Walker’s Cuts to Education; the Unintended Consequences, and Domino Effect.

The dramatic changes made by Republicans to fund public education is starting to ratchet down the system to a point you’d better start worrying about. It looks like the set of tools Gov. Scott Walker gave the districts as a onetime fix will eventually destabilize budgets and downsize schools to a dangerous level. If public schools can’t afford to stay open, how will private schools manage it?

For parents who think they know more about education than those in the profession itself, enjoy the uncertainty and privatization that will...or may follow.  

Daniel C. Vock: In many corners of Wisconsin, school officials say the biggest impact of the changes to school funding and collective bargaining have yet to arrive. “Any time you have one plan that applies to 426 school districts, it works some places really well and other places not so well,” says Bruce Anderson, the superintendent of the Merrill school district, a large rural district in northern Wisconsin. “And then there’s the rest of us, where it doesn’t work at all.”

Merrill has had a longstanding problem with declining enrollment. State aid is based on student attendance … Then last year, the state budget slashed state aid to schools across the state by $834 million. In Merrill, that left the district with $400 less per student. To balance its budget, the district had to close a school. 

Sup. Anderson isn't the only one:

Stateline: In Seymour, near Green Bay, Superintendent Pete Ross says he is concerned … spending caps will not keep up with the district’s costs. Under the new law, increases in teacher salaries now cannot exceed the rate of inflation. But other expenses will. “Whether it be supplies or energy or busing or other insurances that don’t have to do with employee benefits,” he says, “all those are increasing at rates higher than [inflation].”

Smaller districts also worry that they will become, in the words of Sturgeon Bay Superintendent Joe Stutting, “stepping stones for teachers who are going to go and teach in places that can afford to pay them for their skill set.”

The smaller districts cannot keep up with growing districts, Stutting says, if small districts must continually balance their budgets with pay freezes and benefit cuts, he argues, the gap in teacher compensation will grow too. “There is a price tag for good people. That includes benefits and salary,” Stutting says. “I don’t care what profession you’re in, you’re going to get what you pay for.” 

And even if you don't want to believe anything the teachers union says, the following statement should still strike you as a possible outcome;

Mary Bell, the president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, a network of teachers unions, says the recent changes may discourage young people from becoming teachers in the first place. “I worry more and more about who is going to be attracted to do this work,” she says. “The stability and the system made teaching a valued and respected profession. Even if [teachers] weren’t generously compensated, it was stable. Now that stability is gone.”