I-884: A Rotten Apple

I-884, a statewide measure on the November ballot, would raise the state sales tax by 15% (an additional 1¢ per dollar) to produce a billion dollars a year in revenue for an "education trust fund". As with other tax hikes that are sold as benefiting children and education, the I-884 marketers are using an apple logo -- as in give your child's teacher an apple. Washington State loves its apples. But the I-884 apple is rotten to the core.

The pro-884 web site is here, replete with glowing endorsements, such as "We can’t miss this unique opportunity to invest in our children’s success". If only we had reason to be confident that all this extra spending really would lead to more success. Unfortunately, the only sure thing is that a billion dollars a year would be sucked out of the state's productive economy and poured into the pockets of the familiar crew of bureaucrats and unionized public school employees, without any meaningful improvements in the way they actually do their jobs. The Washington Policy Center has written an exhaustive analysis [and shorter op-ed] on the negative impact of this tax hike to the state's economy. The League of Freedom Voters is managing the campaign against I-884. Robert Mak of KING-5 News did a recent feature on I-884: video here, transcript here.

Expect to see a number of newspaper editorials about I-884 in the weeks ahead. In today's Seattle Times, in-house editorial writer Susan Byrnes is more sympathetic to I-884 than I am, but she too raises some serious concerns: "Lofty education standards require stable state funding"

Alone, money will not boost student achievement. Some of the most important ingredients in successful schools cannot be bought: a culture of high expectations, exemplary leaders, devoted, high-quality teachers, and dedicated parents.

But money buys some things that work: preschool for disadvantaged children, full-day kindergarten, teacher training and incentives to attract the best instructors to challenging schools, smaller class sizes and extra help for students who need it most.

First of all, its hard to make the claim that lack of money is the problem. The state's per-pupil spending continues to grow faster than the rate of inflation, without delivering comparable gains in achievement. I'd also be more cautious about making claims of "things that work". "Smaller class sizes" is the first item on the I-884 campaign's list of promises. In fact, "smaller class sizes" only means hiring more teachers, it does not translate into hiring more effective teachers, or delivering meaningful improvements in student achievement. (e.g., see this recent note on the more teachers vs. better teachers trade-off by Chester Finn, with a hat tip to Joanne Jacobs). Nevertheless, "smaller class sizes" sounds appealing, especially to teacher unions (for whom it means more dues-paying members) and to the construction and maintenance people (for whom it means building and operating more and larger schools).

The Times op-ed adds:

Careful targeting of funding and close monitoring of its effectiveness must go hand-in-hand with reforms ... Increased funding should come with strings. Schools and districts need more incentives for success and disincentives for failure.

And that should be the real reason for advocates of education (as opposed to advocates of education spending) to oppose I-884. There are no strings and no disincentives for failure, only more incentives for spending.

It should also be mentioned that the number one financier of the I-884 campaign is a multi-millionaire businessman, who is an investor and director of a private education-services company that would directly benefit from all of this extra spending.

Before you vote for I-884, be sure you read, understand and agree with the complete text of the initiative (here). As we learned in the Sane Transit decision, a vote for an initiative is not a vote for what a reasonable person would infer is the intent of the initiative, it is a vote to approve the literal meaning of every word in the text. Unless you understand and agree with every word in an initiative, you shouldn't vote for it.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at August 06, 2004 10:37 AM | Email This