My brilliant friend, fighting every day for K-12 schools.. makes the Washington Post !!

[jodymarie aimee]

Jeri McGinley, who heads up the nonprofit School Funding Reform for Wisconsin, says that the latest legislative maneuvers are also representative of the Walker era.

“They say that government should play less of a role, but they’re also taking away local control and imposing restrictions,” McGinley notes. “It’s a vicious way to govern.”

Back in the 1990s, Wisconsin imposed caps limiting what each community can spend on its schools, spurred by the anti-property tax fervor of the time. But the caps also had the effect of essentially locking in inequity: property rich districts can spend much more than their poorer counterparts.

Walker’s cuts to education spending, some of the deepest in the nation, made an already unequal system worse, effectively pitting school districts and entire communities against one another. Take the teacher shortage that has followed in the wake of Act 10: Wealthy districts can offer higher wages, even signing bonuses, to attract new teachers, while poor and especially rural districts struggle to fill vacancies and hold onto the teachers they still have.

Then there’s the plague of declining enrollment that is steadily eating away at rural schools. When paper mills and manufacturing plants shut down and family dairy farms close, the kids leave too, and state education funds follow them.

The northern Wisconsin city of Tomahawk, where I attended a hearing held by a commission tasked with reassessing Wisconsin’s school finance system, offers a vivid example of this corrosive dynamic. In the past decade, the student population here has shrunk by 250, down to 1,300 kids in a rural district that encompasses more than 400 square miles. A drop in revenue combined with the state’s deep cuts to education spending has meant that the school district must ask local residents to increase their property taxes again and again, even as the dire financial situation has meant staffing and program cuts.

“It’s a recipe for resentment,” says Kim Kaukl, the executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance.

His hope is that a fairer school funding system can begin to neutralize the power of resentment—and the ability of politicians like Scott Walker to exploit it.

“The mindset in rural areas is that Madison and Milwaukee get everything at the expense of local schools,” Kaukl says. Wisconsin’s largest cities, of course, are also its most diverse, meaning that assertions that they “get everything” are racially coded. “Politicians really play into that feeling of resentment,” says Kaukl. “Then they implement policies that are so bad for education.”

In the Walker era, Wisconsin has become infamous for its divisive politics. And yet the post-Act 10 brand of education activism is decidedly, even insistently, nonpartisan. In a state as divided, or rather “polka-dotted,” by red and blue as Wisconsin, education is still a “purple” issue. Local support for public schools, including increased funding for them, crosses party lines.

So education activists here are making the case that public schools, and more importantly the children they serve, should be free from partisan rancor. This argument has broadened their reach among rural districts across the state, positioning advocates as “the grownups in the room,” as Wisconsin Public Education Network’s DuBois Bourenane puts it.

The story of former paper mill executive Jim Bowman is indicative of the kind of activism that’s flourishing in local communities.

When he helped start a local group, Fox Cities Advocates for Public Education, to support public education after the passage of Act 10, Bowman and his fellow activists decided to eschew the “blue” label.

“We thought that being connected with the Democratic Party would undermine us,” says Bowman, who also serves as a member of the Appleton Board of Education. The group appeals to those whom Bowman refers to as the “purely purples”: parents and other local residents of both parties who care about their schools and are unhappy about the steady depletion of resources from them. These “mad moms” are then encouraged to pressure their local officials, through letters or testimony at public events, or by simply showing up at legislative meetings to send a signal that members of the public are paying attention to education policy.

And the more legislators hear from constituents that they care about public education, the better able they are to counter the influence of big donors and the corporate lobby. “Our goal is to make public education one of the top issues that legislators are hearing about so that they can’t just ignore their constituents,” says Bowman.

Bowman, who initially got active in local politics through Organizing for America, says his group’s nonpartisan approach has given it greater credibility with the public as it seeks to turn the tide of popular opinion against, say, school vouchers.

“When we talk about vouchers, we talk about the lack of the results, the cost, and the fact that the local public is paying for vouchers through their property taxes,” says Bowman. “That lack of transparency really bothers voters in both parties.”

In 2013, Wisconsin lawmakers vastly expanded the state’s private school voucher program, which steers taxpayer dollars to private, mostly religious schools. The measure was backed by an aggressive, and extravagantly funded, lobbying effort by the American Federation for Children, the school choice organization started by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. A subsequent law, passed with no public input, created another voucher program for students with special needs.

The nation’s first parental choice program shifting money from public to private schools was created in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, in 1990. Its scope and cost have risen steadily since then, to $269 million in the 2017-2018 school year, when 36,249 voucher students were enrolled in 238 participating schools, overwhelmingly religious.

McGinley of School Funding Reform for Wisconsin has been a driving force behind an effort to make sure that local taxpayers know exactly how much private school vouchers are costing them. In Stevens Point, where she lives, the combination of revenue cuts and school vouchers have cost the public schools dearly.

“We’re now having to raise property taxes in order to pay for voucher students,” says McGinley, whose organization is pushing legislators to add a line item onto local property tax bills that would make clear exactly how much the voucher program is costing. While the Wisconsin Voucher Transparency Bill failed to receive a hearing during the most recent legislative session, it united school districts from rural Rhinelander to urban Racine.

In Racine, where legislators approved a private school voucher program in 2011, the growing burden on local property taxpayers has emerged as a potentially potent political issue. The Racine Education Association recently launched a campaign to educate local voters about the ballooning cost of the voucher program.

“It’s sort of a politically unifying topic because people care very much about what their property taxes are going to pay for here,” says the union’s president, Angelina Cruz. “The cost burden of having two parallel school systems was really shifted onto local taxpayers without any say.”

The unacknowledged “theory of change” behind much of this nonpartisan activism, of course, is that once voters begin to connect the dots between the specific policies that are undermining their public schools, and the politicians who are enacting them, they will change the way they vote. There is some evidence in Wisconsin — as in the traditionally red states roiled by teacher protests this spring — that such a shift may be underway.

Back in January, a Democratic candidate running in a special election stunned Wisconsin by winning a state senate seat the GOP had held for nearly thirty years, in a district where Donald Trump crushed Hillary Clinton. Education was a major issue in the race. Patty Schachtner, a school board member, ran on a pro-public education platform, calling for restoring funding to local schools, and to the state’s university system, effectively characterizing the Walker-GOP record as one of rural neglect, especially of schools. She defeated her opponent, whose reelection pitch was essentially “keep the Walker momentum going,” by more than 10 percentage points.

But translating strong support for public education into broader political change won’t be easy. In Oshkosh, a blue-collar community in east central Wisconsin, voters passed property tax increases to fund school operating costs in two successive elections by overwhelming margins. Karl Loewenstein, chairman of Support Oshkosh Students, headed up the pro-referendum campaigns and notes that the strongest support for raising taxes to fund the schools came from the most Republican parts of the city.

Voters there bucked local state assembly member Mike Schraa, who actively campaigned against the referendums, arguing that the state had given the schools plenty of money and urging residents to reject a tax increase. But the same voters later sent Schraa, a staunch Walker ally who ran unopposed, back to the capitol.

“Basically you had voters saying ‘Don’t trash our system of public education,’ ” says Loewenstein, who is also a professor of history at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

A poll conducted this spring found that voters overwhelmingly say that increasing spending on public education is more important than cutting taxes, a huge swing over the past five years. For Walker, who has placed tax cuts at the very center of his agenda, that could pose a challenge as he seeks a third term as governor this fall. There are already signs that something of a “makeover” is underway. Walker spent much of last year visiting public schools and touting his love of them. He also modestly increased state spending on education, including more funding for rural schools.

“Walker has heard the message that citizens across the state have been screaming at him,” says DuBois Bourenane. But she notes that despite the increased spending, Wisconsin still isn’t back to the funding levels its schools had in 2009.

And, she says, when Walker boasts that he’s the education governor, “he doesn’t mention that his ‘historic investment’ includes nearly $275 million to pay for private school vouchers.”


washingtonpost.com
Analysis | A new public education movement is emerging in Wisconsin, a rebuke to Gov. Walker’s war on labor and…