It was no surprise that when Gov. Scott Walker unveiled his proposed two-year budget last week he included massive cuts to public education.
The governor famously slashed $1.1 billion from public schools in his first budget, along with implementing tight spending caps that prevented districts from raising property taxes to make up the shortfall and all but eliminating collective bargaining rights for teachers and staff.
But facing a $2.2 billion structural deficit in his next budget as he eyes the White House, Walker topped himself last week. Not only did he syphon off more than $400 million from public schools from K-12 to the university level, but he also attempted to eliminate the Wisconsin Idea and change the University of Wisconsin’s mission to “develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs,” a task best handled by our technical colleges.
When the “Walker Idea” was spotted by the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, the governor tried to back away from his plan, claiming it was a “drafting error,” a “miscommunication” and not a “big deal” that could be dismissed in a Tweet.
But Walker’s rewriting of the Wisconsin Idea is a big deal, and it’s yet another attempt by the governor to weaken our public schools and devalue education in Wisconsin.
In a speech before the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents on Thursday, UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank explained how devastating the cuts would be. UW-Madison would take a $91 million hit in Walker’s budget, a massive cut that cannot be filled with tuition—Walker is implementing a two-year tuition freeze—or by trimming waste. None of UW-Madison’s peer schools are facing such massive cuts, Blank said, and other schools will poach the university’s talent and prospective students as they flee the state for a more welcoming and financially supportive environment. And that’s a terrible strategy for the state’s long-term economic prospects. Historically, Wisconsin has had one of the finest higher education systems in the U.S.
“With this budget, if you are a really top Wisconsin student you might be looking a little harder at some of the other really top schools elsewhere in the country,” Blank told the regents. “And you all know that it’s just harder to bring really top talent back once they’ve left the state.”
State Superintendent Ignored
But Walker’s $300 million cut to the UW System isn’t the only way he’s gutting public education. Although the state’s technical colleges aren’t harmed, K-12 public schools also face an impactful $127 million cut on top of $834 million cut Walker imposed in his first budget.
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It didn’t have to be this way, though.
Last fall, state Superintendent Tony Evers unveiled his proposed budget for 2015-2017, the highlight of which is the Fair Funding for Our Future plan meant to address the state’s broken and highly complex schools funding formula. Evers wanted to help out districts with high property value but not high incomes, districts that receive reduced state aid because they look wealthy. He also wanted to guarantee that each student receives $3,000 in state aid and eventually get the state to recommit to funding two-thirds of a per pupil cost, a promise that fell apart about a decade ago.
Redistributing state aid under the Fair Funding plan would reduce property tax burden at the local level, Evers says, and boost state aid for 95% of the 424 districts around the state. Evers also wanted to address support for English-language learning, rural districts and class size through the SAGE program.
Although Evers is a constitutional, independently elected officer who is the state’s education chief, very little of his proposal ended up in Walker’s budget.
Instead of fixing the funding formula, Walker is keeping general state aid flat next year. He’s also eliminating $127 million of what’s known as categorical aids, targeted funds for specific programs such as SAGE; science technology, engineering and math (STEM) programming; school breakfast; special education aid and more. He’s even doing away with the Chapter 220 program in Milwaukee, an important voluntary integration program that allows MPS’s ethnic and racial minority students to attend predominantly white suburban schools and white suburban students to attend MPS schools.
The categorical cuts will be restored in the second year of Walker’s budget, but over the course of the two years schools will lose $135 in state aid per pupil.
“I think it’s a huge shift away from the state’s long-term, long and proud commitment of investing in education at all levels,” said Jon Peacock, research director for Wisconsin Council on Children and Families. “It’s going to severely compound the fiscal challenges for schools that began with the governor’s first budget.
