State aid, gross school levy, and total costs have seen upward trends almost every year, with the exceptions of Gov. Walker’s first year, when all three went down, and over two years under Doyle, when school levy went down half a percent in 2005 and state aid went down 2.7% in 2009. (In 2009, Doyle removed state funding for schools and replaced it with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds provided by the Obama Administration.) Looking at the overall change over 20 years, state school aid changed by +36.48%, levy changed by +77.58%, and total costs by +51.32%.
This graph represents the change of school aids in percentages from the beginning of an administration to the end of an administration, or to the most recent data available, in the case of Gov. Walker. There are also calculations for the difference between the change over from the last year of the previous administration to the first year of the next administration. Change over previous administration has a downward trend for Walker and Doyle in most categories, or a small positive percentage. Having only one fiscal year for McCallum, his percentage change for his administration was 0.0% in most categories but had an upward trend coming from the change over the end of Thompson’s term. Overall, categorical aids have clearly gone up much more than general school aids (96.53% change for categorical aids vs. 29.23% for general school aids). School revenue limits are not affected by categorical aids.