Charter-School Measure Killed In Committee The Bill Passed The House 72-22 Last Month

Despite strong bipartisan backing from the state House and the governor, legislation to authorize charter schools in Washington was killed by the Senate budget committee Monday.

An unlikely coalition of minority Democrats and conservative critics of education reform joined forces to defeat the House-passed legislation 12-9. It was the fourth year in a row that legislation has sailed through the House only to die in the Senate.

“Strange bedfellows,” said the irritated House sponsor, Dave Quall, D-Mount Vernon. He said he’ll try again next year.

“I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed,” said Sen. Steve Johnson, R-Kent, the Senate floor leader who had spent hours trying to broker a deal that could win enough committee votes to make it to the full Senate.

Although three of his fellow Republicans voted against the plan, Johnson was most angered by the Democrats: “Their platform is essentially ‘no new ideas, but give us more spending.”’

In a last-ditch plea to the Senate Ways and Means Committee, Johnson stressed the bipartisan support from the House and the governor’s office for making Washington the 30th state to authorize the home-grown, independent public schools.

The bill passed the House 72-22 last month. Some of its biggest backers, including Quall and Gov. Gary Locke, are Democrats, Johnson noted.

Charter schools are designed by nonprofit groups as innovative, risk-taking schools that operate with few regulations and only loose ties to a local school district.

“We don’t really have to speculate about what these would be, because there are 200,000 students attending 800 charter schools,” Johnson told the skeptical budget panel.

He said the schools encourage “healthy competition” and help, rather than undermine, other public schools.

But the committee wasn’t buying.

Democrats complained that the new negotiated version of the bill wasn’t even before the budget committee. It was only a one-sentence bill that would be the vehicle for a 13-page amendment on the Senate floor.

The Senate Education Committee already had bottled up charter-school legislation, so sponsors had sought the detour to the supposedly friendlier Ways and Means Committee.

Education Chairman Harold Hochstatter, R-Moses Lake, a critic of the charter-school bill, said, “This came out Mr. Vanilla,” referring to lawmakers facing only a skeletal bill without an opportunity to consider both the policy and the price tag of the full-blown bill.

“I think you should never separate the menu from the price tag, but this bill isn’t the entree and it is not the price,” he said. “It is pie in the sky.”