Russellings: Adequate Funding for Wisconsin's PUBLIC Schools

The following is my letter to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, asking them to take original jurisdiction in the case of Underwood v. Vos:

= = = = = =

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a budget and policy analyst for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, we took great pride in the fact that Wisconsin was a leader not only in education but in funding education. Decades earlier, we had become the first state in the nation to embrace the idea that education, as a state responsibility (built right into our state constitution) meant that we needed to use the state’s progressive funding sources (the income tax and to a lesser extent the sales tax) to even out the disparities in locally taxable property wealth. So we (and by “we” I mean the forward-thinking Wisconsin State Legislature) instituted general equalization aid, distributed in inverse proportion to a school district’s local equalized valuation per pupil. Thus dirt-poor districts got lots of state aid and wealthy suburbs and resort areas with high-value properties got very little. (This sharing was based on the net cost per pupil, after categorical aids like transportation and handicapped aid, federal aid, and user fees had been subtracted from total costs.)

But that just addressed the issue of inter-district equity. It didn’t deal with overall insufficiency of funding. To address that, the Legislature kept increasing the share of net costs to be paid by state aid, eventually setting — and achieving! — a goal of covering two-thirds of elementary and secondary school costs. (An additional 8% was covered by federal aid and 5% by local fees and donations, leaving only 20% to land on the property-tax rolls.) That two-thirds figure was the standard that was maintained during most of my tenure at the DPI.

At the same time, everybody knew that Milwaukee Public Schools had urban problems worse than any other district in the state and needed special attention to them. But one form that such special attention took was an “experimental” voucher program to see if non-public schools could address some of the issues that the public schools were struggling with. We at the DPI opposed the idea, not merely due to the implications for separation of church and state but also for the very real educational concerns about resegregating Milwaukee schools, not merely on the basis of race but also on the bases of religion, behavior, and ability. We pointed out that private schools didn’t have the same mandate as public schools to serve everybody, and that they might well end up cherry-picking the brightest, best behaved, most able-bodied students, thereby impoverishing MPS even further, and not just monetarily.

The Legislature nonetheless gave vouchers their initial push down what has proved to be a long, long slippery slope to the point where now private schools are practically robber barons driving the public schools even deeper into being the educational facilities of last resort. Compounding the problem for the last 10-15 years have been twin sets of handcuffs placed on the schools by our most recent Legislatures: cost controls (or levy limits) to hamper adequate spending and steady erosion of the state’s share of school costs, driving more and more of them back onto inequitable local property taxes, which the legislators can just shrug off by saying “Hey, not my problem, talk to your mayor and city council!”

Well, state legislators, it is your problem. Not just a problem for you to solve but a problem of your own making. If you’d been treating public schools responsibly, it need never have come to this sorry state of affairs. You find the state treasury holding an $8 billion budget surplus, and it apparently never dawns on you that the public schools — which are a state responsibility, remember — have been starving for adequate funding for a good chunk of the 21st Century. And you think of half a dozen things to do with that money other than living up to the noble ideals that made Wisconsin a leader in education for most of its existence. It’s as if the Badgers were playing the Buckeyes, and you guys are rooting for the Buckeyes.

It’s pathetic that we should ever have to take your intransigence and irresponsibility to court to get you to do the right thing, but that’s where we find ourselves in 2023. I sincerely hope that the Wisconsin Supreme Court issues a verdict, loud and clear, to stop robbing the open, accepting, public schools of Wisconsin to finance the discriminatory private ones. I mean really, I know many of you are in thrall to business interests, but it makes no more sense to shift state support for schools from public to private sources than it does to turn all of our highways into toll roads or all our drinking water into “buy it yourself at Walmart” propositions. Some things deserve to be public goods, and I’d put schools and libraries right up at the top of that list.

Sincerely,

Richard S. Russell

7846 W. Oakbrook Cir., Madison WI 53717-1609

608-219-7044 • RichardSRussell@tds.net

http://richardsrussell.livejournal.com/

= = = = = =

The 6 greatest bargains in America:

1) sunshine

2) fresh air

3) clean water

4) public libraries

5) public schools