SERIES | Education Finance 102: A People’s Guide

by Oliver Miska, Jeff Paul, Megan Fisher, and Samantha Fogg

You might have heard about Seattle Public Schools' new plan to close five schools. In the face of public backlash, the district pulled back from their original proposals of 17 to 21 schools.

Whether or not your student’s school is on the new list, parents still feel enraged by the impacts of the failure to fund our schools, support our educators, and serve our students.

Our schools have a long history of inequitable funding and student harm.

For students returning to schools after COVID, the intersecting crises include increasing school violence, continued youth incarceration, diminishing quality of mental health, continued curricular harm, undersupported educators, and neglected school buildings. It’s been shown that when we don’t fund our schools, we pursue “fixes” that disproportionately harm students of color.

Instead of increasing funding to lock up our youth like in Aberdeen and King County, our state has the responsibility to end the school-to-prison pipeline. Closures are a symptom of greater harms: the ongoing underfunding, segregation, criminalization, and abuse of students in our schools, such as isolating and restraining special-education students who are disproportionately students of color.

With these compounding crises, our schools are being asked to do more each year. The competing interests between local control and adequate state funding has put Washington between a rock and a hard place, obstructing much-needed reforms.

The Rock and the Hard Place

The rock is our unfair tax code, the hard place is a handful of half-hearted equity measures.

Calls for more school funding get stymied by concerns that districts are making irresponsible decisions with their budgets and racking up hundreds of millions in deficits. Meanwhile, districts across the state face closures, educator cuts, and state takeover.

There have been many warnings from experts, district administrations, and superintendents that our current school-funding model would force schools into a deficit this fall. The plausible deniability that legislators hide behind allows legislators to only fund part of the costs of educating children.

The People’s Big 5 campaign adds two significant priorities to what lawmakers have proposed: passing equitable reforms to our school-funding model and our unfair tax code.

After the November election, a possible Democratic supermajority trifecta in the House, Senate, and executive branch could allow for more drastic measures.

In addition to the Big 5 Campaign, one group of parents is calling for a special legislative session to bail out our schools, similar to what happened for Boeing in 2013 to the tune of $8.7 billion.

Momentum is building, as Rep. My-Linh Thai of the 41st Legislative District, the Washington State Democratic Party, and the 43rd Legislative District signed on the campaign.

Superintendent Chris Reykdal in his 2025–27 Budget Proposal and press conference, said our state would need a $4 billion investment to match the national average for K–12 spending.

Yet, in response to Reykdal’s recent budget requests totaling an additional $3 billion for K–12 education, some use the excuse that our system is broken as justification to not fund it. Some even argue for slashing teacher pay. Others blame the federal underfunding, while others argue our governor should be given the power to oversee our state’s education policies, removing the elected office of the superintendent. Plausible deniability is neglect.

The experts agree that “with schools, money does indeed matter.” To fix it, we must fund it.

Instead of arguing for more funding through progressive revenue, our lawmakers have framed the problem around a scarcity mindset, nickel-and-diming us with half-measure reforms. 

Since 1977, these include the adoption of the prototypical model in 2009 and the “McCleary Fix” of 2018.

The Prototypical Model: A Model that Doesn’t Work

The state uses what’s called a prototypical model to distribute funds to 295 districts, which then allocate resources to 2,300 schools based on a separate local formula.

The state prototypical model calculates funding for districts based on staffing ratios, class sizes, and operating costs for a theoretical standard school size. Yet schools and students across the state don’t fit the cookie-cutter funding formula. It no longer takes into account changes our legislators have made to policies defining what educators must provide students, as it is based on pre-McCleary staffing levels and has seen few meaningful updates since 2009. Voters even passed I-1351 in 2014, directing legislators to reduce K–12 class sizes and improve staffing support, but our legislators have failed to fund it.

The many layers involved in school funding create a barrier to holding districts accountable. It also forces districts to rely on unsustainable sources like one-time federal funds, external grants, or local bonds to cover basic education costs.

As the Marysville School District administration succinctly warned in 2023, making adjustments to staffing ratios without providing the actual costs to hire, sustain, and support staff has dire implications for district budgets.

While the claim is the system is designed to give much local control to schools, the reality is that it sacrifices transparency and accountability. The prototypical model does not meaningfully include student voices or measure student needs, creating a funding system untethered from the goal of K–12 education.

We distrust the education system for many reasons. We feel confused and gaslit by the hidden disconnects in our school funding system.

Fixing the McCleary Fix

In the 2012 McCleary v. Washington case, our state’s Supreme Court ruled that the Legislature violated the constitution by underfunding K–12 schools. In 2018, the Legislature finally took action to implement their “fix,” which swapped school funding from local to state property taxes.

In reports, op-eds, and public testimony, University of Washington Professor David Knight has tirelessly challenged the conception that McCleary fixed our problem.

In one report, a team of UW experts concluded, “[A]fter full implementation of the McCleary school finance reforms, state revenue is not nearly progressive enough to make up for income-based disparities in local revenue, and state revenue actually contributes to racial/ethnic funding gaps in Washington.”

Meanwhile, some incorrectly blame increased educator pay for the failure of the McCleary Fix.

In reality, the Legislature is responsible for not adequately funding the rising costs of “basic education” and neglecting workforce development, particularly for Education Support Professionals (ESP), like paraeducators who are fundamental to fully funded special education.

McCleary limited our local ability to generate revenue but didn’t equip the state to equitably collect taxes. The growing critique of the McCleary Fix is that it capped local levies, driving wealthy districts into deficits because they couldn’t raise enough funds to meet their enriched local needs. By limiting who we tax to fund our schools, our state has left us with smaller and smaller slices of pie. Some wealthier districts want to reverse McCleary to “fix” the situation and propose raising local property tax caps, but these strategies do not lift all boats but send a one-time emergency line to individual districts, so long as they can afford it.

The good news is that we can find new revenue sources that don’t burden working people or perpetuate wealth discrepancies between rural and urban school districts. Class struggle shouldn’t prohibit us from meeting students' needs.

Equity measures such as regionalization factors and the Learning Assistance Program still maintain burdensome and restricting eligibility criteria, upheld by watered-down reforms.

We must center students’ and educators' needs as we transform the state prototypical model to more closely reflect the true costs of local expenses in our districts.

It is irresponsible to keep pitting parents and educators against one another, claiming to do so in the guise of statewide equity. Rural and urban schools need ample funding.

The Hard Conversations to Come

Local control allows for choice, while also making accountability and equity difficult to implement. We must work together, both rural and urban, red and blue, to keep our schools not only open but thriving as we are building toward the future all Washingtonians deserve.

As long as our legislators continue to fail our students, they should expect to see parents, caregivers, educators, community members, and students showing up in Olympia this January in addition to the school board meetings, city hall budget cycles, and their own campaign events.

Legislators who have cemented themselves into powerful committee chair roles have an obligation to stop the performative policies and bureaucratic partisan violence, and instead fix it as they fund it.

The state has the opportunity to provide consistent, ample, and equitable funding so our youth’s schools can stay open, our educators feel more supported, and our parents feel supported in the difficult work of raising children in the 21st century.

If raising kids takes a village, our state legislators, governor, superintendents, and districts must stop playing the blame game and ask themselves: Can we work together to fix our education system for our youth?

How Can I Get Involved?

One way to get involved in further advocacy is to visit www.ThePeoplesBig5.com. Educator, parent, and student organizations are hosting a community teach-in and public forum on Nov. 17, please RSVP online. Before the legislative session begins next year, we can put pressure on our school boards and superintendents by attending upcoming local district or board meetings. To demand immediate action, sign on to the parent’s letter calling for a special session.

The South Seattle Emerald is committed to holding space for a variety of viewpoints within our community, with the understanding that differing perspectives do not negate mutual respect amongst community members.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the contributors on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the Emerald or official policies of the Emerald.

Oliver Treanor Miska, 33, is a queer educator, community organizer, and lobbyist for educational justice policy in Washington State. Moving out of full-time classroom teaching after six years, they substitute teach in SPS and are the founding director of Solidarity Policy and Public Affairs, a political consulting firm. As a community organizer, Oliver has held leadership roles within Seattle Democratic Socialist of America and Washington Ethnic Studies Now, where they co-lead a statewide legislative coalition. Oliver is also a member of SCORE, the Seattle Caucus of Rank and File Educators. They work to organize youth, families, educators, and community organizations to make transformative racial and economic justice changes we need in our schools statewide. To contact them, email: SolidarityPolicyWA@GMail.com

Jeff Paul is a special education paraprofessional who has been serving students in Seattle Public Schools for over six years. Prior to working on SPS, Jeff was an after-school program provider with Seattle Parks and Rec focused on programming to support student mental health. They currently serve as a trustee on the executive board of the Young Emerging Labor Leaders, a constituency group of the MLK Labor Council, and they're also a founding board member of House Our Neighbors, a housing advocacy organization in Seattle that fights for social housing, climate action, and connected communities.

Megan Fisher is a licensed mental health therapist with a private practice in West Seattle. Megan is a parent of two children, a second grader in Seattle Public Schools and a 3.5-year-old in the Seattle Preschool Program through DEEL. Megan is passionate about supporting human growth and development and creating spaces for community where all humans find connection and a sense of belonging. This is her second year serving on her schools' PTA Board as an advocacy co-chair and her second year as an advisory committee member for the West Seattle Public School Equity fund. Megan volunteers with the grassroots parent-led advocacy group All Together For Seattle Schools. In addition to connecting with the community around her, Megan loves spending time with her husband and two children in and around the beaches of West Seattle.

Samantha Fogg, co-president of Seattle Council PTSA, is Chinese, white, and disabled, an advocate, and a parent of three children in Seattle Public Schools. Samantha is also a member of the Cross Disability Advocacy Network, and serves on the Washington State Board of Health School Rules Technical Advisory Committee, the Washington Special Education Advisory Council, and the Washington State Family Engagement Center Advisory Board.  She has previously worked with National PTA on updating the National Standards for Family Engagement, been an active member of the Nothing About Us Without Us Coalition, and has partnered with the Washington State Office of the Education Ombuds to teach professional development training on Disability Justice. During the legislative session, through SCPTSA, Samantha offers free online drop-in advocacy support on Saturdays with interpretation into Spanish, Somali, and ASL.