What's next for Washington's education lawsuit

The justices will decide whether to issue sanctions to go with last fall's contempt order over the Legislature's lack of progress toward answering the 2012 McCleary decision on public education funding.

[...] he says Democrats and Republicans — leadership in the House and the Senate — are still too far apart on the remaining issues to be close to an agreement on the other parts of McCleary.

The Supreme Court ruled in its 2012 McCleary decision that the state is failing to meet its constitutional duty to pay for the cost of basic education for its 1 million school children.

The justices told the Legislature to find a way to pay for the reforms and programs they had already adopted, including all-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes student transportation and classroom supplies, and to fix the state's overreliance on local levies to pay for education.

The Senate leadership's plan for the interim is to take their proposal about how to fix the school salary system and local levies "on the road" to find out what the citizens want them to do.

The Senate Republican plan, which didn't made it out of committee this year, does not include a way to pay its estimated $3.5 billion cost, but Dammeier expects turning local levies into a state education tax will be at least part of the solution.