Issue Position: Education

Issue Position

Whether or not we have a "constitutional duty" or court ordered mandates is irrelevant. We have to adequately fund education because it is the right thing to do. Merely throwing money at a problem to solve it is irresponsible. The legislature has to get serious about it and stop all the rhetoric and political posturing.

But when we talk about funding education, there are really two questions that must be asked. The first is a quality question -Is this the educational system we want to fund? If the answer is no then we have other work to do. Only then does the question become how do we better fund K-12 education. Clearly there are inequities in funding between poorer districts and richer districts. There are a wide range of outcomes in graduation rates and achievement scores. Are administrative costs too high or do they reflect the job needed to be done? Do we adequately support our teachers? Ultimately, is this the best we can do to prepare our kids to meet future challenges? All of these questions, and more, have a significant impact on the price tag for education.

They are also issues that won't be solved overnight. Our current revenue system is antiquated, built on assumptions made in the 1930's, and has proven to be wholly inadequate in keeping up with current demands and mandates. But that's a whole other issue. So we really are left with funding what we have now with the revenue system we have now.

One action that can be taken immediately is to make public school districts totally exempt from paying sales tax. While not a huge savings, it could have significant impact on district budgets. Second we could expand the sales tax base to include services currently not taxed and dedicate certain streams to K12 education. Finally, and more controversially, we could remove education spending from the operations budget, where it is competing for dollars with every other item, and create a separate budget funded by dedicated streams of income. This would allow more transparency, a better idea of how much funding is available which will dictate other actions, and reduce the temptation of legislators to use education funding as a political battleground.

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