Wisconsin law doesn’t seek equal funding for every school child. Here’s why.

Alan Borsuk::

State Rep. John Nygren, the Marinette Republican who co-chairs the Legislature’s budget committee, told a news conference Tuesday that details of Wisconsin’s school funding system “would probably glaze most people’s eyes over.”

How true. Maybe that’s one of the reasons the funding system is what it is. Who can bear to think about changing it?

But, in line with my motto (“Dare to be boring!”), let us turn our attention to questions such as these:

Why does the education of a kid who lives in, say, the 3400 block of N. Cramer St. get almost $1,200 less in public support than the education of a kid who lives in the 3500 block of N. Cramer St.? Is there something magical in the concrete in E. Edgewood Ave. that makes reality prettier on one side of the street?

Or is it just a historical thing because one block is in the city of Milwaukee and the other in Shorewood?

There are literally thousands of ways across the state of Wisconsin that you could pose such questions, some more dramatic than this example. The state’s 424 school districts each have their own “revenue limits,” which is to say, how much money, under state law, they can receive each year from state aid and local property taxes (and a few other smaller sources, but we’re really talking about state aid and property taxes).