Alan Borsuk: Is it too much to ask that education policy discussions be civil, respectful, thoughtful and productive?
I wonder what is holding Wisconsin together, other than the Green Bay Packers.
We certainly don’t seem to be held together by a shared sense of purpose in public life. Or even by respect for others who have a differing sense of purpose than us.
It’s like Wisconsin residents (or at least those involved in politics) live in two different states, with two widely differing perceptions of reality and two polar-opposite senses of what is important. But they share a deep reservoir of anger at those on the other side This goes for partisanship, reactions to COVID, social issues of many kinds, anything related to race and ethnicity, and more.
But on the current list of episodes that show how divided we are we have education policy and spending discussions of the last several days.
The sessions when the legislature’s budget writing committee votes on statewide school funding for the next two years have been exercises in staunch partisanship for more than a decade. Every vote is along party lines, the legislators of each party talk entirely past each other, and the tone (from both sides) is harsh.
The session Thursday was perhaps the worst. They didn’t even bother arguing over past favorites like the state’s school voucher program. The meeting also didn’t last that long, adjourning by mid-afternoon, compared to some budget cycles when these sessions went all night.
No one made a dent in what anyone from the other side was thinking. There were two entirely different perceptions of what went on in the past year and what lies ahead. One Republican legislator said he should have brought along the muck boots he uses on his farm so he could deal with what Democrats were saying. One Democrat said he should have brought muck boots for the opposite reason.
It was like they were playing out a really bad script, with some alternations in specifics and sources of anger, often focusing on pandemic responses and the huge amount of federal money coming to schools, thanks to President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats.
The overall dynamics were familiar: Republicans won on every point. Less than 10% of the increase in school spending that was proposed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was approved. Public school leaders statewide lobbied hard for increased state support of special education and got a small increase. The overall state limit on school spending was left unchanged for the next two years. Even charter schools and private schools in the state’s voucher program got close to nothing. Milwaukee and Madison, the two largest districts in the state with, of course, the most Black and Hispanic students, were dissed.
If you are a glutton for meetings like this (count me in), you could take a break Thursday afternoon and then tune into the Milwaukee School Board session, which included approval of the Milwaukee Public Schools budget for next school year. The meeting was much more amiable than the legislative session – there is no opposing party within MPS.
But the canyon between what Milwaukee board members see as important and what the legislative Republicans see as important is deep and wide. A good example: board members approved several amendments to what Superintendent Keith Posley proposed, generally in support of social justice ideas that the Republicans just hate.
The MPS referendum approved by voters a year ago (worth more than $75 million in the coming year) and the new federal aid (worth more than $500 million over several years) made the MPS session relatively relaxed. But especially the latter fired up the Republicans calls for no substantial increase in state education spending.
That brings me, for two reasons, to focus on the phrase “maintenance of effort.”
For one, that’s the phrase in federal law that, in simple terms, means a state can’t reduce the percentage of its overall spending going to pay for kindergarten through twelfth grade education even if schools are getting a big helping of federal aid. If a state doesn’t meet that “maintenance” standard, it could lose that federal money.
Democrats say the plan approved Thursday by the Republicans is all-but-certain to fail the maintenance test and Wisconsin could be out that money. Republicans think that’s not so likely and they could fix the problem, if need be.
There will be a lot more developments on this front before the state budget is finalized, so stay tuned.
But “maintenance of effort” could also be taken as a broader term worth some reflection when it comes to the overall education of Wisconsin kids.
Are we really maintaining our efforts to improve education when we fight like this, with so much focus on defeating our opponents and so little serious deliberation on what it takes to support good schools?
For the large number of kids who are not doing well in school (and Wisconsin is tragically one of the nation’s leaders in having kids who fit that label), is maintaining our efforts enough, even if we stay in line with the past? Don’t we need to increase our efforts by setting higher goals and providing the support to reach them?
If “maintenance of effort” means keeping on the path we are on, are we satisfied with that? In recent years, there have been broad and serious indications that student accomplishment in Wisconsin is declining slowly or, at best, holding steady. For low income and minority children, that means the paths to get ahead are generally tough to access and the picture is not getting better.
Do we want to improve? If so, is it outlandish to suggest less fighting, less partisanship, more thoughtfulness, more understanding of people different than us, and more joining of efforts? Maybe pursuing such paths would create fresh reasons to think Wisconsin is held together by things other than Super Bowl hopes and the reasons to wear muck boots to legislative sessions.
Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu.