Bad times the right time to invest in state's schools

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ... it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us ... "

— Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities"

WHEN Dickens wrote those famous introductory lines 150 years ago, he couldn't have anticipated how appropriate they would be to describe the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

But we have the power to move through this economic crisis and back to the "best of times," if we only make the right decisions about where to focus our values and our resources. There is no more important place to invest than in our children's education.

When times are tough, our public schools should not be immune from sharing the burden. Gov. Christine Gregoire made the painful but wise choice in her proposed 2009-2011 budget to forgo educator pay raises. Many educators who provide critical student support will lose their jobs if pay raises are granted. Individual districts share the costs of those raises with the state — costs they cannot afford.

The salary decision made sense, but additional cuts on the table would be devastating. Cash-strapped districts would be forced to make major program cuts that would jeopardize gains made in the past decade. Resource-poor districts would become even poorer. Class sizes would increase. Efforts to support our most vulnerable students will suffer most, as reading coaches, after-school and summer-school programs, and personalized support to keep high-school students in school disappear.

Across the state, and most especially in high-poverty districts such as Mount Baker, Tacoma and Yakima, we've proven that no matter what a child's background, he or she can learn and have hope for the future. In 2008, we graduated the best-prepared senior class in our state's history, thanks to more than a decade of painstaking work to raise learning standards and build the systems of individual support our students need to reach those standards. We have moved all of our students, from the most gifted to the most struggling, to new levels of learning. But in the process, we've stretched the funding of public schools to the breaking point.

Education is the equalizer in our democracy. In difficult times like these, we need to invest more money in our schools, not less. After several years of analysis, culminating in the findings of the Basic Education Finance Task Force, there's broad consensus among state policymakers that we already underfund our education system by at least $1 billion a year.

This extra money isn't for luxuries — it's for basic school operating costs that our state constitution obligates us to cover. Local levies don't provide the "extras" in our schools. Instead, all communities rely on them for essentials. A few examples:

• The state pays for school buses to drive 67 million miles each year. Local levies pay for the other 33 million miles needed to transport our children to and from school.

• The state pays for only half the cost to keep schools heated and lighted — local levies pay for the rest.

• The state provides so little money for curriculum materials and textbooks, that a school district relying only on state funds is on an 18-year replacement cycle.

Families that are already economically disadvantaged will be hurt the worst in this recession, and if we hurt schools, their children will become even more vulnerable. Our K-12 schools are islands of stability, caring and learning for these students.

Regardless of their background, young people come to school to learn to read, write and do math, experience science, and become part of the larger world to which they can contribute. If we chop away at our schools so that they, too, become unstable, our children will lose ground they will never make up. We will pay for our shortsightedness many times over in the decades to come with higher investments in social services and prisons.

We've created a strong framework for education in this state that can withstand the tumultuous times ahead, if we work together to protect that framework from being dismantled. I've taken a lot of heat in my career for putting the needs of children before the needs of adults. But the moment we let our attention drift from our primary goal — doing what is best for kids — we risk losing all we have gained in the past two decades.

We have promised our children equal access to a quality education. Let's not mortgage our children's future by shortchanging their ability to learn. Give schools the resources they need to provide the level of education we are morally and constitutionally obligated to deliver to more than 1 million young people.