Just last week, the Senate Education and Corrections Committee met to hear testimony from education leaders and perform a checkup on the state of education following the first year of major cuts. The conclusions from the committee were that the cuts were in fact real and they hurt. There was overarching, bipartisan agreement that we need to fix a flawed public education funding formula.
For many years now, legislators and education leaders have agreed that the school funding formula needs to be revamped. Because of the extreme cuts in the last biennium it is all the more imperative that we no longer put off this task.
School districts are required to balance their budgets and they took drastic steps to absorb the cuts, but not without impacts to quality. We cannot continue on this course, there needs to be a reprioritization of public education in our state government.
Governor Walker and Republican legislators cut education by $1.6 billion over the biennium. These were the largest cuts to state aid for public education in Wisconsin history. In the same budget Republicans provided 2.3 billion dollars for corporate special interests over the next ten years. Clearly education was not a priority.
During our recent hearing, former Racine Unified Superintendent Jim Shaw and his colleague, Dr. Carolyn Kelley from UW-Madison’s Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis Department briefed senators on their research demonstrating how the cuts in Act 32 disproportionately hurt poor school districts more than rich school districts.
Our state’s flawed funding formula exacerbated the effect of the cuts. Schools struggling with poverty, declining enrollment and transportation costs were the hardest hit in the new aid adjustments.
Most importantly, Senator Bob Jauch reminded all of us at the hearing that our State Constitution unequivocally guarantees public education for all Wisconsin citizens and support for our school districts must be as uniform as possible. The disproportionate cuts not only hurt our children’s education statewide, but they also raise constitutional questions for how our state ensures school districts remain uniform. We need to refocus our attention not only to sparing our children’s education from destructive cuts, but we also have to relook at our state’s school funding formula.
Many school districts have been setting aside money for a rainy-day fund in case the state cuts general aid or any other unforeseen event, but now many of them have dipped into those funds and the threat of bankruptcy looms. Even school districts that had large "rainy day" accounts years ago have now exhausted their reserves because the state aid part of their budget has dropped so precipitously.
A silver lining found in last week’s hearing was that members on the committee acknowledged a bipartisan middle ground. Republicans and Democrats can agree that our current funding formula is broken and needs to be fixed. It is time to dust off Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers’ “Fair Funding for Our Future” proposal and begin to help our struggling schools.
People that can afford to pay the 'user fees' are likely already sending their kids to private schools outside the city. Having a citywide sales tax is likely the most feasible solution, but it also puts additional burden on those living in the inner city and can least afford to pay more in taxes. One of the things I like about the choice/voucher system is that it provides a level of accountability in that parents can take their child out of a school and 'spend' the voucher somewhere else if the school isn't meeting expectations.
The local beneficiaries have to have enough skin in the game that they hold the local systems accountable. If they don't, nobody else will.
"I predicted that cuts to state educational aid would end up being covered by the local property taxpayer, and it turns out I'm right." The cuts were covered by employee contributions and local savings. Act 10 did not allow a tax increase. Please explain how "this hit retirees hard".
You could argue that if you live in a $300K house you have the income to pay the higher tax, but that isn't always the case with retirees. Why shouldn't they be allowed to stay in homes they worked for and own? And now some people want the schools to be entirely the responsibility of the property owners?
*********************** If that's what it takes to get you out of your chair and down to a local meeting to insist on fiscal responsibility on the part of your school district, maybe that's what we need to do. Otherwise, you don't show up and they have no incentive not to keep operating as if money were no object.
"In the preliminary budget, the tax levy for the district is estimated to be $83 million, a decrease of $891,000 from last year’s levy. Assuming a 2 percent decrease in equalized property value throughout the district, the resulting tax rate would be $9.33 per $1,000 of property value. Last year's tax rate was $9.24 per $1,000 of property value. A home valued at $200,000 would pay $1,866 for the school district portion of the tax bill, an $18 increase over last year."
Interesting coming from Lehman since the last budget he supported was when Diamond Jim Doyle was in the Governor’s office, Democrats held the majority on both chambers, the Qualified Economic Offer was eliminated, public contract negotiations were modified in favor of unions, and 300 million was cut from state funding for education, …that was with federal stimulus monies …and without any of the tools Scott Walker gave Senator Lehman had several years to try and modify the state funding formula, but as usual the Democrats put it off for someone else to fix. It’s a little late for Senator Lehman to try and reinvent himself an Education advocate.
Randy, You are making something out of nothing. I don't think you really understand the basics of property tax calculation. I would like to see an honest estimation of the tax increases that would have been required to pay for the budget Barrett would have had.
But McBride also makes a great argument that local leaders need to be incentivized to cut spending and find ways to make education more effective and efficient. Perhaps a quasi Rick Snyder solution would work best here - the more a local district relies upon state funding, the more decision making power the state would be allowed to exercise over district function. One thing that is evident is that Lehman's proposed solution of just throwing more state money at education is not viable, nor does it address or fix the problems in our public education system.
John Lehman is a union tool and has no real ideas other than "give us more money".
For example, RUSD spent around $100 K to send groups to SEWAC at Alverno College. I think it cost about $1,000.00 a head and RUSD sent around 100 people. SEWAC trained them on Jay McTighe's book, "Understanding by Design." So what does RUSD do after spending 100 K on teacher training? Well... Instead of utilizing the people that they trained on Jay McTighe's book, they actually pay Jay Mc Tighe a lot of money to come in for a recent professional development day! So my question is... What was the purpose of paying 100 K for training if you aren't going to utilize the trained personal?
Did we get our money's worth? I don't know, but here's the link to the Patch story. http://caledonia.patch.com/articles/jamie-vollmer-to-racine-unified-community-you-have-power-to-affect-change What I do know, is that RUSD (DID NOT) have to spend thousands of extra dollars to buy Jamie's books! But they did! They used tax payer dollars to buy them, and then they gave books to all the VIPs at RUSD! The administration, school board members, principals, etc. - They all got books! I wouldn't be surprised if they gave one to Shaw as a going away present!
Why do schools now need 3 or 4 assistant principals when 20 years ago they maybe only had 1? Just too much of a money black hole. Schools need to learn to spend within their limits, for too long they've always gotten their way, along with the teacher's union.