Kick The Ball Charlie Brown

There is always an element of three card monty, or some other variation of the shell game whenever someone cooks up a solution to education funding in Washington. For as long as I can recall, publicly funded education has been in a state of “crisis.” Teachers are chronically underpaid. Classrooms are too crowded. Buildings need replacement, repair, or a high-speed internet connection. Politicians always plead poverty. If the citizens want all these things, they say, then they’ll just have to find a way to pay for it. It’s as though our children are being held hostage.
This isn’t new. About 20 years ago, there was a crisis in education funding. Politicians came up with a painless way to solve it. It was called the Washington State Lottery. The money would be generously donated by people who had matriculated through the public education system, and were consequently bad at math. The largest share of the profits would go to education. And ever since, we’ve had a crisis in education funding.
This hardly seems possible. By definition, a crisis is an acute condition. Perhaps we’ve actually had a series of crisis, one right after the other. Crisis has become the chronic condition. Nevertheless, the funding crisis that confronted education before the lottery has managed to endure the solution.
Take a quick visit to the Washington Lottery web page and you will learn that: “This year represents a big step for the Washington Lottery, too—as Lottery players help us provide more money than ever to support Washington schools--$100 million.”
Gee you’d think that with an extra $100 million, Washington’s schools should be able to make ends meet. And indeed, when one looks at the books, it’s clear that, of the profits earned by the lottery, the lion’s share does go to education. What the lottery doesn’t tell you is that, every dollar that flows into education through the front door via the lottery allows politicians reach in through the back door and remove a dollar it would have otherwise received from the general fund. This is how education remains in a state of permanent funding crisis.
So now, we have another solution to the crisis. This one is called Initiative 884. I-884 will raise sales taxes by one penny on the dollar. And that the whole wad is supposed to supplement education.
It’s all for the sake of the children, don’t you understand. Which is why so much of it is predestined for teachers’ wallets.
According to the promoters, the tax increase will fund 16,000 preschoolers. I didn’t know the state paid for preschool myself and I’m even less certain that it should. The new revenue will also reduce class sizes. This is another way of saying that more teachers will be hired. It will raise teachers’ pay. It will fund an additional 32,000 slots in colleges and universities and grant ever more of them scholarships.
And, it will create incentives for teachers to improve their performance. Meet the new standards, and you’ll get a five thousand dollar raise. And, the money will encourage good teachers to take jobs in “high need” neighborhoods.
The first of these incentives is a transparent joke. To earn the extra 5 grand teachers don’t actually have to demonstrate an improvement in their pupils’ performance. They only have to earn certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Achieving this certification requires only that teachers write 3 essays, attend one Saturday class, and submit a portfolio. Teachers are not required to demonstrate that their pupils learn. The National Board is a subsidiary of the teaching establishment.
As the Evergreen Freedom Foundation puts it, "What this amounts to is the education establishment saying 'trust us.' We're already trusting them with $9.2 billion in education funding and we have a climbing dropout rate and stagnant test scores."
And, there’s really no reason to believe that the billion dollars that I-884 is supposed to raise won’t be siphoned off as lottery revenue has. The public education budget has served the legislature as an escrow account for other spending before and there’s no reason to think they won’t do it again.
The only real difference is that this initiative guarantees that teachers will be permitted to collect a toll on the trucks full of money as they pass by.