Tag: Public Education

Rep. Taylor Collins (R-Mediapolis) is the poster child for the anti-diversity, equity and inclusion movement in Iowa. I previously described his work as “the spiritual struggle against the sin of liberalism,” but it’s not really that. It is an old friend, resentment rural Iowans hold against city-dwellers, in this case educators employed by the regent institutions in Iowa.

Here are posts from Rep. Collins’ Facebook page that set the stage:

Thank you Representative Collins! Iowans want well educated students not radical ideologies shoved down the throats of our students!

Time to put an end to the communists running the universities in the state of Iowa.

Nothing will change in the Universities until the Iowa legislature either ends tenure for professor’s in Iowa or somehow fires the administrators who hire and fire.

If you went anywhere in Iowa and asked what people liked about the University of Iowa they would likely say either the Hawkeye athletic program or the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. People from all over the state attend Iowa sporting events or get treated at the University Hospitals. One can argue the value of sportsball programs, yet it is hard to deny the acclaim Caitlin Clark received in the women’s basketball program. If a person has a complicated medical diagnosis, it is good to know treatment is as close as Iowa City. These impressions are not wrong.

If you asked the same people what they don’t like about the university, they might say the unabashed liberalism in Iowa City. The resentment is targeted at people who work for the state government and hold what are, by comparison, cushy, well-paid jobs with substantial benefits, with some employees belonging to a labor union.

You can’t argue much with people’s opinions, even if they are not based in the same reality as you and I. In her book The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, author Katherine J Cramer lays out these attitudes that pit rural versus urban folk in a way that resonates with Iowa and other rural states I visited.

In my Jan. 7 post I wrote, “The University of Iowa already announced closure of some offending programs, including the gender studies and American Studies programs in advance of the new DEI law going into effect in July. They discuss the possibility of forming a new umbrella school for these and other programs, although that seems uncertain as I write.”

The response from Rep. Collins to forming a new school is now known. It is hell to the no!

Sen. Lynn Evans, (R-Aurelia), and Rep. Taylor Collins (R-Mediapolis), sent a letter to the Board of Regents on Jan. 8 saying the UI’s proposal to form a School of Social and Cultural Analysis should be rejected, as it brings together “ideologically driven programs,” rather than doing away with them, according to Iowa Capitol Dispatch.

“Iowans expect our institutions of higher education to be focused on providing for the workforce needs of the state, not programs that are focused on peddling ideological agendas,” the letter stated.

Iowa Board of Regents spokesperson Josh Lehman told Iowa Capitol Dispatch in an email that the board did receive the letter and “appreciate(s) them sharing their opinions with the Board.” Lehman may as well have thrown a barrel of gasoline on that fire.

The new House Committee on Higher Education met last week. Below are the members, seven Republicans and four Democrats, several of them heavy hitters in the legislature.

This committee’s work is expected to be widely reported by Iowa media. I’ll be adding my two cents as well as the session continues.

The Iowa school voucher program, enacted into law by Republicans, is going to be expensive. Private schools are ramping up to use the newly arriving funds.

Last Saturday, I attended a high school class reunion in Davenport where a group of classmates participated in a tour of our old school building led by Andy Craig, President of Scott County Catholic Schools. A classmate reported Craig was dealing with the influx of money from the new school voucher program into the county’s five Catholic Schools. Enrollment at the high school declined by more than half since I graduated in 1970. Plainly, though, they survived the 54 years since then without the state’s largess.

On May 3, House Democratic Leader Jennifer Konfrst addressed the expense of school vouchers on Iowa Press:

O. Kay Henderson: Will ESA policy in Iowa be like Obamacare policy at the federal government? It’s going to have been in place for several years by then. Will it be impossible, as Democrats argue, to repeal it?

Konfrst: It’s a great question. I think that frankly school vouchers are unsustainable, so we will have no choice but to address how much money is going to school vouchers. Right now, it’s an unlimited appropriation and it comes off the top. So, before we fund public education and increase funding, we’re funding school vouchers. So, this year we know $180 million went to private schools and 60% of those families were already in private school, we’re just funding rich kids to go to private school with our tax dollars. And with an unlimited appropriation, we haven’t even gotten to the point where every Iowan is even eligible yet. That’s next year. So, once we start seeing that, if the dollars start going up so much, we’re going to have to roll back those costs because it’s simply not sustainable from a budget standpoint.

Henderson: Several years ago, when a former state legislator named Walt Rogers initially proposed that, the estimate was that it would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million. Is that the current estimate?

Konfrst: $300 million has been the first two years of this program. And, again, we’re not even to the point where the income limits have been taken off. So, we are, we’re going to see hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this, a billion dollars over five years is not unreasonable. And in a state like Iowa, that is simply not sustainable, especially when we remember that that money is coming, that money could be going to public schools to make it better for everyone. 54% of the vouchers so far have gone to 10 counties. So, how is this helping rural Iowa? But the budget for public education has been reduced statewide. So, it’s simply not a fair system. Iowans know that. That’s why they don’t like it. And it’s not sustainable.

Leader Konfrst was right then and the example of Arizona, released by ProPublica this week, shows how right she is.

Arizona, was the model for voucher programs across the country. It spent so much money paying private school tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects. Among the projects facing budget cuts are water infrastructure projects, highway expansions and repairs, community colleges, and air conditioning in the state prison system. ProPublica called it a budget meltdown.

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on vouchers to help kids who are already going to private school keep going to private school won’t just sink the budget, Lewis said. It’s funding that’s not going to the public schools, keeping them from becoming what they could and should be. (School Vouchers Were Supposed to Save Taxpayer Money. Instead They Blew a Massive Hole in Arizona’s Budget by Eli Hager, ProPublica July 16, 2024).

Iowa is not Arizona insofar as we have a budget surplus to be used in case of emergency. However, one expects the emergency upon which it will be spent is the desire of wealthy Iowans for more tax cuts. I believe that bill is coming next year.

Just as my high school managed through declining enrollment and inadequate funding over 50 years, Iowa families will manage through the state’s intentional defunding of public education. What choice do we have? Well, we do have a choice: work to elect more Democrats to the Iowa Senate and House. Here’s a link to some ideas on how to do that. I would point out the governor is up for re-election in 2026. Check out the full article at ProPublica.

There has been a coordinated effort on the part of billionaires to dismantle the American public school system. Iowa has been a part of this effort. Senator Bernie Sanders, chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), released a new report last week. Here is the press release:

WASHINGTON, June 25 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) today released a new report detailing the coordinated and growing effort to undermine, dismantle, and privatize the American public education system. This report comes after Sanders led the committee in a hearing last week titled, “The Immediate and Long-Term Challenges Facing Public School Teachers: Low, Pay, Teacher Shortages, and Underfunded Public Schools.”

Written by the HELP Committee’s Majority Staff, the report focuses on the impact of school privatization policies in the form of private school vouchers, which harm public schools, fuel education segregation, largely benefit wealthy families, and provide tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations.

According to the report’s new analysis, over the past decade, state funding for the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools has barely increased, by an average of just 1 percent a year after adjusting for inflation. During this same time, state spending on tax breaks and subsidies for private schools has skyrocketed by 408 percent, or $7 billion. These costs do not include 9 states that recently enacted, but have not fully implemented, their universal private school voucher policies – which will likely cause costs to further spike in coming years.

“Over the past decade, there has been a coordinated effort on the part of right-wing billionaires to undermine, dismantle and sabotage our nation’s public schools and to privatize our education system,” said Chairman Sanders. “That is absolutely unacceptable. We can no longer tolerate billionaires and multi-national corporations receiving massive tax breaks and subsidies while children in America are forced to go to under-staffed, under-resourced, and under-funded public schools. On this 70th anniversary year of Brown v. Board of Education, let us recommit to creating an education system that works for all of our people, not just the wealthy few.”

The American public K-12 school system serves about 91 percent of students across the country and employs 3.5 million teachers. Funded through taxpayer dollars, the system relies on 44 percent local funding, 46 percent state funding, and only 10 percent in federal funding. However, in the last three years, an unprecedented number of states with Republican-led legislatures have expanded their private school voucher programs, draining hundreds of millions of dollars from state budgets and public education systems to fund private schools.

One example the report examines is Arizona. In 2022, Arizona passed the nation’s first universal-eligibility private school voucher program. Originally forecast to cost $65 million in Fiscal Year 2024, the state later warned that the program could cost $944 million annually, subsidizing many students who never attended public schools to begin with. This could result in a $320 million gap in the overall state budget. While 92 percent of Arizona’s students are enrolled in public school, less than half of new K-12 education spending in the state’s FY24 budget would go towards public education. With the money it spends on private school vouchers, Arizona could hire 15,730 more public school teachers and pay them at least $60,000 a year.

Some additional findings from the report include:

• Families who can already afford to pay for private education benefit the most from private school vouchers. For example, early data from states like Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin show that the majority of students – 65 percent to 95 percent – who participate in private school voucher programs never attended a public school in the first place.
• A handful of conservative billionaires are playing a major role in funding the school privatization movement led by conservative advocacy groups, think tanks, media outlets, and Republican legislatures. The Bradley Foundation, DeVos Family Foundation, and Koch Foundation are some of the biggest right-wing funders driving the research, state legislation, lobbying campaigns, and legal battles to attack the public education system from all fronts.
• Standing up private school voucher programs is decimating the state budgets of early adopters. The report estimates that one year into their new voucher program, the actual cost of Arizona’s program is 983 percent higher than initially projected, and Florida’s universal private school voucher program is already 380 percent higher than what lawmakers estimated.
• In just one year alone, the amount that states are spending on private school vouchers could instead: Hire 15,730 more public K-12 teachers in Arizona; Hire 51,667 more school counselors in Florida; Raise wages for each child care providers by $33,500 in New Hampshire, and; More than triple its investment in career and technical education in Ohio.

As Chairman of the HELP Committee, Sanders has introduced legislation that would address the teacher shortage across the U.S. and substantially increase funding for public schools in high-poverty districts. The Pay Teachers Act ensures all public school teachers earn at least $60,000 a year with increases over the course of their career, and would triple funding for Title I – the major federal program that provides resources to low-income school districts. Sanders has also introduced legislation to make public colleges and universities tuition-free and debt free and to cancel all student debt. 

Read the full report, here.

Iowa has begun an experiment in private school vouchers. What Sanders is saying is it is not an experiment at all, just a manifestation of the wants and desires of billionaires. What should we do about this. Support Democratic state house candidates in the Nov. 5 election.