How Iowa Democrats are proposing to take education in the wrong direction

If state lawmakers want to lead on a legislative issue, you’d hope, at least, that they would start with something realistic.

So far, the best minority Democrats in the Iowa Legislature can seem to come up with are far-fetched proposals not exactly mirrored by reality.

In other words, they’re sticking with what they know — especially when it comes to education funding. Earlier this month, Democrats in the Iowa House announced a legislative agenda that included eliminating Education Savings Accounts, which allow any Iowa student to use their per-pupil portion of state education funding at an accredited non-public school of their choice.

House Democrats’ bright idea is to take what the state spends on ESAs and instead put it toward disguising the true cost of health insurance premiums under the so-called Affordable Care Act by continuing to fund expired subsidies tacked onto Obamacare during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those subsidies were never intended to be permanent.

Pumping more money into a program with costs that are already out of control? How very “big government” of them.

Democrats’ other education proposal is for a 5 percent increase in state per-pupil education funding.

Without context, that number might not seem unreasonable. To look at the big picture, though, they’re asking for a rate that tops every annual percentage of growth since the 1990-1991 school year, when rapper Vanilla Ice was dominating the airwaves with his hit single, “Ice Ice Baby,” the Soviet Union was still dissolving and Sen. Chuck Grassley was still in his 50s.

For what it’s worth, that was also before Iowa’s school funding process was modified to include (among other things) separate categorical funding for things such as teacher compensation and professional development.

In the last 20 years, rates of increase of per-pupil state education funding have averaged out to about 2.41%.

Larger increases of 4 percent annually between 2006 and 2010 — the last time Democrats controlled the legislature and the governorship — were stymied by fiscal crisis, resulting in two across-the-board cuts to general fund appropriations implemented by then-Gov. Chet Culver. Tens of millions in federal stimulus funds were also used to slow the bleeding.

Culver’s first cut in 2009 equaled about 1.5%, or $89.1 million. The second, a whopping 10 percent reduction made prior to the 2010 legislative session, amounted to over half a billion dollars cut from existing appropriations.

Culver and Democrats managed to hold onto a 2 percent education funding increase for FY 2011 but punted on setting a growth rate for the following year. The funding increase for the FY 2012 ended up being a big fat zero.

Then-Gov. Terry Branstad and a split legislature returned to 2 percent increases for FY 2013 and FY 2014. A larger 4 percent increase for FY 2015 preceded a modest 1.25% bump for FY2016 that included a one-time supplement of $55.7 million. Branstad vetoed the $55.7 million, insisting that legislators focus on regular funding and avoid “the disaster that occurred in the previous administration when they used one-time money” for ongoing education expenses.

Since then, state education funding increases have hovered between 1 percent and 3 percent each year.

Given the history, Democrats’ ask of a 5 percent increase in state education funding — one they’ve taken to repeating every year for a good long while now — is simply unrealistic.

And they know that. But the larger strategy at play here is to convince voters during an election year that Republicans are cruelly starving the public education till. Claims of “underfunding” are likely to strike a more poignant chord with voters than warnings about what happens when funding increases outpace budget growth. Especially with voters already experiencing the frustration of financial strain in their public school districts.

But as the numbers show in districts such as the Cedar Rapids Community School District, some districts’ financial strain is due in part to excessive spending. More dollars coming in is more likely to enable bad fiscal habits than offer a way out of them.

Voters, unfortunately, only tend to realize the mistake that is overspending when it's too late, which forces painful choices that don’t seem much better than the fiscal disaster they’re made to prevent.

The purpose of fiscal restraint, such as keeping education spending in line with other budgetary and economic factors, is to avoid those very problems.

Democrats didn’t do that the last time they were in charge. Their lack of fiscal discipline only exacerbated the strain of a global recession and statewide natural disasters, leading to steep, severe cuts.

Cedar Rapids schools are living out the consequences of imprudent spending in real time, as this column has covered in detail over the last several months as a $10-12 million deficit begets drastic spending and staffing cuts and the likely closure of multiple schools to reduce operating expenses.

The district would have you believe its financial woes would be cured if Republicans in the state legislature would only give public schools what they feel is enough money to operate. At the conclusion of its grueling five-hour meeting on Jan. 12, the board unanimously passed a resolution sponsored by Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a left-wing political action group, echoing Democrats’ call for the lofty 5 percent increase in state per-pupil funding.

The resolution, which was introduced by past board president Cindy Garlock, also repeated Democratic legislators’ call to repeal ESAs.

Critics such as Garlock say ESAs are the reason public schools are losing money. To call it fairly, every resident student enrolling outside the district does make for one less sliver of education funding for the district.

What their argument fails to consider, though, is that districts only lose money if and when a family in the district makes the choice to enroll their child elsewhere.

A parent doesn’t make that choice without a reason. By insisting that state per-pupil funding should only apply to a student attending their home district, ESA opponents are — unwittingly or not — asking those parents to put the needs of their school district ahead of the needs of their children.

It takes some nerve to call for more education dollars while advocating for some students to lose theirs altogether.

Garlock said at the Jan. 12 meeting that the district wouldn’t be debating tough budget questions into absurdly late hours if the money spent on ESAs were instead given to school districts.

Wrong. ESAs aren’t even the primary driver behind CRCSD's decline of 622 certified students this year. According to data presented to the district in early December and reported by The Gazette, 46% of students who left are attending another public school district, 22% of them through open enrollment.

9 percent are attending charter schools, with almost 200 students leaving this year for the newly opened Cedar Rapids Prep. Only 4 percent of students leaving CRCSD opted for a non-public school.

Contrary to what Garlock says, ESAs have relatively little to do with CRCSD’s big problems. The same goes for alleged underfunding by the Republican-controlled legislature, which accounts for less than $850,000 of CRCSD’s $10-12 million deficit this year, according to a Jan. 1 message to families from Superintendent Dr. Tawana Lannin (formerly Grover).

Like Democrats’ legislative proposal, CRCSD’s resolution ignores other components of Iowa’s comprehensive school choice system such as the expansion of charter schools that have drawn more students from the district than ESAs.

But ESAs are the central component of state Democrats’ message, which Garlock, longtime leftist political activist, is happy to trumpet.

She’s just sticking with what she knows, just like legislative Democrats determined to “lead” on education by repeating the same mistakes of the past. Runaway spending increases that lead to big problems, and laws that say your kid doesn’t deserve state funding for a better fit when their school district fails to make the grade.

If those are the best ideas they’ve got, Democrats deserve to stay in the minority.

Comments: 319-343-8222; althea.cole.writer@gmail.com