Understanding School Finance in Wisconsin: A Primer by Michael Ford
President’s Notes Few concepts are more important to a functioning democracy than openness and transparency. We need to see our government work, and we need to understand why it works the way it does. While we cannot hope to fully understand everything about government, we need to understand the most significant issues. Transparency is threatened not only by the backroom deal but by a complexity that makes it difficult — if not impossible — to understand certain programs. Wisconsin state government, in spite of its reputation for openness, comes up short on the transparency scale in a major way. The state allocates more taxpayer money to K-12 education ($5.4 billion) than anything else, yet school finance in Wisconsin is complex to the point of being nearly impenetrable. The complexity of school finance was on full display in 2012 when the Madison School District — the state’s second largest — began preparing its annual budget assuming state aids would be cut by $800,000. Yet when the accountants at the state Department of Public Instruction ultimately sorted through all of the variables, Madison was pleased to learn that state aids would not decrease but instead would increase by $11 million. School aids had proven simply too complicated for the budget analysts in Madison schools to predict with any accuracy. We are nearing the point at which the way state aids are allocated to schools is simply too complicated for the average citizen to understand. If that’s the case, how can citizens be expected to hold elected officials accountable? How can they influence the process? There is clearly a need for a layperson’s guide to school finance. To write a guide to Wisconsin’s school finance system, we turned to WPRI research director Mike Ford. He is among a small group of individuals who not only understands the ins and outs of school finance, but can also explain it to the average citizen. In this primer, Ford not only explains the key features of school finance, he does so in the context of important policies, including property tax relief, tax base equalization, and state and local control. As Ford unravels the complexities, between the lines you will see how decades of Wisconsin’s political battles have been translated into the fine points of school finance. There is no good defense for the complexity of Wisconsin’s school finance system. Wisconsin’s schools and taxpayers are ill-served by the fog of intricacy that shrouds school finance. It is a complexity that serves no one other than insiders and lobbyists. By allowing average citizens to better understand school finance, Mike Ford’s primer enables all of us to intelligently follow the activity in the Capitol and ultimately to have a shot at affecting the way the system functions.
George Lightbourn