As I've followed the campaign for I-884, the initiative to raise the state sales tax by a billion dollars a year, I've been astonished at the quantity of hype and sleaze oozing out of the advocates for what is being peddled as a noble do-gooder cause. This posting is the first of an ongoing series.
Let's start with the hype and sleeze of Gov. Gary Locke's flagrantly unrealistic promises in yesterday's P-I:
It's time we deliver on the promises we all make to our children. Initiative 884 will make sure that every child will be ready to succeed the day he or she starts kindergarten. It will make sure every student will have the best teachers, the small classes and the help needed to succeed in school.But the Governor is not merely selling a fantasy about the outcomes, he's also misrepresenting the nuts and bolts of what the initiative would implement. Read the initiative text carefully and you too can see through the Governor's hype and sleaze:
The initiative has strict limits on overhead so that funds will go exactly where voters want them -- to our classrooms.Actually, the initiative only promises that the funds will go to the school districts, which have wide latitude to spend the money as they wish. [Sec. 101].
The Trust Fund will be protected by a built-in firewall that will prohibit its use for any unauthorized purposes.In fact, the state legislature will be able to dip their fingers into the honeypot in only two years and with only a simple majority spend the money on anything they wish.
As with the rest of the public education system, there's no real accountability, no connection between funding and results, and no consequences for failure. At least not from the people whose pockets this billion dollar windfall will fill. The Governor concludes his op-ed by asking:
If we do not pass this initiative, what will we say to our children who want to succeed in school and go to college?We will tell our children that we care about them enough to demand higher standards from the education industry that purports to serve them. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 11, 2004 05:22 PM | Email This
Make sure you see http://i-884students.blogspot.com/2004/10/momentum-is-building-for-i-884.html#comments and enjoy my "shock and awe".
Also, if you can folks, please visit & comment on http://josef-a-k.blogspot.com
Josef
Posted by: Josef on October 11, 2004 10:24 PMHer response started "there are lots of numbers out there" then she went to numbers far from the question. She said absolutely nothing about how high our taxes are. She went off into proving WA support for education is low. Something about the per student funding we give is 30th among the 50 states.
So put this together: (1) we are high taxed, but (2) too little goes into education. That leads to (3) our elected officials are using the adequate funding we provide for the wrong things. I am sure their initiative has controls on where the money goes. But that only lasts for 2 years. Then the same people will be moving the funds into DSHS and compaining we didn't give them enough money.