Iowa lawmakers starve public schools of needed cash

“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”— George Orwell

American politicians have a longstanding practice of using marketing language to promote their priorities. After all, who is “anti-life”? But sometimes, political-speak sinks below mere spin and into outright deception. The PATRIOT Act increased government surveillance. The Clear Skies Act would have allowed more air pollution. And in Iowa, vouchers that send public money to private schools are “education savings accounts,” while effectively cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from public schools is “taxpayer relief.”

Who, exactly, is “relieved” that we are disinvesting in Iowa’s future? Iowa still has good schools with excellent graduation rates, but we’re clearly sliding. Depending on the ranking, we’ve gone from near the top to the middle of the pack. In some aspects, like college readiness, our rankings are outright bad (No. 44).

Iowa’s schools were once a source of pride; our 2004 quarter featured an image of a one-room schoolhouse and the motto “Foundation in Education.” What changed?

Our schools have been on short rations for years, and each year has brought fresh headlines about tuition hikes at our public universities and funding that doesn’t meet rising costs. And the combined impact of skimping on education year after year has been more dramatic than many realize.

Recently, state Sen. and retired Iowa State University economics professor Herman Quirmbach worked with the state’s Legislative Services Agency to determine that impact. The gap between inflation-induced rising costs and state funding is staggering.

Quirmbach and the LSA calculate that, since 2017, Iowa K-12 schools have been shorted $1.6 billion from keeping up with their costs. That shortfall has increased each year and exceeds $500 million for PK-12 in this year alone.

Once we add in similar cuts to higher education, which has lost almost a quarter of its state resources to inflation, we get a very different picture of the state’s budget than the governor brags about. The state’s “piggy bank” for future tax cuts, the Taxpayer Relief Fund, would be better called the Neglect Our Future Fund, since our schools have paid almost two-thirds of it. (Some also comes from skimping on relatively low, regular costs in ways that will inevitably lead to expensive, long-term problems.)