“We have a lot of hope in all of you, who chose to spend your entire day thinking and learning and plotting with us about all of these things, and we know that if we work stronger together, we can make a difference," WPEN Executive Director Heather Dubois Bourenane said. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
In 2020, Madison school district voters approved a $317 million referendum that helped pay for new facilities at La Follette High School, including a new auditorium.
On Wednesday, that auditorium hosted the Wisconsin Public Education Network summit, and La Follette principal Mat Thompson took the occasion to thank the Madison community for the improvements. He also took a poke at how Wisconsin funds public education.
“The state funding formula does not meet the needs of our scholars,” Thompson said. “Many districts across the state, including right here in Madison, need to go to their communities for referendum.”
In April 2024 there were over 90 referendum questions on ballots across the state. “These improvements that you see here today… were made possible thanks to this community — the Madison community that is so supportive of our schools,” Thompson said.
The Madison Metropolitan School District will return to voters in the fall, asking them to approve a $100 million operating funding request and a $507 million building request. School board President Nichelle Nichols told the summit it was a “really hard and important decision” to go back to the community and ask people to “please continue to invest in a public education.”
Schools’ ongoing reliance on raising property taxes to meet costs and deficiencies in the state funding systems were among the issues that educators, school board members, state leaders and other public school advocates discussed Wednesday at the education network’s 10th summit, along with ways to advocate for solutions.
Looking ahead to the next state budget
Advocacy for public education in the state’s next budget cycle was a big focus of the conference.
Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly told summit participants that the Department of Public Instruction is working on its next state budget request, and will continue to seek more resources for public schools.
“We will not be limited by the context of what is. We will continue to treat and design the future that can be,” Underly said.
Underly said that there needs to be an increase in special education reimbursement, general aid, mental health resources and support for educators, and called those requests “bold and audacious and doable.”
“We know that under current constraints we simply don’t have the funding or the resources to support all our students, and that is not okay,” Underly said.
Anne Chapman, research director with the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, informed attendees on the issue during a session that focused on what schools might want to consider in the leadup to the next budget. Chapman told the Examiner that her job is to help people, especially when they are looking to advocate for their schools, understand how funding works and the problems and challenges that presents for districts.
“My hope is that wherever you sit on the spectrum of what school funding should be like, in Wisconsin, you do have the facts,” Chapman said.
Revenue limits and special education
In her presentation she described state revenue limits as the “backbone” of school finance in the state, but explained that they are capped and haven’t kept pace with the rate of inflation for many years. Schools are increasingly relying on referenda to meet their needs, though the rate of passage has been in decline rate of passage in recent years. Meanwhile, the state of Wisconsin still has a $3.1 billion budget surplus, Chapman noted.
Advocating for schools can get complicated. Many tools for funding schools in Wisconsin can pit school districts against one another, Chapman said. Finding policies that are “the tide that raises all boats” and using one voice to elevate them could offer a different path.
“There are ways to fund education that are flexible enough that every district could take those resources and apply it to their specific needs,” Chapman said, “and those are the things we’re looking for when we’re looking for things to advocate for in the state budget.”
Chapman said revenue limits and special education funding are two areas where districts could work together to advocate for improvements as they could help the vast majority of schools. She said the No. 1 issue that she hears from districts is that the states’ revenue limits, which cap how much revenue schools can bring in, haven’t kept pace with inflation since 2009.
School districts rely on their general funds to serve all students, but their “spending power has gone down and down and down over time,” Chapman said. “At some point school districts can’t keep pulling rabbits out of the hat… How much better could it be if they had the resources? They need to close their budget gaps.”
Chapman also noted that providing special education to students can also represent a big cost to districts, and a higher state reimbursement rate could help schools everywhere in Wisconsin . The 2023-25 state budget raised the special education reimbursement rate for public schools from 31.7% to an estimated 33.3%; however this didn’t get close to meeting the 60% that DPI and Gov. Tony Evers asked for.
Pushing back on privatization
Summit participants also discussed the privatization of schools and Wisconsin’s school voucher system.
Derek Gottlieb, an assistant professor at the University of Northern Colorado, presented a session with UW-Madison assistant professor Chris Saldaña called “Lies, Damned Lies and School Vouchers.” The voucher system, Gottlieb argued, is not helping the state meet the duty laid out in the state constitution that “students have a fundamental right to an equal opportunity for a sound basic education.”
“What it takes to adequately educate every child is time, attention, care, rigorous sight… and that requires resources at a scale that is much more massive than the state of Wisconsin has ever felt comfortable and the citizens of Wisconsin have ever felt comfortable providing on a statewide basis,” Gottleib said. “Vouchers are not the way to make that constitutional promise come true — quite the opposite. They sap our capacity by diluting school funding across a much wider range of institutions.”
Voucher schools aren’t required to meet the same levels of transparency as public schools and they aren’t necessarily leading to improved outcomes for students, he noted.
Pro-voucher arguments rely on evidence that “comes from these very tiny targeted programs like the one started in Milwaukee in the early 90s and then that little secret is just assumed to work the same way,” Gottleib said. “If you take it to scale, if you universalize it… all the evidence from the last five, 10 years, when those universal programs have become available in other states — in Iowa, in Indiana, in Ohio — suggests that, not only do the benefits evaporate, but real harms are introduced and the budgetary impact is massive.”
Gottleib said that rather than turning to the voucher program the state should be investing in public schools at a much larger scale.
At the summit’s close, WPEN Executive Director Heather DuBois Bourenane told participants that reaching the state’s constitutional imperative is a realistic goal.
“The state isn’t doing its job even when it sits on a massive surplus. We’re sick of our kids paying the price while our funding gaps and our racial disparities get wider and wider and wider, as we throw more and more money away at privatization scams,” DuBois Bourenane said.
“We have a lot of hope in all of you, who chose to spend your entire day thinking and learning and plotting with us about all of these things, and we know that if we work stronger together, we can make a difference.”
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