Education Week - June 6, 2018 - 24

QUALITY COUNTS 2018: FINANCE
Grading the States

Budget Pressures, Politics
Intersect in K-12 Aid Fights
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 23

OVERALL SPENDING

Bottom-Ranked Top-Ranked

STATE

SCORE (GRADE)

school spending-are up for election. More than 100
teachers have filed to run for state office in Arizona,
Kentucky, and Oklahoma after they failed to get all
they demanded from their strikes and protests.
And Democratic leaders in Congress say that if
they regain control this fall, they'll seek to invest
more than $100 billion in the next 10 years to give
the nation's teaching force a pay raise and shore up
America's dilapidated school infrastructure.

Alaska

96.4 A

Vermont

94.9 A

Wyoming

93.1 A

Recognizing a Shortfall

New Jersey

92.0 A-

New York

92.0 A-

That's not to say that states are uniformly reluctant to spend more money on schools.
According to a recently released study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank that
focuses on reducing fiscal inequality, more than half
of states today pay more toward public education
than they did before the recession, which officially
ended in 2009.
California, for example, has added more than $25 billion toward public education since 2011 and is considering a bill that would add another $35 billion by 2025. It
plans to spend a total of $74.5 billion this school year.
At the same time, more than half the nation's
taxpayers think their taxes are too high, according
to a 2014 Pew Research center poll. In states like
Kentucky and Texas, Republicans, who control most
of America's statehouses, have run on campaigns to
slash taxes to their lowest rates possible.
Student-population centers also have shifted dramatically, including depopulation in the Midwest
and Northeast and overcrowding in the South and
Southwest.
The fiscal impact of such population shifts can be
dramatic either way.
Vermont, which spent an average of $20,795 per
student in 2015 on a regionally adjusted basis-the
highest in the nation that year, according to Quality

STATE

SCORE (GRADE)

Oklahoma

42.7 F

North Carolina

41.6 F

Idaho

40.2 F

Arizona

38.0 F

Utah

37.5 F

Counts data-has lost a tenth of its student body in
the past decade alone, resulting in plummeting in
revenue for many districts and hollowed-out classrooms.
The state, using a carrot-and-stick approach, has
recently consolidated more than 151 of its many
tiny districts into just 38. Vermont raises taxes on
districts that don't consolidate and lowers them for
districts that manage to.
In Arizona, where the student population has doubled over the past 20 years, teachers have long complained about overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated
school buildings, and low pay.
State Rep. John Kavanagh, the Republican chairman of the House appropriations committee, said
Arizona's economy has been slow to improve, and the
legislature, in response, has attempted to cut taxes
to spur it along.
In 2016 alone, the state allowed $13.7 billion to
go uncollected through a series of income, sales, and
other tax exemptions, deductions, allowances, exclusions, or credits, according to the state's department
of revenue.
"We just don't have the money," Kavanagh said in
response to teachers' demands for pay raises. "Arizona was especially hurt by the Great Recession,
and the recovery has been extremely slow. We cut all
levels of spending, and we need to restore all levels
of spending. We've given priority to K-12."
For other states, pension benefits, handed out to
teachers and other public employees generously
throughout the 1990s, have spiraled, amounting to
a debt of $516 billion combined.
Attempts to make changes to either the benefits
retired teachers receive or the contributions new
teachers must make can end careers.
In Kentucky, for example, high school math
teacher Travis Brenda, last month ousted Republican Jonathan Shell, the state's House leader who cowrote and rushed through a bill that made several
changes to that state's pension system.
"They picked on the wrong group," Brenda told
reporters shortly after the primaries. "Not just the
educators, but all state employees are rising up, and
we're not going to be let things be done to us." n

Caleb Kenna for Education Week

Stamford Elementary
School in Stamford, Vt., is
nestled in the Green
Mountains. Rural states
like Vermont have
wrestled with fundingequity issues complicated
by geography.

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