School Funding Declines due to Tax Cutting, Austerity Budgeting, and Paring Down Title I and IDEA
A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) documents that 35 states continued to spend less in the 2013-2014 school year on their public education formulas than they did before the recession hit in 2008. Alabama and Oklahoma have cut per-pupil school funding by over 20 percent since 2008. In 14 states, per-student funding remains fully 10 percent below what those states were spending before the recession. Fifteen states are providing less funding per student than they did a year ago. At the same time, according to the report, an additional 775,000 students are now enrolled in public schools compared to the 2007-2008 school year. (All CBPP statistics are adjusted for inflation.)
What do these numbers say about our society? Do we believe it is our public responsibility to educate all children? Are we committed to expanding opportunity for the children who have been left behind by racial segregation and economic inequality? Is society’s commitment to educating our children diminishing? Have we stopped believing in the public schools and hence stopped investing? Have state elected officials come to accept widespread rhetoric about “failing” public schools, language generated by our national test-and-punish law, No Child Left Behind? And if so, is disinvestment a smart response? A moral response? What do the budget priorities of legislatures across our 50 states say about our society?
Maybe we have come to accept the rhetoric of those who have signed the pledge distributed widely across state legislatures by Grover Norquist and his Americans for Tax Reform. Legislators who sign the pledge promise they will never vote to raise taxes. If states persist in reducing the funds available by cutting taxes, then school funding is likely to diminish over time. The arithmetic is very simple. Because public education for over 50 million children in the United States is such a large endeavor, and because 44 percent (according to CBPP’s recent report) of all education funding comes from state governments, public education remains the biggest budget line for most states. CBPP reminds us: “States have avoided raising new revenues. States have disproportionately relied on spending cuts to close the very large budget shortfalls they have faced over the last several years, rather than a more balanced mix of spending cuts and revenue increases Between fiscal years 2008 and 2013, states closed 45 percent of their budget gaps through spending cuts, and only 16 percent of their budget gaps through taxes and fees….”
Here is how the tax cutting has played out in my state, Ohio. Columnist Thomas Suddes, writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer on June 22, declared, “Republicans grabbed control of the state Senate 30 years ago this November by pledging to cut Ohio’s income tax. They, and House Republicans, have vowed the same ever since.” Suddes traces the history of tax cuts—the elimination of the tax on inventory and equipment that shifted the responsibility for School Funding Declines due to Tax Cutting, Austerity Budgeting, and Paring Down Title I and IDEA | janresseger: