Earlier this year, recently re-elected Governor Jim Doyle creatively used his line item veto power to move funds from transportation and other areas of the state budget to public school funds. Wisconsin citizens may have some “blowback” from that decision in the form of higher vehicle registration fees. This Wisconsin State Journal editorial has more information:

But that’s no excuse for sticking it to the little guy who already pays one of the highest gas taxes in the nation.
The DOT is proposing a 45-percent increase, from $55 to $80, in the annual registration fee for cars.
The governor and Legislature should quickly reject the proposed $25 hike. They also should be wary of even bigger increases proposed for registration fees on light trucks.
The higher vehicle registration fees would bring in an additional $208 million to state coffers over the next two budget years. The DOT says the money is needed to fix roads and to rebuild Interstate 94 south of Milwaukee.
The road work may be justified. But motorists shouldn’t get soaked just because state leaders are mismanaging the state’s money.
State leaders — the governor and the Legislature — have diverted hundreds of millions of dollars from the transportation fund in recent years and spent it on other things such as public schools. To avoid road construction delays, our state leaders then borrowed money to make up the difference.

Patrick Marley has more:

The car registration fee would rise 46%, from $55 to $80. The department also wants to raise the registration fee for light trucks to $80 to $112, depending on their weight.
The changes would raise the cost of a license from $24 to $34 to cover the cost of new federal requirements to make identification cards more secure. Licenses are good for eight years.
The recommendations were due two months ago as part of the agency’s budget request, but the department didn’t submit them until Friday – three days after Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle was re-elected. The department noted that for years it had filed its requests about two months later than other agencies.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has more:

At the same time, the governor and the Legislature can help future DOT budgets by not raiding the transportation fund to fill holes elsewhere in the state budget, something that has occurred too often in recent years and is one of the reasons for the transportation department’s structural deficit.
Drivers should not be taxed by the state twice, once on income and once in fees, to meet the education budget, for example. The fees and the gasoline tax should be reserved for transportation.

A useful reminder that increased local (property taxes), state (income, sales taxes and fees) or federal (income, fees) spending on education ends up coming from the same sources.
Dictonary.com: blowback

For the last few years, we’ve heard the mantra from many school board members and the administration – no money, no money, no money – especially for new programs.
Thanks to Isthmus we now learn that “The district has spent five years building infrastructure, training staff and convincing stakeholders of the growing demand for virtual learning.”
Development of the virtual classroom once again confirms the administration’s approach to managing the MMSD to minimize input from any source other than administrative staff in the Doyle Building. The administration always seems to find money for what it wants to do, such as a new classroom at Marquette, but never money for suggestions from others.

From GreenBiz.com:

A new national report finds that building “green” would save an average school $100,000 each year – enough to hire two new additional full-time teachers.
The report breaks new ground by demonstrating that green schools – schools designed to be energy efficient, healthy and environmentally friendly — are extremely cost-effective. Total financial benefits from green schools outweigh the costs 20 to 1. With over $35 billion dollars projected to be spent in 2007 on K-12 construction, the conclusions of this report have far-reaching implications for future school design.

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WKOW-TV:

The cooler weather that arrived early this year forced many people to turn on their heat much sooner than they might have hoped. The high cost of heating is compounded for the Madison Metro School District, which pays about three million dollars a year in utilities. Recently, the district has gotten creative about conserving energy, and money, with a little help from energy conservation group Focus on Energy.
“Every dollar we save in an energy bill is a dollar that can be put back into the classroom,” says Doug Pearson, with MMSD.

Miranda Spivack:

A Montgomery County “growth tax” law designed to force builders to pay for new roads and schools to ease the impact of development has raised substantially less money than promised by its supporters.
County officials had predicted that the 2003 law, which created a tax to help pay for schools and increased an existing roads tax, would generate as much as $66 million over the past two years. Instead, the amount raised has totaled about $37 million.
Although the shortfall was caused in part by a slowdown in the housing market, more than a third — about $13.5 million — of the anticipated funds were not collected because the County Council allowed a four-month delay before the new taxes took effect. That lag set off a rush by builders to apply for permits before the March 1, 2004, deadline.

The “tax freeze” continues. Alan Borsuk:

At the heart of a decision by Milwaukee Public Schools officials to increase property taxes for schools by 7.7% was a choice not discussed in public:
Millions of dollars that had been freed up within the $1.15 billion budget for the 2006-’07 school year could be used to hold down the tax increase. Or they could be used to increase spending by $78.90 per student across the MPS system – totaling almost $6.7 million.
Administrators and a split School Board on Tuesday went with the increased spending.
Labeled a “one-time rebate” in MPS budget documents, the payments will go to all the schools in the traditional MPS system and to charter schools staffed by MPS employees.
That will help ease a financial squeeze that is harming education in the city, MPS officials say. The money will allow schools to do such things as restore teaching or safety aide positions that were cut going into this year, MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said Wednesday.

The Madison School District’s property taxes will rise 5.8% with the arrival of December’s tax bills. Local school property taxes had been relatively flat the past few years due to redistribution of income, sales taxes and fees via state aids and to some extent flat enrollment and the revenue caps.

Krishna Guha:

A radical new approach to government accounting that would require the US administration to account for the cost of future social security payments year by year as people build up entitlements will be proposed on Monday.
The proposal by the federal accounting standards advisory board (FASAB) – which would also require the government to account for benefits accrued under Medicare and other social insurance programmes in the same way – is unprecedented internationally. It would radically change the presentation of US government finances, in effect bringing forward the cost of rapidly increasing social security and Medicare obligations and greatly increasing the reported fiscal deficit.
George W. Bush’s administration is firmly opposed to the proposal, which officials believe wrongly implies that the government is contractually obliged to make future payments based on current benefit rules.
They fear this would make it more difficult to reform the big entitlement programmes and increase pressure on future governments to raise taxes to meet projected funding shortfalls.
The big increase in the reported fiscal deficit under the proposed rule could have an immediate political effect, making it more difficult to press for Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire in 2010 to be made permanent.

This will ripple all over the place, or “trickle down” as it were. FASAB “preliminary views“.

Ken DeRosa:

In his new book, Eric Hanushek delivers the smack down on Johnathan Kozol who has been insisting these many years that the funding gap between middle class and inner city schools was the cause of the achievement gap between white and minority kids. Thus, to erase the achievement gap all we had to do was eliminate the funding gap:

In both Savage Inequalities and its 1995 successor, Amazing Grace, Kozol described the once beautiful and successful Morris High School in the Bronx as “one of the most beleaguered, segregated and decrepit secondary schools in the United States. Barrels were filling up with rain in several rooms. . . . Green fungus molds were growing in the corners” of some rooms, and the toilets were unusable. Kozol wrote that it would take at least $50 million to restore Morris’s decaying physical plant and suggested that the white political establishment would never spend that much money on a ghetto school. The city actually did spend more than $50 million to restore Morris High School after the publication of Savage Inequalities, though Kozol had not a word to say about it when discussing Morris in the second book. Of course the newly gleaming building had no perceptible effect on the academic performance of the students.

Andy Hall
Wisconsin State Journal
October 4, 2006
On a moonlit autumn evening, talk turned Tuesday to a “perfect storm” that might actually help Wisconsin fix its school-funding mess.
“Everything is coming together in an election year,” Thomas Beebe, outreach specialist for the nonprofit Institute for Wisconsin’s Future, told 17 Madison School District parents and activists who gathered at the Warner Park Community Recreation Center to discuss why Wisconsin schools always seem to be running out of money, and what to do about it.
The Institute for Wisconsin’s Future helped establish the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, a coalition of 122 organizations and school districts, including Madison’s, focusing on school-finance reform.
Beebe, a former official at the state Department of Public Instruction, who served on the Fort Atkinson School Board, said prospects are brighter now than any time in the past decade because increasing numbers of the state’s 425 public school districts are reporting serious financial problems because of state revenue limits imposed since 1993.
In addition, Beebe said, a state task force headed by UW-Madison researcher Allan Odden soon will recommend major changes in how Wisconsin pays for its schools, and a bipartisan Wisconsin Legislative Council panel is exploring school financing for the first time in a decade.
A top goal, Beebe said, would be to radically shift Wisconsin’s philosophy. The education budget would be based on what’s needed to adequately educate all children, including those with special needs, rather than forcing schools to make do with whatever amount of money is available through a formula.
But to make the storm happen, Beebe said, the public will need to push political candidates and public officials into taking stands – including support of controversial proposals to boost school funding by raising the sales tax, eliminating some sales tax exemptions, raising corporate income taxes, and other means.
“I think Tom is exactly right,” Barbara Arnold, a former Madison School Board president who two years ago served on a governor-appointed task force on education reform, said after the session sponsored by the East Attendance Area PTO Coalition.
Matt Calvert, a parent of a Lapham Elementary first- grader and a Marquette Elementary third-grader, said he’s pleased with the schools and their teachers, but he’s troubled by discussions of reducing a music program and increasing class sizes.
“It’s getting to the point now that it’s pinching,” Calvert said.
Madison School Board member Carol Carstensen agreed that prospects for reform are brightening, but she also warned that big changes will require sacrifice.
“There’s no real solution without additional funds,” she said.

According to a media release from DPI, the MMSD will receive $135,000 in continuous improvement grants:
District School Improvement Grant $80,000
Alliance for Attendance Grant $20,000
Early Literacy Grant $35,000
I haven’t seen any comment from the MMSD.
Read the release here.

Some people believe that the Wisconsin Legislature just doesn’t understand how revenue caps affect Wisconsin schools.
I’m sorry to say, legislators know very well how caps control spending and they’re happy about it.
“In GOP Plays Politics With Property Taxes,” The Capital Times’ Matt Pommer wrote in December 2004:

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Jessica Blanchard:

The district’s current “open choice” enrollment policy allows students to attend virtually any public school in the city. Students who live near their school are expected to get there on their own, while free busing is provided for all other middle and high school students, and for elementary school students who attend a school within the large geographic “cluster” in which they live.
It’s a popular plan with many parents, but it’s more complex than those of neighboring districts, and more expensive: The district annually spends an average of $560.86 per student, far more than other large districts in the state. About half the district’s roughly $25 million annual student transportation cost is paid by the state; local property-tax money covers most of the rest.
With Seattle schools facing a multimillion-dollar structural deficit, officials have said they can’t afford to maintain the status quo for much longer. By scaling back the system and offering parents fewer choices of where to send their child to school, the district could see major financial savings — as much as a couple of million dollars a year.

This is the first of a series of farewell posts to this blog. The reasons behind that decision will be detailed in other posts. There are some things I want to say first. I don’t know how many posts or how long this will take. This one is a story about my mother.
In 1968 when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, my parents were involved in an effort to get food, clothes and shelter to those people on the west side of Chicago who lost everything in the destruction that followed. My parents’ activism was rooted in the Catholic Social Action tradition. We attended a suburban parish where their work both found much support and inspired obscene phone calls, filled with racist language, letters and other personal attacks (the callers on occasion directed their hate at me and my brother if we happened to answer the phone – so I learned about being attacked by idiots early on).
As you may remember, Dr. King was killed shortly before Easter. My parent’s desire to help those in need was one with their faith, their understanding of what it meant to be a Catholic. So the natural thing for them to do was to ask permission to collect money to help the relief effort outside of Church after Mass. The Monsignor refused, with the explanation that they were already scheduled to collect money for flowers to place on the altar Easter morning. My mother argued (correctly) that Christ’s mission was better served by helping people in need than by decorating the altar of a suburban church. The Monsignor wouldn’t budge. Neither would my mother. The meeting ended in an impasse.
Sunday morning, my mother was on the corner collecting money for those in need. My brother and I were with her. We saw people give generously and express support and we saw people sneer and mutter ugly things as they passed. The Monsignor sent a young Priest to remove her. She refused. She had learned the lessons of non-violent direct action. She stayed till the end. My mom taught me a lot and gave me much to be proud of.
My educational priorities have been the topic of discussion here lately. This story helps me explain them. I look around our district and see the equivalent of those who lost everything in the riots of 1968. I want to help them get what they need. I also look around this district and see people working to get what I consider to be the educational equivalent of flowers for the Easter altar. I like flowers on the Easter altar; I wish MMSD could afford to give every student everything they desire. I respect (most of) these people for their willingness to work for what they believe in, for what they think is best for the schools. They might be surprised to learn (even though I’ve said this on this blog before) that I strongly believe MMSD should offer some advanced programming, some AP classes, some talented and gifted programming, some arts education… These are all things that I classify as needs. I also distinguish needs from desires. I don’t put my efforts in these areas (yet) because there are already very able advocates and because I don’t believe that in MMSD we have reached that hard to define line that divides needs from desires. I can’t define that line, but I will say that there is a difference in the long term good or harm produced by funding or cutting programs that do their best to educate and create opportunities for children who have no books in their homes or no homes at all and programs that offer a second year of calculus for high achieving high school students. If the first year of calculus is on the cutting block, you may find me fighting alongside the TAG advocates.
Stay tuned for more.
TJM

Mike Johnson & Kay Nolan:

By the time Virchow Krause & Co.’s accounting error was discovered, the mistake had been repeated and the deficit had ballooned to $2.7 million in fall 2004, prompting a downgrading of the district’s bond rating and budget freezes, district officials said.
The firm discovered the error during a 2004 audit and reported it to the district. After about 1 1/2 years of negotiations, Virchow Krause agreed to pay the district $275,000 and to forgive $15,476 owed to the firm by the district. The School Board approved the settlement agreement late Tuesday.

The official Download fileThird Friday Counts were distributed to the Board of Education last night (and shared with the Advocates for Madison Public School list serve this morning). Contrary to dire predictions and assessments (see here: and here), the district is growing. This will mean some increased funding under the current formula and that is good news.
However, the reassignments of the first weeks reveal how the continued tight budget situation limits flexibility in ways that disrupt schools, teachers, families and children.
I believe that this growth is further evidence that passage of the referendum is necessary; that the time to act is now at the beginning of the projected upswing in enrollments.
TJM

Channel3000:

A new report by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance found that Wisconsin’s schools spend about 11 percent more per student than the national average.
The report finds the state spends about $9,000 per student, which puts Wisconsin 12th highest nationwide based on 2004 census data. The national average was is about $1,000 less.

Paul Soglin adds a few comments here.

Terrence Stutz:

Let the classroom competition begin.
Texas’ first full-fledged attempt to reward teachers for students’ performance is under way this school year, with 1,162 public schools – 15 percent of all campuses – invited to participate in the state’s new incentive pay plan.
Schools must let the state know today if they want a piece of the merit pay pie, and few are expected to turn down an offer that could fatten teachers’ paychecks by $3,000 to $10,000 a year – if their students perform well on next spring’s state assessment.
Proposed state grants for individual schools have already been posted by the Texas Education Agency, with amounts ranging from $40,000 at many elementary schools to $295,000 for one of the largest high schools in the state.

Catherine Saillant:

Statewide, public school enrollment was down slightly this year, for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century. And though officials aren’t quite sure of all the reasons behind the drop, they are sure that the cost of housing is one of them.
In Santa Barbara, school administrators worry about lost revenue, because funding is tied to enrollment.
Already, administrators said, the decline has cost the district millions annually. Now, having made small, less-painful cuts, they are considering larger steps, such as selling off vacant property or building housing to sell to teachers at below-market value.

Sonya Hoo, Sheila Murray, Kim Rueben:

Real per capita school spending increased by about 50 percent between 1972 and 2002. Spending levels fell in the late 1970s and early 1980s, reflecting declines in student populations and funding that grew more slowly than inflation. However, those real declines were reversed by the mid-1980s.
Although school districts are the primary supplier of education services, they do not always have independent authority to set spending levels or raise revenues. The ability to set expenditure levels depends in part on the taxing authority of school districts. School districts in 36 states are designated independent, meaning they may generate their own revenues, usually by setting property tax rates. In the other states, some school districts are dependent on a city, town, or county to raise revenues. For example, most school districts in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island are city- or towndependent, while districts in Maryland and North Carolina are primarily dependent on counties. Other states have a mix of both dependent and independent school districts, with dependent school districts generally found in larger cities. Most dependent school districts are on the East Coast.