Wisconsin's Pet Goat: School Finance Reform

By Annette Talis

Most of us have seen the 2001 footage showing the commander in chief crouched on a small elementary school chair to while the nation was under attack. That day many soccer moms who cast their top-of-the-ticket ballots for better schools were transformed into security moms.

Matt Miller’s article advocating a nationalized education system, “A Modest Proposal to Fix the Schools: First, Kill All the School Boards,” published in The Atlantic earlylast year, gave fits to a few people at the National School Boards Association but largely went unnoticed among its target audience in Washington, D.C.  Public education was no longer at the top of the national agenda.

Public policy discussion about student achievement, performance accountability and class size now seem sepia-tone images of a more innocent era when Americans had the luxury of thinking about public education.

“Why educate your kid in math and science if he’s going to be up to his rear end in seawater?” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor John Sharpless ironically asked last year, astutely predicting a bipartisan election-year decampment to newer, fresher national crises.

The economy, job losses, national security, energy and health care have shifted public priorities, all but drubbing public education off the national editorial page.

I felt melancholy recently listening to the quavering voice of a U.S. Department of Education official trying to tap passion, anger or any emotion about the federal Reading First program, the darling of phonics advocates and the demon of the whole-language crowd. The vitriolic Reading Wars now seem a bucolic luxury given the present state of world affairs.

On Election Day in November, I could almost hear a collective sigh of relief from Wisconsin school boards, administrators and teachers, who would welcome a period of relative national obscurity.

Yet the vise of contemporary pressures now squeezing the economy will not allow business as usual in American schoolrooms.

It is untenable for Wisconsin to continue to rest on its laurels, willing only to dip a toe in the water of educational innovation.  No, these times will demand a hard edged scrutiny of an increasingly expensive, largely bureaucratic system, one that provides scant evidence of overall success in raising  achievement, employment and quality-of-life outcomes of traditional struggling students. 

The good news is we may have learned some important lessons along the way.

According to the National Review, No Child Left Behind’s self-described “true believers” Chester E. Finn Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli recognize “When Washington knowingly holds out carrots and sticks, sunshine and sanctions, to alter the established practices of states, districts, schools, and teachers, unintended and undesirable changes are at least as likely to result as the kind that lawmakers expect.”

In Wisconsin, during economic boom times, we learned that 2/3 state funding did not transform public schools.  We now know that the state’s key leverage points; more money and altering the structure of taxation, are not the solution to reforming schools. But we also know from the earlier experiences of mediation-arbitration and double-digit local property tax rate increases that the state’s school-finance and taxation policies can get in the way of both those desirable policy outcomes.

In a time of shared pain that offers the prospect of collective resolve, the governor, legislators, school leaders, interest groups, educators and Wisconsin citizens must have the guts to make significant personal and political sacrifices to realistically examine school finance and public employee collective bargaining without the expectation of new money or risk leaving nothing behind but the hollow shell of an American ideal.

-January 8, 2009