had enhanced funding for classified staff. The Senate will have to come to our position on that one.”

While the Senate’s budget cut those programs, it did preserve funding for all-day kindergarten that the House did not. Rep. Sullivan says “we’re generally in agreement” on that issue, and the funding will likely be preserve.

A bigger sticking point, however, is levy equalization. Though the House budgeted a 4 percent increase in funding to help offset differences between wealthier and poorer school district levy sizes, the Senate only budgeted a 1 percent increase– a difference between the two chambers of $7.2 million that has yet to be resolved.

In addition to those four major issues, there are other issues that have education advocates concerned as well.

The House’s proposed budget reduces bonus money for teachers who receive certification from the National Board by $7.3 million. “Groups like ours hate to see that,” says Scarola. “You dangle a bonus in front of teachers to take on hard assignments, and times get tough and you snatch it back. It’s the kind of things that teachers remember forever, that unions remember, because they don’t last… Here’s where we’re with the union.”

Another issue that teacher unions are concerned about: declining state funding for teacher planning and collaboration. The state pays teachers for 180 instruction days. But according to Wood, the state added 3 additional “learning improvement days” 10 years ago. These were paid work days when teachers were to collaborate with each other in their lesson planning and curriculum development. “Gradually they’ve eliminated those days,” says Wood. The first was eliminated a few years ago. The second one was eliminated during the 2009 legislative session. Both the House and Senate have proposed eliminating the last remaining day, saving the state $15 million. It’s highly unlikely that funding will be restored. “The state will only be funding those 180 student days,” says Wood, “then any additional days for planning and collaboration will have to be funded by school districts.”

The Legislature is also considering cutting funding for the Beginning Educators Support Team (BEST) program, which provided funding for mentors to work closely with new teachers for their first two years. “Results were promising,” says Scarola, “and now they’re threatening to cut it. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s discontinued in the House budget. The Senate budget restored most of it. We’d love to see that back.”

Finally, traveling beneath the radar of nearly all education advocates this session is that the House proposes drawing $100 million from the Education Savings Account– a fund created by leftover cash reserves from the state at the end of the fiscal year that is supposed to go toward K-12 and higher education. It’s unclear whether that money is earmarked for education purposes, though Sullivan says it will be.

Advocates know that, on these and other issues, the Legislature isn’t likely to give them all of what they want, because no one is being spared the effects of budget cuts. But the collaboration and bridge-building in the education community that we’ve seen toward the end of the 2010 legislative session is a potential silver lining on this dark cloud. Only that coalition, working together, is likely to have much of a chance in the future of recovering cut programs, staving off future cuts, or improving the state’s long-term funding of early learning and K-12 education.