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Education
Wins!
The
Commonwealth's new
budget puts the priority right where Virginians
say it should be.
Contrary
to political pundits who measure results only in
terms of which political leaders or what
philosophy seemed to have prevailed in the Richmond, education is the real winner in the budget just
passed by the General Assembly. That means
legislators and Gov. Mark R. Warner have succeeded
in putting education first, which is where both
the general public and the overwhelming majority
of elected officials always have said it should
be.
The
education budget numbers that emerge from the work
of the General Assembly in special session are
impressive. Start with $759 million more for K-12
public education over the next two years. This
increase over and above that proposed by Gov.
Warner in December will allow Virginia for the
first time to meet its responsibilities to fund
Standards of Quality practices its state Board of
Education recommends but local school divisions
now fund themselves.
The
result will be more and better trained teachers, a
broader effort to get at-risk four-year-olds into
Head Start programs, stronger English as a second
language programs, even close to full state
funding for students at Thomas Jefferson High
School for Science & Technology, the
highly-honored and nationally-emulated
Governor’s School in Northern Virginia. The
increase also will allow the state to shelve the
accounting practices that fiddle federal and local
revenues to make the state share look more robust.
And it gets the education discussion back on
educational goals and objectives and off the
destructive budget blame game of who hasn’t paid
which part of whose responsibilities.
Conferees
even worked through the ticklish problem of how to
distribute the revenues to be produced by the
one-quarter percent increase in the sales and use tax
dedicated to education. Half will be distributed
according to the arcane composite index that
legislators think benefits rural school divisions
and half will be distributed according to school-age
population, which legislators know benefits the
largest school divisions.
As
an aside, one delegate on May 7 explained these
actions to the House in terms of “Solomon
splitting the baby,” a result that in Old
Testament terms at least never happened.
Solomon’s proposal to divide the child was, of
course, an attempt to identify the real mother of
the child, whom Solomon knew, never would allow
her child to be killed in such a manner. So the
“Solomon-like” decision in this case would
have been to distribute all the new money by
school-age population, since educating children,
not politically balancing education money, is the
real goal of state education spending.
Turning
to higher education, Virginia
legislators stopped dismantling the system they
have claimed to support and, instead, begin
rebuilding the capacity of state colleges and
universities for the future. To begin closing a
gap in base funding that the General Assembly
estimates at $300 million a year (others estimate
the need at far more than that), the Assembly
approved an increase in FY2005 and FY2006 of $102
million more that the $73 million originally
proposed by the Governor in December. But there
are years of neglect still to make up if Virginia
truly values the quality and academic reputations
of its state colleges and universities.
The
additional monies are to help mitigate rising
tuition, support growing student enrollments and
allow institutions to keep the course offerings
that not only enrich education, but keep students
from having to hang around an extra semester just
because required courses are full. A huge advance
in an area where faculty salaries have slipped
into the 20 percentile of the average of peer
institutions is $31 million to increase faculty
salaries by three percent this year. The not-so-hidden
secret, unfortunately, is that Virginia faculty
will need to get six to seven percent increases in
salary every year for five or six years just to
get back to the 60 percentile average of peer
institutions, which is the stated policy goal of
the Commonwealth.
Every
Virginian, whether one has a student in K-12 or in
a state university or not, will see the benefits
of this renewed investment in education. Smarter,
more skilled, more confident and more accomplished
students mean smarter, more skilled, more
confident and more accomplished workers,
entrepreneurs, community leaders and parents. This
always has been the promise of a quality public
education for every person and the return on
investment for an informed and creative democratic
society. But it is a promise that must be renewed
constantly and 2004 General Assembly efforts can
only be applauded in the context of how Virginia
can improve again next year.
Still,
if political pundits remain determined to name a
leader who wins in all this, they should consider
Del. James H. Dillard, II, R-Fairfax, not just the
Governor, the Speaker of the House or Republican
Senate leaders who may seek more power or higher
office. Even members of the House of Delegates who
have opposed him would agree that Dillard has been
absolutely forthright and indefatigable in his
efforts to establish education as a true priority,
to set standards and to fund them responsibly.
From
his positions as chairman of the House Education
Committee and the House Appropriations
Subcommittee on Education, Dillard has lectured
and prodded and pushed his colleagues for years to
do the right thing. This year Dillard helped
convince enough of his Republican colleagues to
join with enough Democrats to pass new revenue
bills devoted to education. And even though he was
not named to the budget conference committee as he
has been in the past, Dillard’s well-developed
plans for investing new revenue wisely in
education priorities carried the day. Education
won in Virginia
this year and because his priority has never been
anything other than education, so did Jim Dillard.
May
10, 2004
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