Want great schools? Show us the money

Speaking of money and schools ...

There's been a lot of talk this year about establishing some kind of merit pay system for Iowa's teachers.

The idea is that it will give educators extra incentive to pull out all the stops - to truly push, prod and encourage their students to excel.

Never mind the implication that teachers now are holding back the good stuff because it's not worth the extra effort.

Never mind the complexities of developing some kind of merit system that accounts for differences between subjects, classes and individual students, yet can be applied universally and fairly across the state (proponents insist this can be done).

Let's assume state leaders will devise an equitable, effective system of merit pay and get buy-in from Iowa's schools. Here's the real question: Will they fund it?

More broadly, will they fund any of the ambitious reform ideas expected to come out of last week's education summit? As merit pay backers say: Money may not be everything, but it certainly makes a difference.

Yet the Iowa Policy Project released a school funding report on Friday that shows the state hasn't been putting its money where its mouth is for some time now when it comes to education.

Researchers crunched the numbers and found a decade-long decline in real dollars for state aid to K-12 schools - to the tune of almost $300 million from fiscal years 1998 through 2010.

State leaders also have suppressed districts' ability to spend money from local property taxes, with the result that Iowa's per-pupil spending has not kept pace with increases throughout the country, according to the IPP.

That sluggish commitment has filtered up, too, in funding for community colleges and regents universities.

Nowadays, public funding only accounts for about 40 percent of the budgets at Iowa's three regents' universities. Tuition and fees carry more than half that total $4 billion price tag.

Which reminds me of a joke I once heard once from university fundraisers who beat the bushes for donations to pay for the higher education state leaders claim to value so highly: “First we were state schools,” they told me. “Then we were state-supported schools. Now, we're state-located schools.” It's funny because it's true.

None of this will come as a surprise to education insiders who have been slashing budgets for years now. But they're important reminders to the rest of us that the adage is true: You get what you pay for.

Or don't get what you don't pay for.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net