Paramount Duty of the State: A Brief History of Educational Equity and Inequality in Washington State

• In Event: Communities-of-Color-Based Research for Racially Just Transformation in a State's Public Education System

Abstract

Objectives and Purposes

This paper analyzes the basic infrastructure of schooling, school funding, and state responsibility for education that developed in Washington historically, highlighting sources of inequity built into the system, in contradiction to the State’s distinctive constitutional commitments to educational quality and non-discrimination, established in 1889. It further examines historical attempts to address those inequities, with attention to the role of teachers and teacher professional organizations (including the WEA and the NEA) in those struggles.

Perspectives and Frameworks

Washington State’s constitutional commitment to education is distinctive in two major ways. The first is the high level of responsibility the constitution assigns to the state for providing public education. The second is Washington’s constitutional commitment to non-discrimination. By comparison with other states that specify a “general and uniform” system of education, or a system “as nearly uniform as practicable,” Washington specifies that it is the paramount duty of the state “to make ample provision for education of all without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste or sex.”
Even as Washington State institutionalized these distinctive principles, however, it also contradicted them. First, the basic place-based infrastructure of schooling and school-funding in Washington (like that of other states), depended upon the expropriation of land from Native Americans, its conversion into property, and its colonization by Anglo-American law and western missionary, military, and political institutions. Second, within the settler system, early legislation in Washington (like that in other states), made special allowances for school funding in some districts that facilitated inequities by locality, reinforcing social stratification.

Methods (Historical)

Educators and political leaders recognized certain of these contradictions and proposed measures intending to address them. Meanwhile, however, a surge in white supremacist and anti-immigration politics in the early decades of the 20th century, put education at the center of efforts to establish racially and culturally exclusive policies at local, state, and federal levels. Individual educators and teacher professional organizations, including the Washington Education Association (WEA), participated in these efforts and, in a few cases, in resistance to them.

Findings

This paper explains the historical origins and significance of Washington State’s distinctive constitutional commitments to education and educational equity. It then outlines the basic infrastructure of schooling that developed in Washington historically, highlighting sources of inequity built into the system. Two historical attempts to address those inequities are examined, with close attention to the role of teachers and teacher professional organizations in those struggles. The paper closes with a few recommendations for confronting that history and assuming responsibility in ongoing struggles for education equity and justice.

Significance

Understanding this longer and broader history of struggle over equity and justice in education, and the role of teachers and teacher professional organizations in those struggles, can make us better able to assume responsibility for educational equity and justice in the future.

Author

• Nancy Beadie, University of Washington