Ben Mitchell
Director of Advocacy & Policy, Foundation for Tacoma Students
The state legislative session is coming to a crescendo. In the last three weeks bills either made it out or died in their house of origin, and we’re about to go into a key phase when spending and tax plans for the next two-year budget will be released.
Because of our giant budget deficit it’s a very hard year for legislation that proposes new spending, which is nearly everything. Up to this point anything with a price tag was subject to a lot of scrutiny as lawmakers have been focused on suppressing new spending and finding things to cut in order to close the deficit.
But true to the principle of Chekhov’s gun, we’ve known since late last year that new taxes were going to be an element in the story eventually. And this week saw the first big move in that direction with the release of a package of tax proposals from Senate Democrats. House Democrats will release their own tax ideas, and then budget proposals will come out on March 24. That will then set the table for the last five weeks of the session.
In the other Washington, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at eliminating the Department of Education. This landed exactly two months after his inauguration, and is part of a clear approach by his administration to dramatically deconstruct government agencies and funding. We think this is going to cause a lot of harm to the country. In the case of the Department of Education, it undermines our goal for everyone to have equal opportunity to receive a quality education.
An important thing for us to be doing right now is to think about what we will do to strengthen the federal role in education, when the inevitable realization comes that we need to.
Closing windows for legislation
As we’ve covered previously, for the first time since the Great Recession, our state is facing a significant budget deficit. This has created a legislative dynamic where bills face only the narrowest of paths to final passage. March 12 was an important cutoff date where bills had to make it out of their chamber of origin, or what we dub Level 4 in the legislative session videogame:
Level 1: Get voted out of policy committee in house of origin (House or Senate)
February 21 deadline
Level 2: Get voted out of fiscal committee in house of origin
February 28 deadline
Level 3: Get approved by Rules committee to move to a vote of the full chamber
March 12 deadline
Level 4: Get majority vote of full house of origin
March 12 deadline
Levels 5-8: Switch to opposite chamber, repeat steps 1-4 over there
April 16 deadline
Level 9: Get signed into law by Governor
The good news for bills that are still alive at this point is that we can officially upgrade their status from smiley (🙂) to shit-eating grin (😁). If your bill has made it this far you have to be feeling pretty good.
Here’s where things stand: (😁 = Very good shape; 🙂 = good shape; 😬 = dicey; 😵 = dead; 🤔 = I have no idea).
House Bill 1587 – Encouraging local government partner promise scholarship programs within the opportunity scholarship program.
Status – 😁 (Level 5)
Passed out of the House of Representatives, now in the Senate.
What this bill does
Allows local governments who want to create a college promise program to access matching funds through the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship.
Amended in Appropriations to limit the state matching amount for any single local government to $250,000 per year.
House Bill 1273 – Improving student access to dual credit programs.
Status – 😁 (Level 5)
Passed out of the House of Representatives, now in the Senate.
What this bill does
Improves high school student access to career and technical education programs by enhancing collaboration between K-12 and higher education, developing statewide articulation agreements, and improving administrative systems.
Amended in Appropriations to only maintain an existing pilot program. No new programming.
Senate Bill 5192 – Concerning school operating costs
Status – 😁 (Level 6)
Passed out of the Senate, now in the House
What this bills does:
Increases the funding formula for materials, supplies, and operating costs (MSOC), and provides that the increased allocation amounts may only be expended on MSOC.
Senate Bill 5263 – Concerning special education funding
Status – 😁 (Level 6)
Passed out of the Senate, now in the House
What this bill does:
Removes the 16% student enrollment cap for special education funding, and boosts the funded amount for each student. Does not include extra funding boost for special education students who spend more time in a general education classroom.
Two months ago, at the start of the legislative session, we had our eyes on a lot of legislation that aligned with our policy platform that has since died:
There were bills in the House and Senate to provide universal free school meals. Governor Ferguson came out in favor of this, and that earned the bills courtesy hearings in their policy committees. But the price for this coupled with anticipated cuts in federal funding for meals and nutrition meant they never stood a chance this year.
A bill to address chronic absenteeism in K-12 schools garnered bipartisan support, but it also crashed on the shores of the fiscal situation and never made it out of the Ways and Means Committee.
Of all the K-12 funding bills in the mix this year, our favorite was the only proposal that exhibited K-12 funding equity in the classical sense of equal opportunity – which requires differential funding.
A proposal to expand our flagship financial aid program, the Washington College Grant, had a decent run in the Senate. But that was before we learned that we would need to persuade lawmakers not cut financial aid, let alone expand it.
And of course, there were our top priority bills in the House and Senate that proposed to fund financial aid outreach specialists to help high school students navigate financial aid applications and college enrollment processes. These bills are also now dead.
Reflecting on all of that makes you wistful, like flipping through old photos. “We were so young…”
Joking aside, bills come and go every year. There are more goners than in the recent past, but this year still represented marginal progress for each of these ideas. Our work from here is to help to create the conditions for policy windows to open next year or the years after that for good ideas like these to move forward.
The first big move on new taxes
Two months into the legislative session the biggest outstanding question was what kinds of new revenue proposals will Democrats put on the table as part of an overall strategy to close the budget deficit. Senate Democrats let the cat out of the bag when they dropped a package of five different tax bills:
Senate Bill 5794 – Tax exemptions
How it works:
Repeals 20 different tax exemptions currently in state law that are “ineffective and obsolete.”
Projected to raise ~ $1 billion over four years.
Senate Bill 5795 – Sales tax
How it works:
Lowers the state sales tax from 6.5% to 6% beginning in 2027
Projected to decrease revenue by ~$1.3 billion per year.
Senate Bill 5796 – Payroll tax
How it works:
Companies that have more than $7 million in payroll expenses would pay a 5% tax on the compensation they pay to any employee who makes more than ~$176,000 per year.
Projected to raise ~$2.3 billion per year.
Senate Bill 5797 – Wealth Tax
How it works:
People who have more than $50 million in stocks, bonds, ETFs, mutual funds will be taxed at a rate of $10 for every $1,000 of assessed value above $50 million. The revenues would go to K-12 operating costs and special education. Providing an answer to the question of how those two big priorities could be paid for.
Projected to raise ~$4 billion per year.
Senate Bill 5798 – Property Tax
How it works:
Raises raise the current 1% cap on property taxes, and would allow the property tax to grow based on population and inflation. The state property tax is dedicated to public schools, and local property taxes would go to public safety, criminal justice, and community protection.
Projected to raise $779 million over four years at the state level.
All told, this full package of tax proposals is estimated to generate about $17 billion in new state revenue over four years. The high-end estimate of our state deficit is $16 billion over that same period – an amount that ticked up with the latest revenue forecast update earlier this week – so in theory these proposals taken together would square the budget circle without necessitating any budget cuts.
But this is just the opening gambit when it comes to new revenue. House Democrats will release their own slate of tax proposals, and we also just spent the first two-thirds of the legislative session killing bills and going through budget cutting scenarios. This was nobody’s idea of fun, so we assume that this move by Senate Democrats is to get everything on the table, with the understanding that not all of these proposals will be passed into law.
Here’s what will happen from here:
March 21 – House Democrats will release their proposals for new taxes.
March 24 – House and Senate will release their full budget proposals.
March 31 – House and Senate expected to pass their budget proposals by this date.
April 1-27 – House and Senate will agree on tax changes to pursue and ultimately the final spending plan for the next two-year budget.
Governor Ferguson is still a key player in all of this. The legislature has the authority to write the budget, but the Governor can veto things. Ferguson has not yet come out in favor of any particular taxes, and he has said that he does not support a wealth tax in particular. The Governor also has a higher profile and a bigger megaphone than any legislator, so he could push back on any of these ideas and have an impact.
But stepping back, the main takeaway from the release of these tax proposals is just to confirm what has been pretty clear since late 2024: new revenue is going to be a significant part of the final solution to address our budget deficit. An all cuts budget solution has never been seriously proposed, and it’s not going to be.
The case for a strong and assertive Department of Education
President Trump has signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. To state the obvious, the Department of Education was created by the Department of Education Organization Act of 1979 duly passed by the House and Senate, and according to the Constitution, cannot be eliminated without congressional action.
But President Trump can try to hobble the agency, and as he made clear in his campaign and since taking office, that is something that he very much wants to do. To that end, about half of the staff at the Education Department have been fired, and Elon Musk has decided to cancel basically all of our federal capacity to research and evaluate what’s happening in schools. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has talked about how she sees herself as overseeing some sort of “final mission,” which seems to be rendering the Department inert, demoralizing its staff, and changing the mission of the Department to be about reshaping how public education is organized, funded, and delivered.
For us at FFTS we think these actions are terrible. But that does not mean that we think education reform is per se terrible. What we’re focused on is how to fix things in our education system, and unfortunately the political choices of the Trump administration are incredibly detached from actual problems in education:
The nation’s report card shows widening academic achievement gaps.
Chronic absenteeism is a significant issue.
School districts are facing budget crunches.
These problems are fixable, but they require focus, partnership, determination, investment, and scaling up federal funding and accountability for public education. There are four broad categories for the biggest functions at the Department of Education, and we have thoughts on how to reimagine the federal role in education under each of these areas:
Administering higher education financial aid programs in the form of grants and loans.
Providing funding to K-12 schools, districts, and states for low-income students and students with disabilities.
Ensuring students aren’t discriminated against because of their race, sex, or national origin.
Performing and funding research, tracking education outcomes, and publishing data.
Student loan and grant programs
The biggest thing the Department of Education does in terms of dollars is administering federal grant and loan programs. These are massive programs that total about $120 billion each year and include the Pell Grant, federal Work Study, and federal direct loans. There has been a campaign underway for some time to double the value of the Pell Grant, and there’s a solid case for this. It would encourage more college going among students who may not otherwise decide to go, and would be targeted at students with the greatest financial barriers. When it comes to loans, a simple income-based repayment approach could replace the standard time-based approaches. We could even look at employer withholding as the mechanism, similar to how social security is deducted from paychecks.
K-12 funding programs for the most disadvantaged kids
Most of the federal funding for K-12 education is through two big grant programs: Title I grants for poor students, and IDEA grants for students with disabilities. Just as important as the money itself, is that these two programs come with requirements for states and districts to set minimum expectations for serving students. These accountability requirements were stepped up in a big way with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002. But NCLB was criticized for forcing schools to narrow their academic focus to math and reading. In response, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015 gave states more room to experiment with different ways of measuring schools’ performance and leeway to decide what should happen in persistently struggling schools.
Almost ten years on, it seems like ESSA replaced NCLB’s narrow accountability system with a vague one that has led to a decentering of the performance of underserved student groups. What’s needed might be a middle path that is more prescriptive than ESSA, but that includes a wider range of data points, as well as inputs like funding alongside outputs.
Civil rights enforcement
The Department of Education enforces several laws related to discrimination on the basis of sex, race, national origin, disability status, and age. In the U.S. we have an established decentralization of our education system’s funding, academic standards, and curricula to states and local school districts. That is not going to change, but it also should not be extended to local governments having full control over civil rights policy and enforcement. The Department of Education should scale up its commitment to the goal that no matter who you are or where you came from, our public school system will educate you to a standard of excellence. It was not that long ago the Black students and students with disabilities were not allowed to live as full members of society, and our era today requires an assertive Department of Education that will prosecute cruelty towards trans kids and others on the margins of society.
Education research
Within the Department of Education is an independent office called the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) that collects a lot of important data and statistical information, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress. IES also funds education research and rigorous reviews that look at how effective various programs and interventions are. The Trump administration cut about 90% of the staff at IES and cancelled a significant number of research grants. Research and data is our love language at FFTS, and the federal role in this work is something we should be smartly expanding, not cutting.
But there are improvements that can be made. Too much good research and data sits on the shelf, and the federal government could do a better job of thinking about how to disseminate and promote important research. The federal government could be more assertive when evidence and data clearly point to something being effective or ineffective. We’re used to A-F grades in education, so assign an A grade to interventions that have solid evidence, and an F grade to things that don’t. Lastly, there’s an open lane in DC for a certain out of power political party to launch an urgent challenge to figure out how to address the most pressing problems in education. Like eliminating the early literacy gap. Ensuring every high school graduate is truly college or career ready. Attracting the top college graduates to the teaching profession.
It's all about accountability
The key thing to know about the Department of Education is that it doles out a whole lot of money. President Trump has said that the big funding streams for financial aid, special education, and Title I will continue, but it doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of interest in the requirements and standards that the Department of Education has traditionally attached to that money.
Our hope is that someone or some group of players will come together to stand up for this necessary accountability. Accountability for how well the education system serves students. Accountability for how well the education system spends money. Accountability for making sure parents know how their kids are doing. Accountability for getting the best teachers in front of the students who need them the most.
We believe that in five, ten or twenty years from now, the most important thing for students will be the extent to which the Department of Education exhibits this robust accountability role.
