Vote no on inadequate proposal

Before you decide whether to vote for Seattle's Families and Education Levy, please contemplate this imaginary dialogue with a door-to-door fund-raiser:

"Hi, will you give me some money to help children?"

"How much do you want?"

"I'll figure it out later and bill your credit card once a year for seven years. Don't worry, only half the people will pay more than $65 a year."

"But that's $455. And you might charge me even more?"

"You can afford it. Just sign here."

"What will you do with the money?"

"I haven't worked out the details, but you can trust me. I'm doing this for the children."

"How have you helped children in the past?"

"I've been spending other people's money on children for 14 years"

"Doing what exactly?"

"All these questions. What's the matter? Don't you want to spend more money on children?"

As absurd as that dialogue is, it's eerily similar to the public discussion over this year's levy.

The proposed levy continues a program that started in 1990 and has since spent $138 million. Where did all that money go and what has it accomplished? City officials have yet to give the public a comprehensive answer to these most obvious of questions. We reviewed the city's evaluation reports from some 25 different programs that have been funded by the levies; only three programs showed any plausible improvements in academic achievement.

A representative of Mayor Greg Nickels countered our criticism by saying that earlier levies weren't focused on "academic achievement"; they were intended to make children "safe, healthy and ready to learn." Have the levies been successful on those terms? His reply: "In some of the programs, we think they have been." Never have we heard such damning faint praise from an official touting his agency's accomplishments.

Even as city leaders acknowledge they've done a poor job of managing the past 14 years of levy proceeds, they expect Seattle families to give them 69 percent more money in exchange for only vague promises that they'll somehow do a better job this time.

Indeed, it is a crisis for our entire community when so many students consistently fail to reach their potential. But closing the achievement gap will not happen because hundreds of millions of dollars were tossed into a wishing well marked "Compassion for Children." It will come only by investing in programs that are held strictly accountable to produce meaningful results.

Levy supporters pay lip service to the concepts of accountability and measurable outcomes. That's a good first step. But read the entire initiative text carefully -- and you must read it carefully, because we're not voting on sunny campaign promises; we're voting on the actual text. The initiative text contains only "illustrative examples" of how the money might be spent, no real commitments. There is no requirement that anybody will be held to deliver meaningful results. The levy simply gives the City Council a blank check to spend $117 million, without real assurances the money will improve academic achievement. Once again, the new levy, like the earlier ones, will be but a grand symbolic gesture and a payoff to insider pressure groups, without accomplishing its stated goal.

We can't afford to abandon the many children in our community who are left behind. But we really can't afford to make our working families pay another $117 million while still leaving so many children behind. Vote no on this inadequate proposal and ask the City Council to draft a fair and effective initiative that includes meaningful accountability to ensure that we deliver tangible results for the children in greatest need.

Stefan Sharkansky and Andy MacDonald live in Seattle and comment on local issues at the Sound Politics weblog, www.soundpolitics.com

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