Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna said Tuesday that he would spend an additional $1.7 million on the state's public education obligations and higher education through 2015.

McKenna's plan would take into account a series of expected savings, such as smaller government, more competitive state contracting and curbed health care costs, all ideas he's discussed before. The plan released Tuesday included a spreadsheet that puts dollar figures onto how much would go toward education in the coming years through 2021.

He said Tuesday that the plan takes into account an assumption that non-education spending growth is capped at 6 percent per biennium, and that state revenue would increase by 9 percent per biennium.

McKenna also proposes a levy swap proposal to make education funding more consistent as required by a state Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.

He says he wants to increase state spending on public schools by 4 percent by 2019. Currently, 44 percent of the state's general fund budget is allocated to public education from kindergarten through the end of high school, a reduction from 48 percent in the early 1990s.

"What we're trying to achieve here is a reversal of the trend we've seen over the last several years," he said.

He also wants to reduce class sizes for kindergarten through third grade to 17 students per teacher and pay for all-day kindergarten by the 2017-2019 biennium.

McKenna's numbers show that an additional $4.6 billion would be spent on public education by 2021, and that higher education would see an increase of $1 billion in that same timeframe.

The refocus on education funding has been driven in part by a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year. In the so-called McCleary decision, the Washington Supreme Court determined in January that the state isn't meeting its constitutional obligation to amply pay for basic public education.

Former state Sen. Dan McDonald helped McKenna craft the plan.

"We're not saying this is going to be easy," McDonald said. "This gets you to where you want to be and the numbers work and I think it's very reasonable to say look higher ed and K-12 have been taking the brunt for a long time. We're going to grow them faster than the rest of state government."