In Bellevue, I have heard many theories regarding the impact of McCleary and how one or two state level decisions should be our primary concern.

Way back in January 2007, while Bellevue High School was dominating in football (thank you, Coach Goncharoff), two families sued the state “for not meeting its constitutional obligation to amply fund a uniform system of education.” It would take until 2018-2019 and many legal actions before McCleary was fully implemented. In my time as a parent in BSD, I have heard about McCleary at about 50% of our school leadership meetings. Whether you are for McCleary or against it, I am not sure that it had the massive impact that we believe it did. Please take a look at the figure below. It contains shifted 8th grade math performance curves for the Nation, as well as 3 state curves (one of which is WA).

As an example: above are the 2000-aligned 8th grade math performance curves for three local states as well as the national average. Do you know which one is WA state? Where is McCleary’s impact?

Here is the link to the original WA and national curves: link

The other states represented above are Oregon and Idaho. If the WA curve is primarily driven by the McCleary decision or anything that was WA specific, would you expect the curves to look so similar?

A national change happened around the same time as WA’s initial roll out of McCleary. In the mid-2010’s, we also moved away from strong Federal controls around school district performance. Adequate Yearly Progress likely evokes stress from school leaders, whose schools were evaluated for their performance next to our kids. It seems logical that we schools stopped improving at teaching our kids when that was no longer a defined goal.

In most spaces (think: industry and higher education), organizations get more investment when they drive better ROI. Currently, we stopped holding student outcomes as an important indicator of the ROI of our school systems. WA state’s Prototypical funding model does not contain a funding component that ties to student performance. When school success is recoupled to student success, schools will have the opportunity to succeed and fail with their students.

Further reading

• Read McCleary, et al. v. State of Washington
• Paper on the bigger picture: Testing Theories of Why

Until next time,
Will