A couple of weeks ago, Washington state representative Dave Quall argued that we need a different system for financing public education in this state. (He's probably right, though I am not sure he and I would agree on the remedy.) As part of his argument, he made this claim:
Bottom line: Most school districts do not have the resources they need to provide our children with the quality basic education they deserve.
That inspired me to send this email to Quall:
Dear Representative Quall:
In your June 6th Seattle Times op-ed, you said that most of our school districts "do not have the resources they need" to provide a "quality basic education". All right, how much more do our schools need? I understand that you may not have an exact number, but would be satisfied with a rough estimate, such as 20 or 30 percent more.
If our schools had these resources, how much — and again, a rough estimate would be fine — would our test scores go up?
Feel free to add any more information that you think would help the public understand this problem. For example, I think almost everyone would be interested in knowing how the funding has changed over the last thirty years. And many would be interested in knowing whether you see any places that could be cut to provide more resources for our primary grades. For example, would the state be better off if we spent less money on, for instance, the Woman's Studies department at Evergreen and more on reading teachers in Seattle's central district?
Because of the great interest in this subject, I would like to publish your answer both on my own site, Jim Miller on Politics, and at a group site, Sound Politics.
Sincerely,
Jim Miller
Be interesting to see what Quall has to say, if anything.
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
(I've closed comments to give Representative Quall a fair chance to answer my questions. I'll post his answer here and make it open to comments. Or, if he doesn't answer in a reasonable amount of time, say two weeks, I'll put up an open post, so we can speculate on why he doesn't want to answer those questions. Of course, if you live in his district, you might want to -- politely -- encourage him to give us a substantive answer.)
Posted by Jim Miller at June 23, 2008 03:18 PM | Email This