Ben Mitchell
Director of Advocacy & Policy, Foundation for Tacoma Students
At the Foundation for Tacoma Students we believe that a better world is possible, but that its realization requires difficult, rigorous work. This informs our approach to policy work where we show up with a balance of pragmatism, and constantly try to push forward as many different issues as we can, because we never really know what policy window might open.
There’s an underlying theory of action to that approach that’s grounded in older but still very relevant political science, and our new policy platform fits within this. Downstream of our policy platform is a targeted plan for our advocacy during the 2025 state legislative session. Our top priority is a proposal to invest in student outreach that will help students navigate college financial aid and enrollment processes. This idea rests on a solid case, and the question as we look ahead to 2025 is whether or not a policy window is open for this legislation and the financial investment it requires.
A little bit of political science
A great book with a very boring and unfortunate title is called “Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies,” by John W. Kingdon. The book focuses on formal legislative bodies, like Congress or state legislatures, and tries to answer the question of why some policy issues get traction and attention, while others wither and never really go anywhere.
The theory laid out in the book is that we should understand these legislative arenas as organized anarchy. That there are three independent streams of process that are always going on simultaneously, but that aren’t connected and have lives of their own:
Problems
Policies
Politics
The idea is that public problems get recognized and defined according to processes that are different from the ways policies are developed or political events unfold. Policy proposals are developed according to their own incentives and selection criteria, whether or not they are solutions to problems or responsive to political context. And then political events flow along on their own schedule according to their own rules, whether or not they are related to problems or policies. The shorthand for this whole mishmash is “The Garbage Can Model” – not a joke, a real political science term – because there’s no rhyme or reason as to what’s in your garbage, it’s just a bunch of stuff knocking around.
The key to understanding why something doesn’t happen in a legislative body is that the work streams are siloed and not coupled together. A problem with no solution will not get real attention. A policy idea that doesn’t answer any prominent problem, will also get ignored. And then if you have political will to solve a problem, but there’s no feasible policy available, nothing will happen.
But at some critical junctures the three streams do get joined, and the greatest policy changes grow out of these windows when problems, policy proposals, and politics are coupled. A tangible example of this dynamic in our state is climate change policy. It came to be widely seen as a big problem among the public, media, business, and politicians. All kinds of policy strategies were developed by different actors. And the politics in Washington were very favorable, exemplified by outgoing Governor Inslee who made it his top priority. And we’ve seen over the last several years that a legislative session never went by without meaningful climate change policy passing.
Why a policy platform?
As an advocate and policy influencer we don’t just wait passively for one of these policy windows to come along. We actively work to couple policies to problems, problems to political forces, and political forces to policies by brokering people and ideas, and floating and refining proposals. This can create the conditions that will open up a policy window.
Which brings us to our brand new policy platform: Pathways to Possibilities. The platform is an important expression of our approach to policy work. It lays out a set of bold ideas for public education that will help all students, but also keeps equity at the center by focusing on policies that will disproportionately benefit students from lower-income or working class families, and students of color.
The primary purpose of the platform is to help in opening up a window for policy change. We do this by highlighting data, research, and experiences that convey the nature of specific problems to policymakers. And then we connect those problems to our pet policy ideas that are fleshed out in the platform. By connecting problems to policies, our platform builds awareness, offers persuasive arguments, and helps us develop allies by signalling what we’re about.
Our platform is organized under five issue areas:
K-12 Resource Equity
K-12 Student Experiences
K-12 Standards and Expectations
Postsecondary Pathways
Postsecondary Costs
Under these issue areas we flesh out nine policy proposals that will serve as the basis for our advocacy work over the next few years.
The overarching idea conveyed through our platform, and the thing we’re trying to incept into the minds of people in and around government in Olympia, is that the biggest structural barrier to realizing our 2030 Community Goal is the persistent disconnect between high school, higher education, and our workforce systems. This disconnect shows up in current policy discussions that are fractured in unhelpful ways. Ideas to change K-12 standards and expectations are grouped separately from ideas to change how we fund our K-12 system. Programs like school meals are categorized as supporting student well-being and considered apart from student academic achievement. Higher education issues are thought of as their own system, entirely separate from K-12.
We believe that a more effective approach would be to bring these ideas under a single heading of “Education Pathways”, and then pitch different policies as having a simple unified purpose: to put every young person on a path to a good-earning wage job.
Our top priority for 2025
Over the last several months we’ve been working with colleagues from the community college and four-year public university sectors to develop a legislative proposal to embed new student outreach specialists at two-year and four-year public colleges and universities across Washington. The purpose of the outreach specialists is to complement the work of high school college and career advisers and help high school students and their families navigate the processes to obtain financial aid and enroll in college.
The idea behind this legislative push is that many students need more hands-on assistance. While this is widely understood, there is uneven access to comprehensive college and career counseling across our state. We believe that a viable path to increasing the access to this kind of support is to build off of an existing initiative called the Financial Aid Outreach and Completion Pilot Program. The program was created in 2022 and has been implemented in two pilot regions. The data on the pilot program so far shows its promise:
In the two pilot regions, the rates of students completing financial aid applications increased dramatically and well above the statewide average between 2022 and 2023.
Based on that data, we’ve modeled what the results would be if those trends carried over to a potential statewide expansion:
More than 3,200 additional students completing a financial aid application.
Nearly 3,000 new students directly enrolling in college.
More than $13.5 million dollars in new federal Pell Grant funds in the pockets of our students, and that we currently leave on the table in DC.
Will a policy window open?
We think there’s a compelling case for this proposal to invest in student outreach positions across the state. The policy window seems like it’s cracked, and we’re trying to throw it open by connecting the problem to the policy and hammering home the following argument:
There is a real public problem around helping people obtain good-earning wage jobs. The good news, both nationally and in our state, is that the job market and the economy overall are healthy. A recent study from the Washington Roundtable documents how job growth is expected to surge between now and 2032.
But, most of the jobs that pay the most and that will ultimately help someone be economically secure require education and training after high school, namely a 2-year or 4-year degree. And since 2019 the number of people pursuing either a 2-year or 4-year degree has decreased nationally and in Washington.
Layered on top of this are credible surveys and studies that show that young people want to continue their education beyond high school.
There is no one thing that explains this gap between student desires and actual college enrollment rates. For some it’s about cost or concerns about return on investment. For others it’s a missing sense of belonging in higher education. And then there’s the fact that many high school students are unsure about what career field they want to pursue, and that holds them back from committing to college.
Because these barriers are so varied and situational, that calls for policy that provides individualized support to students. And the best form of individualized support is a skilled and trusted adult whose purpose is to help a student do things like surface their goals and aspirations; identify an education or training program that connects to those goals; and then navigate the process to enroll in and pay for that program.
The current Financial Aid Outreach and Completion Pilot Program shows a lot of promise, and it offers a vehicle to build out an integrated statewide strategy for advising students to and through postsecondary education and training.
The political forces for 2025 are the key variable as to whether or not the window for this idea opens. There are numerous lawmakers in the House and the Senate that champion higher education policy, but it hasn’t been a top tier policy issue in the same way that something like climate change policy has been. Moving this issue up the political priority list is crucial because lawmakers always grapple with hard tradeoffs as to where to spend their capital, and the budget environment is going to be much more challenging than in years past.
That’s the cliffhanger as we officially enter the legislative session preseason before opening day on January 13, 2025. To help get ready for the session you can read our full policy platform, subscribe to our policy newsletter, and check out our webpage to get caught up on our work.
