David Michael Miller
Schools in Wisconsin face a long-term crisis that requires urgent action. Well, it’s more accurate to say that schools in Wisconsin face several long-term crises that each require urgent action. Right now, I want to focus on how the Republican-led Joint Finance Committee has decided, once again, not to fix our broken school funding system.
For decades, our schools have been funded by an arcane formula and capped by difficult-to-understand revenue limits.
“Schools in Wisconsin are funded mostly through a combination of local property taxes and general state aid. The state puts a roof on the total amount of money a district is able to take in between those two types of funding. That’s the revenue limit,” says Tamarine Cornelius, an analyst for the Wisconsin Budget Project.
Revenue limits were capped in the early ‘90s, based on what districts were spending at the time. If your district spent more on education in the era of the Sega Genesis, you have a higher revenue limit now. If your district wasn’t spending as much back then, you’re stuck with a lower revenue limit a quarter century later.
When the state has provided more money, it’s largely been through per-pupil aid. With per-pupil aid, every district gets the same $200 funding increase per student. However, flat per-pupil aid fails to correct revenue limit disparities or address the educational needs of all students.
All Wisconsin students deserve a quality education that prepares them to be productive, well-rounded citizens. After all, in a rapidly graying state like Wisconsin, it’s in everyone’s economic best interests to prepare all our young people for excellence. However, different students need different levels of support — special education services and ELL (English Language Learners) programs, to name two — and these supports come with a price tag.
For far too long, the state has been derelict in funding these programs. The state has only reimbursed districts for 25 percent of the cost of special education programs. Even as participation in ELL programs has significantly increased, funding has remained flat.
Gov. Tony Evers’ budget proposal is an important step forward. His proposal to add $600 million in funding to special education programs would be transformative, raising reimbursement rates for districts from 25 percent to 60 percent. Additionally, the governor proposed more than $40 million in additional funding for ELL programs.
Unfortunately, the counter-offer of the Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee is pitiful. They propose only a $97 million increase in special education reimbursements, 86 percent less than what the governor proposed. They zeroed out the increase in ELL support.
While the current Republican proposal raises revenue limits, it doesn’t even match the rate of inflation. In the real world, this is a funding cut. With the budget negotiations ongoing, districts can’t depend on getting even this level of funding in the final budget.
Sadly, this has become a biannual tradition. Schools regularly break for the summer without knowing what next year’s final budget will be. School boards take a best guess with a preliminary budget in the spring. This creates unnecessary uncertainty around class sizes and staffing hires.
Districts need stable, predictable budgets. It should be written into state law that revenue limits are indexed to inflation — this was a key recommendation from last year’s bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding. That way, districts know they will largely be able to continue services for students year after year.
When the state provides additional educational funding beyond the rate of inflation, that money should be primarily targeted towards programs that would have the greatest impact.
In the long term, Wisconsin’s school funding formula is broken and unsustainable. However, without a funding boost, readjusting the formula would mean that some districts would lose funding. Avoiding cuts to some districts requires reworking the formula to ensure that no district receives a revenue limit lower than what’s currently in place.
That would be more expensive. But it’s not that Wisconsin can’t afford to better fund our schools, it’s that legislative Republicans lack the will to make it happen.
In the Joint Finance Committee, Republicans stripped more than $1 billion of new revenue from the governor’s budget. They ripped out the Medicaid expansion. They rejected the idea of taxing income derived from wealth at the same rate as income derived from working an actual job. They refused to close a loophole that lets manufacturers pay next to no tax on their income.
So when they come back with an education proposal that’s a fraction of the governor’s, that’s not fiscal responsibility; it’s a reflection of their inability to escape fealty to wealthy donors and special interests.
Wisconsin needs to fix its school funding formula. And we need legislators who actually have the will to do it.
Alan Talaga co-writes the Off the Square cartoon with Jon Lyons.
