Teachers’ Strikes Showed Desperate Need for Funding: Will Congress and State Legislatures Respond?
In walkouts and strikes all year long—from West Virginia to Kentucky to Colorado to Oklahoma to Arizona to California—teachers have been crying out for essentials their schools cannot afford. Two weeks ago in its annual update on the fiscal condition of America’s K-12 public schools, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities confirmed teachers’ concerns. In 24 states, combined state and local funding for public schools (adjusted for inflation) remains below what was being spent in 2008, before the Great Recession.
We are in the midst of the federal and state budget season, and too often the conversation isn’t really about what public schools need. After all, that would be way too expensive. Instead of a conversation about what is required to serve our children well, we hear debates in Congress and in our legislatures about the size of the slices in a budgetary pie that is smaller after years of tax cuts. Sometimes public schools merely get what is called “a budgetary residual”—what’s left after lawmakers fund higher priorities. This year teachers have been reminding us that our children ought to be our priority.
Budget discussions are just beginning in my state, Ohio. The Governor’s new budget flat-funds K-12 spending except for one laudable line-item—an additional $250 million to help school districts provide wraparound social services for children and families in poverty. The amount would grow to $300 million in the second year of the biennium. But the Governor’s proposed budget won’t address Ohio’s inadequate and very unequal school funding formula. Last summer, when he was interviewed by Jim Siegel for the Columbus Dispatch, Ohio’s school finance expert Howard Fleeter explained that Ohio’s funding formula is failing to support the state’s poorest school districts—the ones the state brands with “F” ratings and has begun to punish by seizing them and taking over their governance. After documenting Ohio’s underfunding of its poorest districts, Fleeter commented: “The formula itself is kind of just CONTINUE READING: Teachers’ Strikes Showed Desperate Need for Funding: Will Congress and State Legislatures Respond? | janresseger
