UFWS News

UFWS Message: If They Come in the Morning

2012-03-20T12:40:28Z

If They Come in the Morning by Bill Lyne ufwsblog.org

So the budget that nobody read but all the Senate Republicans and three nominal Democrats voted for as the clock struck midnight turned out to be a bit of an embarrassment. It seems that the “fund education first” crowd had written a budget that cut education by another 80 mil or so, which quickly became a little awkward for the Zarellistas, the Road Kill renegades, and the putative Republican gubernatorial nominee.

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.

web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/

UFWS Message: An Open Letter to Nick Hanauer

2012-02-27T17:28:51Z

Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel
by Bill Lyne

An Open Letter to Nick Hanauer

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 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 ( http://publicola.com/2012/02/21/democrat-hanauer-on-education-mckenna-is-on-the-right-track-we-are-not/) 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 18th 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 wor
kers 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.

--
web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: <http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/>;

UFWS Message: Night of the Living Dead

2012-02-16T23:21:45Z

Night of the Living Dead by Bill Lyne www.ufwsblog.org

Death and taxes may be inevitable, but here in Washington, tax exemptions never die. There are tax breaks hanging around that are so old and so irrelevant to the well-being of the state that only a lobbyist could love them.

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?

--
web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: <http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/>;

UFWS Message, Working Class Heroes

2012-01-23T11:48:25Z

Working Class Heroes by Bill Lyne www.ufwsblog.org

A big thanks to Senators Hill, Tom, Becker, Kastama, and Litzow, who have put some money in our pocket here at the blog. Last year, when the bill to establish Western Governors University-Washington was slithering through the legislature and everybody was promising that WGU would never come back looking for state funding, a betting pool developed around how long it would be before WGU came back looking for state funding. The smart money was on two years, thinking the WGU folks would have the decorum to lay low for at least one legislative session. But on a hunch we doubled down on one year. And now, exactly a year later, Senators Hill, Tom, et al have introduced SB 6322—“Allowing nonprofit institution s recognized by the state of Washington to be eligible to participate in the state need grant program.”

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.

web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/

UFWS Message, Signs Taken For Small Wonders, Part 1

2012-01-19T20:46:25Z

Signs Taken For Small Wonders, Part 1 by Bill Lyne ufwsblog.org

Like a SuperPac not coordinating with the McKenna campaign, the Seattle Times called out Democratic Leadership by name this week. They told us that a study from the University of Pennsylvania had told them that Chris Gregoire, Frank Chopp, and Lisa Brown are responsible for the fact that not enough people in Washington go to college.

A big tip of the blog hat to the folks at the Times and their capacity for imaginative leaps. The Penn report only mentions Gregoire in passing and says nothing about Chopp or Brown even though it is titled “State Policy Leadership Vacuum.” A better title might have been “Ivy League Thinking Vacuum.”

The study starts off well, detailing how Washington’s public universities are among the best, most efficient, and most productive in the country. It then stays strong, pointing out how underfunded and deeply cut our universities have been.

But then, after a brief detour for some obligatory K-12 bashing, the report goes right off the logical rails, telling us that the solution for saving an excellent system that has been devastated by relentless budget cuts is to spend money on more bureaucracy and new layers of administration.

Being the college professors we are here at the blog, we try to steer clear of making fun of academics who ignore the obvious in favor far-fetched theory and lugubrious detail. But in this case, it’s pretty tempting to put on our best James Carville drawl, turn to our colleagues at Penn and say, “It’s the money, Stupid!”

Which is something we might also say to our friends at the Times. The next time they want to bash Democrats (and here we mean all of them, not just the guv, the speaker, and the majority leader) for lack of leadership, they should point to Washington’s ridiculous tax policy, and the way that Tim Eyman and millions and millions of corporate dollars have hijacked Washington’s future. You can’t rescue Washington’s state universities with Ivy League studies, you’re gonna need some money.

web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/

UFWS Message, STEM and the State

2011-11-14T21:01:57Z

STEM and the State by Bill Lyne www.ufwsblog.org

Last month, Western Washington University held its Board of Trustees meeting at Safeco Field, the house that Washington taxpayers built. The last part of the meeting was devoted to a panel discussion with a distinguished group of legislators and business leaders.

One of the peppiest panelists was a fellow named Lew McMurran, the Vice President of Government and External Affairs for the Washington Technology Industry Association. Mr. McMurran enthusiastically led the panel in chorus after chorus of Washington’s state universities need to produce more graduates in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields. He told the trustees that while those sociology degrees might be interesting if you like that kind of thing, it was time to quit funding that nonsense and pour all the resources into the techno-degrees that his folks needed to hire.

Here at the blog, we can’t tell you what a relief it is that sociology seems to have supplanted English as the whipping boy of choice when our hard-nosed pragmatist friends want to decry the frivolity of college majors that are not business or STEM related. Social scientists falling to the status of poets can only be yet another sign of progress in a late capitalist world.

But alas, much as it might pain us to say it, we still need the sociologists, if for no other reason than they subsidize the engineers. The good news about those worthless humanities and social science degrees is that they’re cheap. The professors have no job prospects in the real world so they work for peanuts, there aren’t any labs and it has become perfectly acceptable to batch process those students in classes of 500. The ever-increasing tuition that philosophy and history majors take out more and more loans to pay more than covers the cost of their navel-gazing education, so universities can take the extra and ship it down to the science and technology end of campus to help pay for the real degrees.&nb sp; So the key to more STEM degrees turns out to be more humanities and social science students.

But STEM cannot live on sociologists alone. The post-World War Two techno-industrial boom that drove American prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century was fueled by public university systems that were almost completely subsidized by state and federal tax dollars. That public investment made America the runaway leader in scientific and technological development. STEM-mania (and the job market it serves) is one of the strongest arguments for public universities that are much more robustly public than what we have now.

But when the conversation at the Western Board meeting turned to taxes, Mr. McMurran’s enthusiasm dimmed considerably. In response to a couple of legislators who felt that the state should explore some new tax revenue and that perhaps businesses (especially the ones stockpiling mountains of profit) should pay their fair share, Mr. McMurran reacted like a parent whose child has farted in church, going so far as to suggest that many legislators have been just plain rude to business on the subject of taxes.

Calling for more STEM degrees without at the same time demanding more business taxpayer investment in public universities is kind of like trying to make cake without flour and eggs. STEM degrees are expensive, which means that you either have to revive state support to universities or you have to keep jacking up tuition. And the more you raise tuition, the more you create a student population that won’t necessarily be interested in STEM degrees.

Sadly enough, when students arrive at universities, we still let them choose their own major, much to the chagrin of those people who want universities to produce more STEMs the way a sweatshop in a third world country might produce more Nike shoes. Students from lower middle and working class backgrounds (precisely the students now being squeezed out of higher education) tend to be the ones who choose the business and STEM majors, the majors with sound economic futures. The children of the professional, managerial, and owning classes, the ones whose parents bought them piano lessons and had the nanny take them to museums, tend to be the ones who fill up the music, philosophy, and poetry classes. At Western, in the mid st of the Great Recession and with tuition going up by double-digit percentages every year, demand for Creative Writing degrees has never been higher.*

The technocratic industrial revolution in the second half of the twentieth century was not spawned by private universities. It was fueled by widespread access to publicly funded public universities that allowed the children of bus drivers and typists to become scientists and engineers.

*These are, of course, just the impressionistic musings of an English professor. For the real data on the relationship between economic class of origin and career choice, you should probably talk to a, um, sociologist.

web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/

UFWS Message: Get Off the Fence

2011-09-28T23:07:52Z

Get Off the Fence by Bill Lyne ufwsblog.org

Sit on a fence long enough and you end up with a fence post up your ass.

So now is the time for everyone in Washington’s public university community—students, parents, alumni, faculty, staff, administration, and trustees—to get off the fence and strongly support revenue solutions to the new state budget problem.

With the ink still drying on last year’s bi-partisan, sustainable, all-cuts budget, the state economist has predicted that tax revenues will be down another 1.4 billion. Much hubbub has ensued and on November 28 state legislators will head back to Olympia for a special session to try to put the house back in order.

Times like these are especially tough on public universities. Unlike those snotty kids in public schools or those pesky old people living high on the pension hog or those freeloaders sucking up Medicaid, our budgets are not constitutionally, contractually, or federally protected. This is compounded by the fact we seem to be everybody’s second priority. Democrats tell us they love us and they’re going to give us the funding we need just as soon as they raise taxes. Republicans tell us they love us and they’re going to give us the funding we need just as soon as they cut all those social services. In a state where unconstitutional initiatives keep majority Democrats from governing with a majority and where a critical mass of Democrats often act like Republicans, this kind of love triangle can leave college folk twisting themselves into knots trying to be all things to all people. University presidents tend to feel like they’ve navigated the legislative Scylla and Charybdis just right when Republicans think they’re Democrats who lean right and Democrats think they’re Republicans who lean left.

But now the jig is up.

If our public universities are going to remain public, if the middle classes and below are going to continue to have the opportunities that come with a genuine college education, if the state is going to continue to have the economic development and social stability that comes from strong universities, then this state must raise more revenue. With nothing but dark economic clouds on the horizon, we can no longer continue to try to walk a political tightrope, thinking that if we don’t do anything to piss off anybody, then maybe somebody will give us some money.

It is time for us to get off the fence and make full-throated arguments for tax reform and new revenue, including but not limited to the following:

--Even if public universities weren’t going to benefit from increased revenue, it’s high time Washington’s tax policy joined at least the late twentieth century. We have the most regressive tax system in the country.

--When some Democratic legislators say that they are unwilling to kill people so other people can go to college, they have a point. Capitalist economies without social safety nets should only exist in Dickens novels. The state budget has been so bad for so long that higher ed folks have started eying K-12 and social services as competitors for scraps and that’s a sure sign that we’re losing our way. We’ve taken to making the morally dubious argument that a dollar invested in higher ed makes more long term sense than a dollar invested in children’s health care or food for poor people. It’s time for us to stop that and start telling people that there should be two dollars.

--Public sector jobs are still jobs. The demonization of public employees has been so relentless that you’d think they were just a bunch of thieves stealing our tax money. Actually, they’re cops, firefighters, teachers and other hard working professionals, thousands of whom have been laid off. This not only erodes the public infrastructure to dangerous levels, it also drives the unemployment rate up, because . . .

…most of those private sector jobs ain’t coming back, taxes or no taxes. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have kept tax burdens on the well off unconscionably low in the hopes of spurring job creation. That hasn’t happened, because a variety of factors (mostly technology) have made it possible for companies to downsize and maintain or increase productivity. Insisting that rich people and corporations pay their fair share of taxes won’t kill jobs and isn’t class warfare, because...

…to quote Elizabeth Warren, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

--Taxes don’t drive away business. Study after study, leaked internal memo after leaked internal memo have shown that taxes are not near the top of the list in corporate calculations about where to do business. Boeing is much more likely to leave because our public universities aren’t graduating enough engineers than they are because taxes went up a little bit to pay for those engineers.

Here at the blog, we have often had the opportunity to share a beverage and conversation with revenue averse legislators, and we can say with sincerity that they are not like their comrades in the other Washington. For the most part, they are decent, thoughtful, and well-meaning people who are not simply trying to score political points. However committed they may be to smaller government and lower taxes, they aren’t likely to toss the university baby out with the tax bathwater just because we disagree about how to solve the budget crisis.

So it’s time for everybody in Washington’s public university community to get off the fence. We need to say as loudly and as forcefully as we can that enough is enough. We cannot just continue to cut. We need more revenue.

web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/

UFWS Message, Hunter and the Hunted

2011-04-05T13:33:31Z

Hunter and the Hunted by Bill Lyne www.ufwsblog.org

So the House budget proposal was unveiled on Monday, and, well, it could have been worse. Don’t get us wrong, here at the blog we still feel that tax loopholes should be on the table (giving money to out of state banks and private jet folks while people go hungry and die is, no matter how hard you squint, just wrong), that there ought to be a more serious and sustained effort to reform the goofiest tax system in the country, and that every proposed budget this year is just another step in the destruction of our crucial public infrastructure.

But . . . given the local problem of creating a budget within ridiculous constraints, Rep. Ross Hunter and the House Dems did a remarkable job. Obviously not everyone is going to buy into all the choices, but this budget has a coherence and clarity that we haven’t seen in a while.

For our state universities, the House budget whacks $100 million more than the Governor’s proposal did. But a tip of the blog hat to Representative Hunter and his colleagues for making the extent of the cuts clear. You don’t have to dig into the murky footnotes to find how the details of pension adjustments and salary reductions add up to more than the advertised cut. The full damage was right up front in the presentation that Representatives Hunter, Darneille, and Sullivan made at their press conference. The slide showing the higher ed cuts had a big asterisk making it clear that the cut percentages included all the back of the book stuff.

The other great thing that the House budget presentation did was make it clear that state spending and public services continue to shrink. State spending per person is the lowest it’s been since 1986 and dropping. Remember that the next time somebody tells you that state spending is out of control.

And while state spending has been dropping steadily, spending on higher education has dropped precipitously. With both the governor’s and the house budget proposals out now, the writing on the wall is pretty clear. When the smoke clears on this year’s legislative session, state support to our public universities will have been cut by 50% or more in the last two biennia.

To understand the consequences of this disinvestment, we need only turn our eyes to Oskaloosa, Iowa, the home of Tom Mortenson, publisher of the newsletter Postsecondary Education Opportunity [link] . Since 1991, Mortenson’s newsletter has “relentlessly calculated, documented, and reported& rdquo; the consequences of state disinvestment in higher education over the last two decades. Mortenson lists Washington as one of his “dumb, dumber, dumbest” states, for having recorded our poorest rates of investment in higher education over the last two fiscal years. In FY 2010, we spent $5.48 per $1000 of personal income in this state on higher education. That’s 63.7% below our peak of $15.53 in FY 1974.

Perhaps the clearest consequence of the thirty-year choice that policy makers in Washington and other states have made to disinvest in public higher education has been the exacerbation of the gap between those who are born with stuff and those who have to work for it. As Mortenson points out:

This decline in state investment in higher education has occurred during the Human Capital Era of the U.S. economy. Since 1973 income and the welfare that income provides has been based almost entirely on educational attainment, particularly higher education. Since 1973 the real incomes and living standards of people of all genders and races and ethnicities, families, households, cities, and states have been reallocated according to educational attainment. Those with the m ost education have prospered and moved farther ahead, while those with the least education have suffered and fallen further behind. Higher education has become the distinct line of demarcation between those moving forward and the rest moving backward in their incomes, health, wealth, and general welfare.

This race to the bottom will continue this year, no matter what budget is ultimately adopted. The House budget proposal cuts between 3.2% and 5.4% from the total budgets of each of our universities and raises tuition by 11.5% to 13% just to keep those cuts from being worse.

So, while the House budget writers did a good and thoughtful job, the bottom line is still that our students will be paying 11% to 13% more to get 3% to 5% less.

The organizing and education that members of the higher education community have done has made higher ed more of a priority for legislators. But if we’re going to preserve the future of this state through the middle class expansion and economic, political and cultural development that access to high-quality, publicly supported universities brings, we still have a lot of work to do.

web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/

UFWS Message: Hunter and the Hunted

2011-04-05T13:13:24Z

Hunter and the Hunted by Bill Lyne www.ufwsblog.org

So, while the House budget writers did a good and thoughtful job, the bottom line is still that our students will be paying 11% to 13% more to get 3% to 5% less.

web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/

UFWS Message, Whole Lotta Countin� Goin� On

2011-03-24T13:02:52Z

Whole Lotta Countin’ Goin’ On by Bill Lyne www.ufwsblog.org

At the end of the day, politics is about counting. Here in Washington, for example, folks in Olympia and beyond are counting, counting, and recounting. The house and senate budget writers at the eye of the storm are counting how many dollars they’re going to cut from where. Every time they do a new budget scenario, they then go count how many of their colleagues will vote for which version. Those people in turn start counting what their vote will cost them in constituent votes and campaign donations. One of the keys to democracy lies in the fact that those who count most clearly usually end up running things.

This year, one particular count has gone up dramatically. The legislator bromide that no one ever hears from anybody about universities is no longer true. Thanks to the efforts of a whole variety of groups, including the Washington Student Association, the College Promise Coalition, Western Advocates, UW Impact, the Public School Employees, the Independent Colleges of Washington, and the higher ed members at SEIU, legislators have been hearing from alumni, students, parents, faculty, and staff about the need to save our public universities.

So far, legislators have received:

--over 5,000 emails

--over 1000 phone calls

--over 500 letters

--over 1200 signatures on petitions

There have also been community conversations and town hall meetings all over the state focused on higher education. People across the state are realizing that we can’t decimate the state support for public universities and expect them to survive, and they’re letting our representatives know that.

Legislators will, of course have to weigh the choices they make about universities against their other political and ideological commitments. But here at the blog, we’re feeling pretty certain that neither the issue nor the coalitions that have been built around it are going away.

For those faithful blog readers who haven’t already joined us, sign up now:

College Promise Coalition-- www.collegepromisewa.com

Western Advocates-- www.wwuadvocates.org

UW Impact-- www.uwimpact.org

FYI PAC-- www.fyipac.org

Washington’s public universities have been neglected and underfunded for over thirty years. The campaign to keep high quality public four year education accessible has just begun.

web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/

UFWS Message, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

2011-03-14T14:09:42Z

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go by Bill Lyne www.ufwsblog.org

Imagine winning an all-expense paid trip to Disneyland and then getting there only to find that half the rides have been closed.

Last Wednesday, the House Higher Education Committee heard representatives from the state universities testify about the impact of potential budget reductions. It was a parade of university presidents and trustees talking about the carnage of thousands of students turned away, thousands of classes cut, hundreds of jobs lost, skyrocketing tuition, longer time to graduation, and the elimination of whole programs and colleges.

On Thursday, the picture brightened a little bit, when the committee heard testimony from the HEC Board about the impacts of budget reductions on student financial aid. Washington State ranks third in the nation in need-based financial aid for students. That’s something we should be proud of. Even in hard times, the state has remained committed to helping needy students have a shot at college. Governor Gregoire’s proposed budget, which cuts another $380 million from the university budgets, actually adds $91 million to the State Need Grant to try to keep up with the inevitable tuition increases. The 2010 supplemental budget that the legislature recently passed cuts $25 million from the State Need Grant, but this will not reduce any aid. The money will be replaced by funds from the university budgets.

Those two days of testimony represent the right hand gives, left hand takes away dynamic of the zero sum game of higher education in Washington state. While we have been committed, with well above average financial aid and below average tuition, to making sure that students have a shot at college, we have been not so committed to making sure that our universities are able to provide the kind of education those students deserve.

At the same time that Washington ranks in the top five in need-based student financial aid, we are in the bottom five in funding for our state universities. The budget for financial aid is more than the budgets of Western Washington University, Eastern Washington University, Central Washington University, and the Evergreen State College put together.

Next year, over 70,000 students will receive assistance from the State Need Grant. If they attend one of our state universities, they will pay more to get less, they will have fewer classes to choose from, the classes they can choose will be much larger, they will have less access to their professors, and some programs will simply not exist anymore.

It’ll be like Disneyland without Pirates of the Caribbean and the Matterhorn.

web page: www.ufws.org
blog: www.ufwsblog.org
unsubscribe: http://www.ufws.org/mail/mail.cgi/u/ufww_news/