Washington legislators have a lot to gain if they give state school districts and teacher organizations the proposed constitutional amendment they are asking for.

But citizens have a lot to lose.

The education interests want to do away with the supermajority requirement that now exists for passing special maintenance and operation levies and bond issues. Bond and levy elections are the methods school districts use to raise property taxes above the lid that’s set in the state constitution – namely, 1 percent of your home’s assessed value.

The supermajority represents an important constitutional balance between the need for taxes and the need to protect homeowners from taxes so high that they put property in danger of confiscation by the government or the mortgage holder.

It’s true that a safeguard against overtaxation can be too restrictive. In Idaho, for example, it takes a two-thirds vote. That’s extreme, but the 60 percent requirement that applies in Washington has been on the books for years and has worked well.

The same constitution also declares that the state – for these purposes the Legislature – gives the public school systems the money they need to cover the basic education needs of the state’s children. If that responsibility is being met, the local districts should reserve special levies for special purposes – such as enriching the educational experience that the state is obliged to fund.

That’s a fiction, of course. School districts will tell you the state isn’t meeting its burden and they couldn’t do their own duty without relying on local patrons to fill the gap with those special levies. And, when construction needs are on the table, for bond issues.

Patrons have been responsive. Bond issues fail sometimes, but most pass. And it’s been a long time since passing maintenance and operations levies has been a problem. Reducing the passage requirement to a simple majority of the vote would make that support even more secure.

The easier it is to persuade local voters to hike their own property taxes for their schools, the less pressure there is on the Legislature to start fulfilling its constitutional requirement. The less pressure on lawmakers to pay fully for basic education, the more money left on the table to meet the money-related requests of other constituency groups.

That’s what legislators have to gain if they agree to put a constitutional amendment on this fall’s general election ballot. To achieve that won’t be easy. It takes a two-thirds vote in both houses of the Legislature before the question can go to the voters.

But they have a clear political incentive to make the effort.

Out in the grass-roots world, where the so-called “American dream” of home ownership is getting more elusive, citizens may prefer to retain the comfort of knowing school districts have to make an especially compelling case to raise the tax lid.