Open Letter to Legislators Regarding the McCleary Decision

At a recent news conference and again in a Washington Policy Center posting online, a significant misrepresentation of the WA State Supreme Court’s McCleary decision has been put forward to justify an agenda of further educational reforms.

The misrepresentation: 

“The McCleary decision’s central concern is not about money, but about improving the schools. The McCleary decision concludes its long analysis with this statement: “fundamental reforms are needed for Washington to meet its constitutional obligation to its students. Pouring more money into an outmoded system will not succeed.”

The accurate information: 

1) The McCleary opinion of the WA State Supreme Court finds that Washington state has systematically underfunded public education for decades. 

2) Underfunded means having appropriated insufficient funds. Therefore, McCleary is, indeed, about money. 

3) To claim otherwise is to misrepresent the facts. 

Consider, please, the following quotes from the decision:

Pg. 58:

"this would mean that  “full funding is whatever the Legislature says it is,”  CP at 2805 (FF 180), thus allowing the State to maintain the appearance of fully funding the basic education program even though appropriations bear little resemblance to the actual level of resources needed to provide a “basic education.”

Pg. 58:

“By 2005, the lack of correlation between the funding formulas and the goals of the education system had become obvious. The Washington Learns final report noted that  “[t]oday, the K-12 education system is still financed by the thirty-year old statutory formula of the Basic Education Act.”

Pg. 60:

“If the State’s funding formulas provide only a portion of what it actually costs a school to pay its teachers, get kids to school, and keep the lights on, then the legislature cannot maintain that it is fully funding basic education through its funding formulas. Even assuming the funding formulas represented the actual costs of the basic education program when the legislature adopted them in the 1970s, the same is simply not true today.”

Pg. 69:

This is the page upon which we find the quote used in the news conference and in the WPC posting.  It is found in a segment of the decision entitled “Funding the Basic Education Program with Local Levies.”   It is clear, therefore, that any commentary in that segment is about the use of local levies to fund basic education. 

And here is the full paragraph in which that quote appears.  “We do not believe this conclusion comes as a surprise. Rather, the evidence in this case confirms what many educational experts and observers have long recognized: fundamental reforms are needed for Washington to meets its constitutional obligation to its students. Pouring more money into an outmoded system will not succeed. We turn then to the more difficult issue: what remedy this court should employ to ensure that the State complies with its article IX, section 1 duty. ”

Therefore, fundamental reformers referred to in the quote relate to use of local levies to fund basic education and nothing more.  To suggest otherwise, by taking a portion of this quote completely out of context, is a significant misrepresentation of the facts.