Iowa lawmakers starve public schools of needed cash
The state’s “piggy bank” for future tax cuts, the Taxpayer Relief Fund, would be better called the Neglect Our Future Fund, since our schools have paid almost two-thirds of it.
“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”— George Orwell
American politicians have a longstanding practice of using marketing language to promote their priorities. After all, who is “anti-life”? But sometimes, political-speak sinks below mere spin and into outright deception. The PATRIOT Act increased government surveillance. The Clear Skies Act would have allowed more air pollution. And in Iowa, vouchers that send public money to private schools are “education savings accounts,” while effectively cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from public schools is “taxpayer relief.”
Who, exactly, is “relieved” that we are disinvesting in Iowa’s future? Iowa still has good schools with excellent graduation rates, but we’re clearly sliding. Depending on the ranking, we’ve gone from near the top to the middle of the pack. In some aspects, like college readiness, our rankings are outright bad (No. 44).
Iowa’s schools were once a source of pride; our 2004 quarter featured an image of a one-room schoolhouse and the motto “Foundation in Education.” What changed?
Our schools have been on short rations for years, and each year has brought fresh headlines about tuition hikes at our public universities and funding that doesn’t meet rising costs. And the combined impact of skimping on education year after year has been more dramatic than many realize.
Recently, state Sen. and retired Iowa State University economics professor Herman Quirmbach worked with the state’s Legislative Services Agency to determine that impact. The gap between inflation-induced rising costs and state funding is staggering.
Quirmbach and the LSA calculate that, since 2017, Iowa K-12 schools have been shorted $1.6 billion from keeping up with their costs. That shortfall has increased each year and exceeds $500 million for PK-12 in this year alone.
Once we add in similar cuts to higher education, which has lost almost a quarter of its state resources to inflation, we get a very different picture of the state’s budget than the governor brags about. The state’s “piggy bank” for future tax cuts, the Taxpayer Relief Fund, would be better called the Neglect Our Future Fund, since our schools have paid almost two-thirds of it. (Some also comes from skimping on relatively low, regular costs in ways that will inevitably lead to expensive, long-term problems.)
Diverting these funds means that Iowa PK-12 schools have $800 less per student than they used to, and they weren’t exactly flush in 2017. $800 is the cost of a new computer for each student, a teaching aide for the classroom, better lab materials, field trips, or any number of other opportunities that our kids no longer have. And remember, that’s $800 per student per year. Over the course of a PK-12 education, this adds up to Iowa investing thousands of dollars less than we used to in each of our children.
If we continue on this path, this decline will get worse. We already have teacher shortages as veteran teachers leave the field and new ones reconsider what they’ve gotten themselves into. And while the chasm between the earnings of teachers and other college grads has grown recently, state Republicans have demonized teachers and politicized school curricula. We applaud Gov. Kim Reynolds’ proposal to increase teacher salaries and hope that the Legislature will implement it. But that salary increase cannot come at the expense of cutting other already-reduced PreK-12 education spending.
All of these cuts predate the mushrooming payments to private schools and the rush to eliminate income taxes that jeopardize our state finances. Imagine what will happen to our schools when tax revenues plummet.
Schools are one of our state’s best investments. Leaving aside the benefits of an educated population, every dollar that states spend on education returns multiple dollars later. So let’s stop the bleeding of education funding. Our children deserve at least inflation-adjusted 2017-level funding. Tell your elected representatives to start investing in Iowa’s prosperity instead of undercutting our children’s futures.
Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa.
Originally published in the Iowa City Press-Citizen on January 13, 2024.