Court ruling should spur action on education funding

State lawmakers grappling with a court ruling on education funding must be secretly buoyed by two facts: King County Superior Court Judge John Erlick chastised them for abdicating their constitutional duty to fully fund public schools but he didn't assign a cost or a deadline.

"So we'll fund education a tiny bit more a lot farther down the road," my conservative colleague snarkily observed. Not a far-fetched assumption considering the well-intended but meandering way educational improvements, including funding, have come about so far.

Gov. Chris Gregoire and Attorney General Rob McKenna are mulling a possible appeal to McCleary vs. the State of Washington. A bipartisan group of legislators sent Gregoire a letter urging her not to do so. Normally, I'd agree. The state is guilty as charged and should reserve future ammo for defending education's portion of the budget.

But I'm feeling cynical about the ruling. The next step may need to be a return to court, emerging with an order that carries a dollar amount and a compliance deadline. Without it, this ruling from the biggest education-finance lawsuit in 30 years arrives with all of the thunder of fairy wings.

The challenge is to move Olympia away from business as usual with Washington's constitutional mandate to provide ample funding for education being whatever the Legislature feels like providing.

Erlick's ruling falls into a baffling political landscape where no legislator is against fully funding education. Yet, the yawning gap between what is needed and what is provided forces school districts to rely on getting $2.1 billion annually from voter-approved levies.

Lawmakers tsk-tsk this dichotomy. But in a moment rich in irony, as the judge read his ruling last week, lawmakers were moving to raise the levy lid so districts can deepen their dependence on these money measures.

Lawmakers are notoriously shy of tough choices. But this issue calls for just such decisions.

About 43 percent of the state's $33 billion biennial budget goes to the K-12 system. Rep. Ross Hunter, the Eastside Democrat who chairs the House Finance Committee, wants half the budget eventually earmarked for education.

He would get no argument from some on the other side of the political aisle, where the most thoughtful views on education are echoed by Rep. Skip Priest, R-Federal Way. Priest sees the ruling as an order to lawmakers to begin future budgeting by fully funding education first.

What Priest doesn't say, however, is something echoed throughout the marble halls of the Legislature: Education needs to come first; remaining funds will be fought over by various constituencies advocating for everything from public health to clean water. That promises to be an ugly fight.

The ruling gives cover to a shift in priorities readily apparent Monday night when Republicans and Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee handily approved more money for school transportation. It was a strange moment. Any spending now makes it harder for the state to dig itself out of a $2.6 billion budget hole. Yet, Olympia has so shortchanged budgets for school buses and other transportation needs that many districts now run bus levies. I found myself saying recently as I voted for one such levy, can an electricity and classroom furniture levy be far behind?

Granted, lawmakers are in a strange bind. One wonders whether the state constitution's framers were, as Erlick's 103-page decision ruminates, influenced by grand visions of an active and educated democracy or by Thomas Jefferson's 1787 hope that "the means of education shall be forever encouraged." Whatever floated their boat, framers in our state codified the strongest constitutional protection for education in the nation.

In the context of state government's broadened role and current fiscal crisis, this protection is inconvenient, uncomfortable and expensive. Nonetheless, the ruling emphasizes that lawmakers are bound by it.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com