As responses roll in from the left and the right to Gov. Jay Inslee’s plan to raise state spending by $5 billion over the next two years, buoyed by potential new taxes on capital gains and carbon emissions, one of the more outspoken criticisms has come from state schools Superintendent Randy Dorn.

Inslee’s budget proposal adds $2.35 billion to education spending in the next budget biennium, focusing the money on early learning, reducing kindergarten-through-grade-three class sizes, freezing higher education tuition rates, and paying off some of the state’s McCleary obligations a year ahead of schedule. But that’s not enough in the view of Dorn, who submitted a $7.2 billion increase in the education budget to the governor’s office, and he said so publicly last week.

Dorn criticized Inslee for not doing more to address the imbalance in funding from the state and the local levies school districts rely upon, a key element of the state Supreme Court’s McCleary decision. Nor does the governor’s plans address smaller class sizes for grades four through the end of high school, as will be required by a recently approved voter initiative.

To Dorn, that amounted to sloughing off the state’s constitutional obligation to fully fund basic education — and he warned of legal repercussions unless the Legislature acts to remedy it.

“If adopted, it would move this state one step closer to a constitutional crisis,” Dorn said in a statement following the release of the governor’s education proposal. “In writing the budget I hope the Legislature will take its constitutional obligation seriously. If it does not, I believe the Supreme Court will do what is necessary on behalf of students, as unprecedented and unpleasant as that may be.”

Schools Superintendent Randy Dorn

It’s a stern rebuke, particularly coming from an elected official who would seemingly be closely allied with the governor otherwise. But Dorn, in an interview earlier this month prior to the governor’s budget release, said he doesn’t mind taking an antagonistic standpoint.

He said lawmakers will also have to confront a thorny political history of voting to raise taxes to fund schools in Washington state, and the uncomfortable position it can leave elected officials in.

“Most legislators and the governor probably won’t want to see me come June,” Dorn said. “I will use up every bit of political stock I’ve got. My job is not to make adults happy. My job is to focus on what’s best for the kids.”

Inslee has defended his spending priorities, saying that it’s the first step in fulfilling the myriad needs the state’s public school system has.

“This plan will allow Washington to take important steps toward getting out from under the court’s unprecedented contempt citation,” Inslee said. “But we have more than a legal obligation. This is the right thing for our students.”

SCHOOLS UNDER MICROSCOPE

That, in turn, invites scrutiny on the state’s school system. Legislators — and by extension the state’s electorate — want to ensure they’re getting the best bang for their buck. Republican lawmakers, as they have in recent decades, have called for education reform in exchange for new revenue. Their priorities, however, have remained under wraps. It’s a tough prospect in many states, even in state Legislatures held by majority Republicans.

Dorn, himself a strident proponent of reform during his six years as a lawmaker representing Eatonville and other parts of Pierce County in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said he sympathizes with the daunting choices lawmakers face in the upcoming session. He was voted out of office in 1994 partly because of a vote he took to raise the state’s business and occupation tax the prior year to support education, he said.

On reforms, Dorn said the Legislature took on the big issues when it overhauled the definition of basic education in 2009 and voters passed a measure allowing for charter schools.

“There’s no more stealing from this fund or that fund kind of thing,” Dorn said. “We have to be real, and that’s the big hurdle.”

Washington state was the first in the U.S. to lose its waiver under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. That sets forth a mandate that, unless teachers’ performance was measured based on students’ performance on standardized tests, all students would be required to test proficient in reading and math.

Eighty-eight percent of the state’s 2,176 schools failed to meet that strict standard this year, according to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. They were subjected to it because this year the Legislature could not agree on implementing teacher evaluations that would meet federal standard, causing the state to lose control of $40 million in federal funding to support programs in its poorest school districts. The money instead must go to private tutoring or busing children to schools that aren’t failing if parents decide they want that.

The waiver loss prompted political backlash, with Republican lawmakers blaming the teachers’ union, and the union saying the standards were unfair because they subverted their attempt to implement a better standard for measuring teachers.

Dorn publicly blamed the union’s lobbying for the failure to adopt the evaluation system that would have met federal standards. He also pinned it on a federal system that holds districts to all-or-nothing standards and he contends is supremely unfair. He believes Congress has failed in its obligation to revise the law to reflect the realities public school systems face across the U.S.

Using scores in math and language arts as measures of core competencies for students, Dorn said the state’s schools have about doubled in their proficiency rate over the last 14 years, hovering around an average of 65 percent in some grade levels. Whether that’s enough is a question for debate.

“That has taken 10 years of hard work,” Dorn said. “We can show here’s where we started, here’s where we’re going.”

Dorn said getting children the resources they need will require tax increases beyond what the governor is proposing. In the interview, he embraced a 1-percent hike in the state sales tax, which would generate an estimated $2.1 billion in the budget cycle, while saying other measures will be needed to cover the bill for fully funding K-12 education.

Inslee, on the other hand, only proposed using a slice of the revenue the state could get from a cap-and-trade program, and the money it could accrue from a capital gains tax, to fund education needs. Of the $2.35 billion increase in funding he’s pitched, he offers a scant $28.6 million in savings, arguing the state has cut its budget enough over the last six years as it grappled with the economic recession.

Inslee said in rolling out the proposal that he’ll work with the Legislature on regaining the waiver, but plans to backfill the programs that lost funding, such as expanded preschool for low-income students, with state funding instead.

WILL HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF?

Dorn said he takes a longer view of state politics and basic education funding in sizing up the 2015 legislative session.

The last time the state raised the sales tax was in 1983 under then-Gov. John Spellman, a Republican, during steep revenue shortfalls due to an economic recession. The budget was balanced and funding for basic education was preserved, but Spellman, breaking a campaign pledge not to raise taxes, lost his re-election bid to Booth Gardner a year later.

The next relevant moment in the ongoing struggle of education funding came 10 years later, when Dorn was serving as chair of the House Education Committee. In 1993, following two bitterly contentious sessions that saw a teachers’ strike in 1991, the Legislature passed the Education Reform Act that added new measurements of a school district’s overall performance.

Dorn also cast a vote to raise the business and occupation tax rate to patch up the state budget. A year later, he and a litany of his fellow Democrats were swept out of office in the best election cycle for the Republican Party in a generation.

But Dorn said his overall point is clear, and lawmakers will have to confront this history as it moves to address basic education funding once more, albeit with a state Supreme Court mandate hanging over their heads. The governor’s proposal, of course, doesn’t touch the sales tax or the B&O tax, aside from closing some tax exemptions.

“Those two sessions, to me, are what we are up against,” Dorn said. “I’ve been a legislator. I’ve pushed the green button for new revenue.”

Dorn is now in his second term as superintendent, and is noncommittal as to whether he’d run for re-election again. The next six months, he said, will offer a chance to define his tenure in office.

“I think about 75 percent of my job is going to be the next six to seven months,” Dorn said. “This is going to be the Armageddon for the future of Washington state. We are not upholding our paramount duty. Will this be a historic session? Answer: yes.”

Your support matters.

Public service journalism is important today as ever. If you get something from our coverage, please consider making a donation to support our work. Thanks for reading our stuff.