Senate committee advances inadequate school funding proposal — again

Fitting for Groundhog's Day week, a Senate committee advanced a bill yesterday that would do the same thing the Legislature did last year, and the year before that: slowly starve our schools. The legislation they approved falls far below what's needed to keep up with rising costs and meet the needs of Iowa students. 

The bill, would set Supplemental State Aid — the rate of increase in general per-pupil funding from the previous year — at 1.75%. The Governor beats that figure, but barely, proposing a paltry 2% SSA increase in her budget.

We have yet to see an SSA proposal from the House, but given the state's estimated $1.3 billion budget shortfall and lawmakers' drive for local property-tax cuts, there's no reason to expect it to be substantially better than that of the Senate and Governor. 

Budgets are one way we demonstrate our aspirations as a state. The chart below shows how school funding has failed to meet the needs of our children and how proposals from the Senate and Governor would extend the downward trend line another year. 

Inflation has more than eaten up modest increases in the last decade

You can't have a serious talk about school funding trends without factoring in inflation. Yes, lawmakers increase SSA almost every year. But in the last decade, those increases have failed to keep up with rising costs.

In the chart below, you can see that since 2017, lawmakers have continually set general per-pupil school funding — known as State Cost per Pupil — lower than what was needed to keep pace with expenses, much less pull ahead.

Our failure to keep up has happened in a period when 2 in 5 Iowa students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches — reflecting the same inequality of opportunity along racial and geographic lines we see in our broader communities — and students face growing mental- health and other challenges that complicate their experiences in and outside of the schoolroom. 

The thing about the erosion in our commitment to our public schools is that the damage compounds. An inadequate funding increase sits on top of a base that is inadequate because the previous year's funding increase was inadequate, as was the funding increase before that. 

The Iowa State Education Association has rightly called for breaking the cycle of funding inadequacy by setting SSA at a minimum of 5%, arguing that that a meaningful increase is what's necessary to:

provide equitable public education for every student regardless of race, disability, identity, socioeconomic status, or ZIP code. Funding should address achievement gaps and unpredictable enrollment numbers, keep pace with increased expenses, reduce class sizes, and allow for competitive salaries and benefits for all education professionals. 

No matter how strong the case — and it is a strong one — it just may not be possible to get the kind of school-funding increase that we need out of our current Legislature, whose leaders’ priorities tend toward doing less to broadly expand opportunity. But we simply must do better than proposals we're seeing so far.

Now's the time to try to push that percentage up by reaching out to your lawmaker to help make the stakes clear. Share stories of what's happening to the schools in your community. It’s also time to start asking candidates for office how they will approach school funding in future years, as our surpluses dwindle. 

As recently as 2004 Iowans held our education system in such high regard, we put a one-room schoolhouse on our state quarter under the words “Foundation in Education.”

We can once again be the state that defines itself by the quality of public education it offers its children, but it’s going to take realigning our aspirations for our children with the budgets that serve them.