But not to worry.  Even as the education crowd was flooding Olympia with outraged emails and phone calls, the Zarellistas sharpened up their pencils and presto, not four days into the special session a new budget appeared, this time without those unsightly education cuts. 

That education cuts can come and go with relative ease in the Zarelli budget should come as no surprise, since what gets funded and what doesn’t is not really what this budget proposal is really about. To find the long-term ideological bedrock of the Zarelli budget we need to turn to the trinity of a blown-off pension payment, charter schools, and a state takeover of K-12 employee health care.  These things are all part of the latest R-plus-3D budget even though the first one is exactly the sort of “gimmick” about which Republicans have repeatedly berated Democrats, the second one doesn’t save a dime and would certainly end up draining public education even further, and the third one would actually cost the taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. 

But never mind all that fiscal responsibility stuff, what the three pillars of the Zarelli budget have in common is that they all further eviscerate the public sphere and take specific aim at the state’s biggest public sector union, the Washington Education Association.  You have to give Washington’s Republican/Road Kill politicians credit for their ability to learn from the experiences of their colleagues in places like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana.  Instead of overreaching to do away with public infrastructure and collective bargaining all at once and risking massive 99% backlash, our guys are coming at us piecemeal.  Makes them look reasonable by comparison. 

Before the ink was dry on the newest budget proposal, Governor Gregoire told the Zarellistas to “get over it” and promised to veto charter schools.  And the skipped pension payment is locked in a staring match with the Democrats’ apportionment payment delay.   

That leaves the health care takeover.  If we take the State Auditor and the State Health Care Authority at their word, Senate Bill 6442 (the bill included in the Zarelli budget that mandates the state takeover of K-12 employee health care) would do at least four things: create a new state bureaucracy, cost the state tens of millions of dollars, reduce health care for over a hundred thousand underpaid teachers and school workers while denying health care altogether to thousands of others, and, most importantly to the Republicans/Road Kills, take away collective bargaining rights.  The Zarellistas claim that 6442 will eventually save money, which could be true, but only because the added bureaucracy will be paid for and more by reduced health care for all and no health care for many.

History will no doubt judge us very harshly when it comes to health care.  Future generations will probably look back on our current health arrangements the way that we look back on slavery.  Here at the blog, we haven’t been to church in a while, but we still know that it is surely a sin that the richest country in history allows some people to go without medical care and other people to profit from pain.  The future will surely see us as barbaric for not understanding health care as a basic human right rather than a “benefit” to be reduced and exchanged for a budget deal.

But until that future comes, we should not take away the ability of school employees to have at least some say in their access to medical care.  Whatever else it will or won’t do, taking away the right to collectively bargain health care will mean that our teachers and other school employees will pay more and get less.  A lot of the real Democrats are going to get a lot of pressure to vote for the health care takeover, especially if charter schools and the pension gimmick go away.  The health care takeover will start to look like a compromise rather than the fundamental retreat that it is.

As they consider that vote, we hope they’ll keep at least one eye on the long-term consequences. 

If they come in the morning for some collective bargaining rights, they’ll be coming tonight for all of them.

Until the Friday night coup.

Senator Roach was one of several senators claiming to be the 25^th vote that pushed the Republican-plus-the-Democratic-Pep-Boys (Rodney, Jim, and Tim) budget over the top on the night the lights went out in Olympia.  But what set her apart from everybody else was what she told the Seattle Times about why she voted for the budget: "When it got down to it there were some things I was asking of my caucus … one of them was the full restoration of going back into the caucus and access to staff. And that occurred."

While Senator Roach’s admission that she traded the most important vote of the legislative session for a seat in the caucus room and another shot at staff may seem a little frightening to some, we think it’s positively refreshing compared to some of the sanctimonious verbiage that’s been flowing around the budget vote.  Senators Tom, Kastama, and Sheldon, for example, took to the editorial pages of the Seattle Times to talk about “mortgaging our future,” “budget trickery,” and their own “[b]old leadership.”  To hear them tell it, you’d think that only their courage and willingness to make the hard choices stands between us and certain financial ruin at the hands of drunken Democrats willing to spend money faster than Sarah Palin on a shopping spree at Nordstrom’s.

To buy that line you have to buy the idea that moving a payment to school districts from 11:59 to 12:01 is an irresponsible gimmick while completely blowing off a payment to a contractually guaranteed pension program is just responsible budgeting.  To use the overused analogy to the family budget, it’s like being a little late with the rent versus skipping a mortgage payment.

The Senate Republican (er, sorry, “bi-partisan”) budget and the thinking behind it also imagines that our boom and bust economy and the nineteenth-century revenue structure that supports our public infrastructure are fixed in nature, like the tides.  All the somber talk about living within our means never considers that the means might be too small to support a healthy society.

And that’s what’s really at stake as we head into yet another special legislative session.  It’s not about which budget has the bigger gimmick or kicking a can or which senators have the most courage.  It’s about very different visions of the future of Washington.  The bi-budget looks to institutionalize a vision that concentrates wealth at the very top, taxes poor people at 5 times the rate of rich people, and starves public infrastructure, including the K-12 and higher education that everybody says they want to fund first.

Congratulations, Senator Roach, both on your return to the caucus room and your refreshing honesty.

The rakish, usually quite affable, and always polite Senator Kilmer was clearly pissed last Friday as he raised his voice against the “backroom deal” that had brought a Republican budget to the floor.  It seems that Senate rules are arcane enough that a budget that no one but the writers has seen and about which there has been no public testimony can be introduced on a Friday afternoon and passed just after midnight on Saturday morning.  And Senate decorum is apparently such that saying “backroom deal” is akin to talking about somebody’s mama.

Fortunately, here at the blog we’re unconstrained by such niceties, so we can call Friday night what it was: mean.

• $311 million more cut from food and housing assistance, as well as services for children in poverty

• $67 million more cut from toxic cleanup of our lakes and rivers

• $44 million more cut from K-12 classrooms

• $41 million more cut from Disability Lifeline services for disabled adults

• $38 million more cut from college and university students

It would, of course, be a little unfair to blame the good senators who voted for this budget, since most of them hadn’t had time to read it by the time the question was called.

The real star of Friday night’s performance was Senator Joe Zarelli, the architect and mastermind of the budget coup.  Unlike that loose cannon Senator Kilmer, Zarelli remained mindful of the bright Senate line that separates gentility from anarchy and was careful not to say what he was really thinking, which was probably something like “The good senator from the sixth can go suck an egg, because I have the votes and she doesn’t.”  Instead, he tried his best to keep the smug looks off his face as he rose to do his best Fred McMurray imitation, genially telling the angry Democrats that as soon as they calmed down he was sure everything would be O.K.  If TVW had switched to black and white while Senator Zarelli was talking it would have been just like an episode of My Three Sons.

Playing the parts of Robbie, Chip, and Ernie were nominally Democratic Senators Tim Sheldon, Jim Kastama, and Rodney Tom.  They didn’t say much, but their votes were crucial to the coup and what allowed the Republicans to crow about the “bi-partisan” vote for the budget no one had read.

Senator Tom was particularly quiet Friday night.  His support for the Zarelli budget is particularly disheartening for those of us in higher education.  We’ve always hoped that Senator Tom, as chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee, would somehow see his way clear to genuinely supporting our state’s outstanding universities and colleges.  In the budget that Senate Democrats presented last week (the budget that people actually got to read and testify about), Senators Ed Murray, Lisa Brown and Derek Kilmer showed a lot of leadership and courage in finally proposing no more cuts to education.  As Senator Tom sat down with his Republican pals to write the coup budget, we would have hoped that he would have insisted, as the chair of Higher Education, that another $38 million not be cut from an already decimated system.  As the 25^th and deciding vote, you’d think he could’ve gotten at least that in the deal.

Hope he got something else really good instead.

But there are some long faces around Olympia, despite the good caseload and revenue news.  The changing winds have sapped the sails of the R&R (Republican and Road Kill) caucus, some of whom were salivating at the prospect of holding revenue hostage to what they like to call “reform.”  As the budget proposals have come forward and the revenue fight has disappeared, the R&Rs have fallen back on metaphors of childhood games and talked a lot about kicking cans down the road.

Here at the blog, we’ve never been shy about stealing a good line, so we too would like to encourage the legislature to not just keep kicking the can of our revenue problem down the road.

The Hunter and Murray supplemental budgets are what they’re supposed to be, temporary solutions trying to make the best of a bad deal.   They don’t do anything to address the structural problem of Washington’s incredibly regressive nineteenth-century tax system.

But today, on the extra day that the clash between the universe and the Gregorian Calendar gives us every four years, two bills showed up in the House Ways and Means committee that represent a, um, big leap forward.

The first one, Representative Reuven Carlyle’s HB 2762, we’ve spoken of here before.  It would put mandatory sunsets on almost all current tax breaks, forcing the legislature to make sure they’re still benefiting the state and maybe rake back some of the cash that’s only fattening corporate reserve accounts.  This should be a no-brainer.  The tax exemption that made perfect social and economic sense fifteen years ago may be nothing more than something a lobbyist is desperately trying to keep out of sight today.

In principle, the state senate endorsed this idea on February 11 when they passed SB 6088 by an Eyman-killing vote of 45 to 3.  6088 would put sunsets on all future tax breaks.  Admittedly, it’s easier to vote to end loopholes that don’t exist yet than it is to end the breaks for big campaign donors.  But the principle’s the same.  The rights of the unborn tax exemption should also be available to the exemptions living among us.  HB 2762 is the rare tax bill that actually could get the bi-partisan two-thirds it needs to pass.

Not so much with Representative Laurie Jinkins’s HB 2563, which would impose a 5% excise tax on capital gains.  This is a tax on rich people (about 3% of Washingtonians), which shouldn’t be a problem since they pay, on average, less than a fifth the percentage of their income in taxes than poor people do.  Forty two of the fifty states in our union already do this, many of them at a rate higher than 5%.  Once it were up and running, this tax would generate about $500 million dollars a year, which would leave our legislative budget writers not so dependent on what they can dig out of the cushions.  It would also be a big step toward dragging our tax code out of the cellar.

Neither of these bills will do anything to solve the immediate budget problems that the legislature is currently wresting with.  But they will eventually help us stop kicking the can by writing budgets that keep kicking people in the head.

Our friends over at Publicola have recently been hosting a rousing debate between big bucks Democrat Nick Hanauer and WEA President Mary Lindquist on teachers’ unions and K-12 schools.  Here at the blog, we have a hard time resisting sticking our nose into issues we don’t know much about, so we decided to join the fun with our own open letter to Mr. Hanauer:

Dear Mr. Hanauer,

I’ve been reading your recent Publicola colloquy with WEA President Mary Lindquist with interest.  I appreciate the way that you have genuinely engaged the question of what you call school reform and that you took the time to respond to Mary’s letter to you.  That’s unusual—most rich people who appoint themselves experts in something don’t usually engage with the people they criticize.  You seem like a guy who might be willing to listen, so I’d like to take the presumptuous step of joining the discussion.

In the full disclosure department, I am a professor at Western Washington University and the president of the United Faculty of Washington State, which represents the faculty at Washington’s four regional comprehensive universities.  We are affiliated with WEA and I sit on the WEA Board of Directors.  But, while I have learned a lot about K-12 education from the teachers and staff at the WEA, my union work deals almost exclusively with higher education, so I’m probably as much out of my depth as you are when it comes to K-12 education.  This letter is from one uninformed outsider to another and is not in any way an official response from the WEA.

In your letter to Mary you say that it’s not the hard-working, dedicated teachers who are ruining education but rather their nasty, child-hating union.  I grew up as an upper middle class white boy in the American South, where all of the white grownups had their favorite Black people—the cook, the person who looked after the kids, the guy who took care of the cattle for a share of the corn crop.  But God forbid that one of those favorites be seen gathering on a street corner with Black people from out of town, or at an NAACP meeting, or having coffee with a union representative.  At the first hint of any organized activity, our grownups would turn on their favorite Black people faster than a summer squall could dump an inch of rain on the pasture.  Suddenly the individuals who had been so tender, wise, and trustworthy were scary, too stupid to know better, and not to be let into the house.  Everybody loved the solitary black person, nobody liked it when they started to bunch up and talk crazy.

That’s kind of the way it is with teachers.  Everybody loves a teacher, nobody likes the big, bad teachers’ union.  As long as they’re staying after school to give the extra help to the kids who need it or reaching into their own pockets to pay for the supplies that the state doesn’t anymore, teachers are saints.  But when they collectively advocate for decent wages, adequate health care, and working conditions that don’t erode by the minute they’re a threat to the moral fabric of the state.

Perhaps it is this construction of a teachers’ union that isn’t composed of teachers (the same way my southern relatives always believed that organized black people were put up to it by uppity Northern Blacks or communists) that leads to some of the difficult constructions in your letter to Mary.  You say that “the vast majority of Washington’s teachers care deeply about student outcomes, work incredibly hard, and are constantly working to improve their instructional practices.”  But in the very next paragraph you talk about the “elements that are largely missing from our State’s public education system: relentlessly high standards, a culture of excellence, and a systemic commitment to innovation.”  For both of these things to be true, you have to imagine the deeply caring, hard working, forward looking teachers you describe coming together in their democratically elected union and suddenly losing all interest in excellence and innovation.

The truth is that teachers in this state and across the country are concerned about the “reforms” so relentlessly pursued by well-funded corporate interests (from Arne Duncan to the Gates Foundation to the League of Education Voters) because many of them will do to public education what the same kind of privatizing “reform” did to health care.  Education is what Wall Street has called “the big enchilada,” the last big public sphere (after health care) available for private exploitation and profit.  And if we privatize education while trotting out euphemisms like reform, efficiency, and excellence, we’ll get exactly what we have now with health care.  Rich people will have access to the best education in the world and everybody else will get education that is extremely profitable but below the standards of many developing countries.

There is something deeply disingenuous about the arguments that you and other business elite school reformers make when you say things like “I am not a teacher and would not presume to tell you how to teach . . . but in my experience as a business leader and entrepreneur . . . .”  The education foundations and leagues and task forces that people like you fund are full of non-teachers who are constantly telling teachers how to teach, but even if that weren’t true, the evidence of your steel-eyed business sense is hard to see in the education “reforms” you’re pushing.  I’m not a business leader and entrepreneur, but it isn’t a stretch to imagine that if education were a company you were trying to turn around, you wouldn’t be focusing on the stuff that’s always a part of education “reform.”

• If you had a company that was as desperately underfunded as public education, you probably would make that funding your first priority.

• If you had a company that needed more workers as desperately as public education needs more teachers, you wouldn’t spend all your time worrying about the order in which you were going to lay off the workers you have.

• If you had a company that desperately needed the most trained and qualified workers the way that our schools need the most trained and qualified teachers, you wouldn’t turn to a temp agency like Teach For America (whose freshly scrubbed and earnest young charges make up for their lack of qualification with lots of well-meaning white liberal racism).

• And you certainly wouldn’t spend your time writing complicated and lugubrious evaluation policies that only the most committed HR bureaucrat could love.

If a smart business person like you were running public education and looking to genuinely succeed, you would hire the very best people you could find, you would hire enough of them, you would pay them very well, you would get out of their way and let them do their jobs, and you would fire them if they didn’t get that job done.  The only thing that the education “reform” movement seems to be genuinely interested in is the firing part.

In your letter to Mary, you tell the world that “my record as a proponent of more funding for our public schools is unassailable.”  Bully for you.  The fact that you and everybody else has failed in the quest for adequate funding (as even the State Supreme Court has acknowledged) should not lead you to abandon your progressive values.

You shouldn’t fall into the trap of scapegoating teachers for American racism and class inequality.  A UW Philosophy grad like yourself should know that a teacher evaluation bill isn’t going to make a dent in the alloy of democracy for white men, capitalism, and racialized slavery that coalesced in the 18^th century and created the backbone of American inequality that persists to this day

You should get out of the weeds of charter school statistics and Bellevue anecdotes and recognize that the assault on teachers’ unions has nothing to do with education and everything to do with the further erosion of public infrastructure and what few collective bargaining rights remain.  Most school reform policies come from a very unprogressive playbook and most of the bills you support get their templates from ALEC.

You should recognize that public school in the United States has never been pure.  The two big forces behind creating and mandating public schooling have been anti-Catholicism and child labor laws.  Nineteenth-century Protestant elites, fearing that Catholic schools were creating a populace more loyal to the Pope than the President, were the driving force behind the public school system. And in the twentieth century, mandatory public schooling to the age of 16 went hand in hand with the outlawing of child labor and the need to create a warehouse for the suddenly unemployed and unruly mob of children of the laboring classes.  School is as much about learning to pledge allegiance, line up, and respond to Pavlovian bells as it is about education.  Teachers work in a context that is usually completely antithetical to the creativity and innovation you talk so much about.  Insofar as you’re interested in public schools as something more than a factory that produces semi-skilled workers for businesses, you should focus on reforms more fundamental than busting teachers’ unions.

Maybe you should have tried to have a cup of coffee with Mary Lindquist before you made a big public show of chatting up Rob McKenna—another guy who, like you and me, doesn’t really know anything about K-12 teaching.

The WEA has its problems—it’s almost as white as you and me and it has all the usual inefficiencies that come with a big democratic organization.  But the WEA is not education’s problem.

I hope you’ll consider that.

Sincerely,

Bill Lyne

Who tried teaching high school for one year before moving on to the much less difficult job of college professor.

There is no doubt that it serves the public welfare to encourage colleges to help minority and disadvantaged students. Nor is there any doubt that colleges should ensure that all students graduate in a timely manner. Already Washington’s colleges do an excellent job with retention and completion. Done well, efforts to encourage retention and completion rates should lead schools to invest in smaller classes and better faculty mentoring. On the other hand, it can also lead to lower standards or, alternatively, schools being more averse to taking risks with students who might struggle, often those from minority or disadvantaged backgrounds.

But the real problem with HB 2265 is its effort to base colleges’ performance on how many students graduate in predetermined fields. There are several issues with this approach. First, linking funding to performance outcomes seems an act of hubris from a legislature that has reduced funding to the point where our four-year institutions are barely public anymore. To be legitimate, this bill should be accompanied with a guarantee that that at least fifty percent of funding for four-year institutions will come from the state.

Second, our four-year institutions have missions that are much broader than what the bill envisions. From an economic perspective, four-year colleges graduate people with transferable skills, the skills employers consistently say they want more than anything else. By cultivating students’ analytical abilities and creativity and by teaching them to write, four-year institutions prepare them not just for today’s economy, but to invent tomorrow’s economy. Recent studies of student learning outcomes suggest that students gain these skills most effectively in the liberal arts and sciences. By narrowing the mission of four-year institutions to high-demand fields, Washington risks losing its competitive edge against other states and nations.

But, more important, four-year institutions devote significant resources and energy to general education programs and majors unrelated to high-demand fields, or any fields whatsoever. This bill will have a negative effect on important areas of study, from English and history to biology and physics. It will limit students’ choices by reallocating resources toward specified programs. And it will further threaten the broader personal and civic purposes of higher education.

A better assessment would measure not the number of students in high-demand fields but whether graduates gained the transferable skills employers want most, and whether graduates become thoughtful citizens. Studies show that college graduates are more engaged in politics and are more likely to participate in the various voluntary associations that sustain the fabric of American civic life. If we want to recognize the various ways in which college education contributes to society, we need to include these measures as well.

Four-year institutions are designed to perform different tasks for both the economy and the society than more vocational institutions. By narrowing the goals of four-year education, we risk transforming baccalaureate education in ways that may not be good for us in the short or long term.

On February 11, the Washington State Senate took a big bipartisan step toward moving our state out of Zombie Land. SB 6088, introduced by Senator Craig Pridemore, requires that every new tax break have a clear statement of what policy goal the exemption is trying to achieve and a shelf life of five years.  The bill passed the senate with 45 yeas, 3 nays, and 1 excused.  It’s not every day that a bill with the word “tax” in it passes by a margin that not even Tim Eyman could deny.  It should sail through the house.  It’s hard to argue against the idea that tax breaks should provide some benefit to the state and that they ought to be regularly reviewed to make sure that they’re still providing those benefits.

But if you want to hear some of those arguments, tune in for the debate on HB 2762.  Representative Reuven Carlyle introduced this bill on February 2. It was referred to the Ways and Means Committee and has yet to be scheduled for a hearing.  Here at the blog, we desperately hope the HB 2762 hearing happens because we want the bill to pass, and it’s always fun to watch people who argued for something on Tuesday argue against the same thing on Wednesday.

HB 2762 does the same thing that SB 6088 does, only it does it for existing tax breaks, not just those that are currently only gleams in lobbyists eyes.  SB 6088 prevents the birth of new zombies, HB 2762 drives stakes through the hearts of the living dead currently walking among us. It allows the legislature to regularly consider the efficacy of tax exemptions and get rid of those that benefit only the exemptees and not the state of Washington.  It puts expiration dates from 2017 to 2025 on all existing tax exemptions, meaning that the legislature will have to reconsider the benefit those breaks bring to the state and act affirmatively if it still seems like a good idea to continue those breaks.

Last week that idea was so good that over ninety percent of the state senate voted for it.  No one’s going to change their mind just because now we’re talking about tax exemptions that actually exist.  Right?

Whether it’s the momentum of that whole 99% thing, or some fresh legislative leadership or just that enough is enough, it’s clear that momentum for a fundamental restructuring of the Washington State tax system is building. Even those legislators who have signed Grover Norquist’s we’ll-let-all-poor-people-die-before-we-raise-taxes-one-penny pledge (and you know who you are) have begun to face the inevitable. Probably the surest sign that this is happening is that the people who until now have only been shouting “Reform!” have now started to say “Reform then Revenue.”

These folks are, of course, using the word reform with a fair bit of elasticity. A more accurate description of what has happened as Washington’s tax system has collapsed would be just doing less for people who need more. When Governor Gregoire pitched her half-cent sales tax increase, she touted how she had “reformed” Worker’s Compensation, Unemployment Insurance, Public Pensions, and access to state parks. What this really means is that people hurt on the job are more vulnerable, people without jobs have a harder time paying their rent and buying food, people who spend their working lives serving the state will be poorer in their golden years, and people who want to visit public parks have to pay. The “reform” of our health care system has left 170,000 more people in our state without health insurance and taken away access to such things as hearing aids and eyeglasses from 180,000 people. The “reform” of our education system has inflated the size of K-12 classrooms, turned students away from community colleges, and left students at universities paying more to get less.

It would be a mistake to say that we have arrived at this sorry place by accident. Many years of business elite lobbying and false populist grass roots organizing (Tim Eyman is the tip of a very big iceberg) have created a pervasive illusion that Washington is an overtaxed state where greedy, lazy state employees get fat sucking from the public tit. In fact, the only overtaxed people in this state are poor people, who pay 17% of their income in taxes, while rich folks pay 3%. State revenues per thousand dollars of income have fallen from $64 in 1997 to $49 in 2010.

This assault on the public sphere has eroded Washington’s social, health, and education infrastructures to a point where a critical mass of legislators have finally begun to show some leadership. In an election year, dozens of legislators have proposed reviewing and closing tax expenditures, a capital gains tax, and a couple of different kinds of income tax.

None of this stuff is going to pass this year. Some of it might go to a spring ballot, but the chances of passing there are also pretty slim. This should not in any way slow the tide of genuine tax reform. The false consciousness that pervades the public perception of Washington’s taxes was not built in a day and won’t be undone in one legislative session.

This year’s all-cuts supplemental budget is going to make Washington even meaner than it has already become. We must hope that the death and destruction that comes with that will unite Washington’s citizens and their representatives continue to break the chains of the country’s most unjust tax system.

In all the intense and wide-ranging testimony about the Marriage Equality bills (SB 6239 and HB 2516) nobody asked an obvious question: Why would anyone want to be married by the state?

Even the most cursory glance at the history of marriage in the Western world reveals an institution whose primary purpose has been to oppress and exploit women and hoard and protect property while naturalizing a heterosexual romantic narrative that disguises power arrangements that are overwhelmingly homosocial and homoerotic.  If you’re looking for an institution with which to reinforce gender and class inequality, you couldn’t do much better than marriage.  And yet no one in the legislature has introduced a bill to abolish marriage.

And everyone who testified about marriage equality seemed to take it for granted that marriage as we know it is something that’s generally O.K.  The folks who testified for the bills talked persuasively about the mainstream legitimacy and the boatload of social and economic benefits that will come with marriage.

The people who testified against the bills, on the other hand, brought nothing less than the Wrath of God.  The unblinking, possessed looks in their eyes, the slight quiver in their hands, and the thunder in their voices as they talked of abominations against nature had us here at the blog just about ready to repent, head to the confessional and save our heathen souls before it’s too late.

But then we remembered what we’d have to give up if we started living our lives within the bounds of what nature has given us.  Clothing, for example, is not found in nature, to say nothing of iPhones and Prius’s.  Cooking your food isn’t natural.  Heck, crapping in a toilet, instead of wherever the urge hits, is not natural.  So, after a long struggle with our inner blog, we resigned ourselves to an eternity in hell and took the side of Katherine Hepburn when she imperiously told Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen that Nature is what we were put on this earth to overcome.

And it has been a great comfort to us to see so many other prominent straight people (many of whose best friends are no doubt gay) having the same wrestling match with their consciences over this issue.  Senator Mary Margaret Haugen, who announced herself as the pivotal twenty-fifth vote in the senate, evoked memories of those crusty white people reluctantly embracing civil rights, as she talked about generational differences and strong Christian beliefs.  And Governor Gregoire dominated a whole news cycle when she soliloquized like Dante about her 7 year journey (7 years that gay Washingtonians were denied equality, but who’s counting) and worried about the Vatican (no doubt a legitimate fear given how hard the Catholic Church has come down on those bishops who looked the other way while priests abused children).

But still nobody paused to suggest that now that we’re about to give more people access to the burning house of marriage perhaps we should do a little something about putting out the fire.  Perhaps we should at least think a bit about an institution that to this day remains, at least symbolically, an exchange of woman as property between two men (“Who gives this woman to be married to this man?”), an institution that created the concept of spousal abuse.

And it may be that a greater inclusion will change the institution for the better.  After all the love and monogamy and parenthood smoke has cleared, what the legislature and the governor will have enacted is greater access to basic rights like health care, equal taxation, binding wills, and the ability to visit loved ones in the hospital.  And that will be a great thing that should have been done a long time ago.

And perhaps this law will move us a little bit closer to a Washington where people don’t have to live in fear of social exile or losing their jobs or being beaten or killed simply for who and how they choose to love.

What we do know for sure is that something is probably changing for the better, otherwise so many angry people wouldn’t be about to spend so much money on a referendum to overturn a law on which the ink has barely dried.

Come to Papa.

WGU is a nominally non-profit enterprise, but their business model is no different from for-profit operations like Kaplan or Phoenix.  They depend a lot on federal and state financial aid, which is why the play for state need grant makes sense.

Their business also depends on a special appeal to working people.  With the same faux populism that Newt Gingrich uses to bash Mitt Romney, WGU-Washington tells prospective students that they can go to school after they’ve put the kids to bed, they can get credit for all the things they’ve learned out there in the rough and tumble world and they don’t have to put up with all the stuff that those twenty-year olds at real college do—football games, beer bongs, classes, actual professors, stuff like that.

Despite the fact that we’re hopelessly snotty and elitist college professors here at the blog, we’re actually all for the Western Governor’s model in theory.  Godspeed to those who can teach themselves, those whose work and life experience have given them the knowledge and skill necessary to earn a credential, those who can demonstrate competence without logging any class time.  And certainly we’re all for people with jobs getting the training they need to get better jobs.

What we’re not for is those people getting ripped off.

Tuition at WGU-Washington will run you between $2890 and $3250 every six months.  Then there’s the extras: the resource fee ($145), the application fee ($65), the science lab fee ($350), the student teaching fee ($1000), and the education leadership practicum fee ($1000).  So let’s say you’re going to WGU to get a BA in Information technology.  And let’s say it takes you their advertised two years, half the time a real BA would take.  That’ll cost you $12,120, give or take (Nursing an Teaching will run you more).

And here’s what you get for that 12 grand:

• Coursework attempted and completed, and learning resources (excluding textbooks) scheduled into your Degree Plan.
• Assessments (limited by individual course guidelines and a standard number of permitted re-takes)Counsel from dedicated mentors.
• Note: Tuition costs do not include the price of textbooks and various materials (varies by course).

This is taken straight from the WGU-Washington website.  Translated, it means you get  1)  Course materials you can find for free in lots of other places all over the web (but not textbooks, those are extra); 2) some tests; and 3) someone to call for pep talks (not to be confused with teachers).  Twelve thousand bucks for that.

If WGU were really the working class heroes they claim to be, they would post links to all of the free learning resources for the subjects they teach online.  Then they would make their assessments available for a $100 processing fee.  You could do the same studying at night or on your coffee break and then take the tests and get your degree for a hundred bucks instead of twelve thousand.  The pep talks you’d have to get from your friends and family.

That would, of course, cut into the budget for all the other stuff WGU does.  Advertising would take a hit and we’d certainly miss those peppy WGU-Washington commercials every ten minutes on T.V.  And then there’s lobbying–the Salt Lake Tribune reports that from 1999 to 2005, WGU spent at least $1.6 million on lobbying.  And the executive compensation packages would surely suffer. (A lot of folks in Olympia made a big fuss a few weeks ago when the CWU Board of Trustees all got high and gave Jim Gaudino $500,000 spread over the next five years—WGU Chancellor Bob Mendenhall’s $700.000-plus annual salary makes President Gaudino look like one of the 99 percent.)

That’s the stuff that’s now going to be covered by state need grant money—taxpayer money.  Or, at least we have to assume that’s where it will go.  At a time when the legislature is regularly beating on our very open and transparent real public universities to become more open and transparent, Washington’s sparkly new public online university is utterly unaccountable to the state.  WGU-Washington does not make its accreditation reports, its graduation rates, its student debt loads, its budgets, or its salaries publicly available.  SB 6322 is asking Washington taxpayers to take it on faith that their money going to WGU-Washington is somehow a good investment.

But hey, WGU did turn out to be a pretty safe bet.