Education Gov. Walker and Right-Wing Elites attack public schools again saying, "you're going to love our tax cuts, whether you like it or not."

"You're going to love our tax cuts, whether you like it or not."

The "fellows" at the loony bin of right-wing politics, the MacIver Institute, are saying desperate school districts are trying to avoid "education" Gov. Scott Walker's latest attack on our public schools by taking away the Energy Efficiency Exemption. Yea right, "supposed energy efficiency," like anyone cares about that?

...the termination of the Energy Efficiency Exemption (EEE). This loophole allowed school districts to raise taxes for supposed energy efficiency projects without going to referendum. Last year alone, districts collected an additional $92.3 million through the EEE. With the program eliminated, property taxes in those 148 school districts will automatically drop $92.3 million.

Flat earth Republicans have again drummed up phony outrage over school districts attempts to save energy costs by upgrading systems and building new schools that are environmentally friendly and better learning environments. Yea, like climate change, is real.

Republicans not only hate the clean energy push, but they are also desperate to preserve high fuel costs for Big Energy campaign donors. So they're claiming districts are scamming taxpayers with promises of energy savings when all they want to do is trick them into building modern high tech schools. As the Cap Times' "State Debate" put it...

The conservative MacIver Institute's Bill Osmulski complains that Wisconsin school districts are using "massive tax cuts" engineered by Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature to mask "huge" referendum tax hikes. It seems the harder state officials try to cut taxes, the harder local school district officials try to figure out ways to spend, he asserts.

It's alright to laugh. Check out the MacIver "News" services comment below, and tell me if their logic could also be applied to the massive and "considerable" Foxconn handout that won't be paid off for 30 or more years. Ironic?

The energy savings on many of these projects is negligible. It will be decades before the savings justify the expense – which was considerable. 

 Crazy isn't it? I remember not too long ago when the steel pole building-like Kromrey Middle School had a massive and dangerous mold problem. There were giant fans airing out rooms and hallways 24/7 because of its outdated or nonexistent ventilation system. At a district meeting with parents, there were some who didn't care and thought a new school was an overreaction, that the unsolvable problem was something we could live with.

So after cutting the EEE, districts will see a "tax cut"...unless they smartly propose what would be a revenue-neutral spending referendum. Did you ever get the idea that families actually want their kids to get a great education, putting that first, above tax cuts?

Their mindless whining continued, with MacIver "fellows" condescendingly saying district residents just don't understand these "tricks" or how to spend their money wisely. But I thought people knew best?

Throughout the state, there are a total of 61 districts going to referendum next month. The combined cost is $1.25 billion for construction, $157 million for one-time operations, and $26 million in permanent annual operations spending. Not all of those districts have the EEE “opportunity levy” to exploit, but there are other ways to create the same illusion of little to no tax impact. 

Authoritarian Much? MacIver wants you to believe that the "conservative elite" at the state Capitol, Walker, Republican "leaders," and think tanks should be calling all the shots, not you. Like they say, "You're going to love our tax cuts, whether you like it or not."

From the tactics and literature accompanying this year’s referendums, it appears the harder the state works to provide property tax relief, the harder local school officials will work to keep local taxpayers from ever benefiting from it.

Walker and Trump cut education, worry about Labor shortage they created and Access to Affordable "relevant" Education!!!

 It's important to put the following story in context:

Gov. Scott Walker has attended a White House ceremony with President Donald Trump and members of his Cabinet focused on bolstering American workers. President Donald Trump called Gov. Scott Walker "a favorite of mine."

Yes, Walker was a favorite alright:

Democrats seized on Trump calling Walker "a favorite of mine" and noted that Trump had trashed Walker in the past, including when they were both seeking the GOP nomination for president.

But it was the point of the meeting that twisted reality into a pretzel:

Thursday's ceremony was focused on adding jobs and training workers

Jobs without education, a neat Trick: Really, after creating a schooling funding crisis in the U.S., Republicans like Walker and Trump are now worried about the labor shortage they set up for the future? Note: Companies are now returning to the days when they trained their own employees. Who would have thought:

CBPP

WPR: Trump signed an executive order establishing a new council focusing on creating solutions for the country's most urgent workforce issues. The National Council for the American Worker is to be charged with creating a national strategy for making sure Americans have access to affordable, relevant education and job training, and is supposed to focus on creating solutions for the country's most urgent workforce issues.

The Trump administration initially sought much steeper cuts — totaling $8 billion or 13.5 percent, spending cut to education.

DGA: Governors Mary Fallin (R-OK), Doug Ducey (R-AZ), and Matt Bevin (R-KY) have all slashed funding for education and are largely to blame for the poor conditions

Washington Post: Between 2008 and 2015, the total state per-student funding for grade schools dropped in 29 states, less total school funding per student than they were in 2008, with the sharpest drops coming in Republican-led places such as Arizona, Florida, Alabama and Idaho, according to a study last year by the left-leaning think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Public investment in K-12 schools — crucial for communities to thrive and the U.S. economy to offer broad opportunity — has declined dramatically in a number of states over the last decade. Worse, some of the deepest-cutting states have also cut income tax rates, weakening their main revenue source for supporting schools. These cuts risk undermining schools’ capacity to develop the intelligence and creativity of the next generation of workers and entrepreneurs.

Here are more charts highlighting the GOP record on education:

Fear of losing election, Republicans panic with Education Funding.

Republican voters must be one issue voters because there's no other explanation for the GOP's continued political dominance. Heck, they oppose almost every popular policy supported by most Americans, from gun control to public education, and yet... 

It's crazy. While Republicans cut taxes so they can plaster it all over their campaign ads, their constituents are actually raising taxes on themselves. Even worse, Republicans have freed businesses from their tax obligations, you know, like helping fund an educated workforce. 

Wisconsinites have been approving school funding referendums everywhere, proving education is their top priority, not tax cuts. Yet voters continue to vote for tax-cutting Republicans. What gives?  The Washington Post tried to make sense of this, highlighting our flip-flopping governor:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who made his name attacking unions and slashing school funding, is promising a “historic investment” in public schools as he campaigns for reelection. A recent Marquette University poll found that 63 percent of the state’s voters would choose to increase spending on public schools over cutting property taxes, up from 46 percent in 2014. 

Voters across the state have approved hundreds of local referendums over the past decade that have raised billions of dollars from increased property taxes for schools. Walker, who enacted large cuts to school funding in 2011, has responded to the shifting opinion by proposing a $200-per-pupil increase in funding this year, on top of a similar increase last year. Funding, when adjusted for inflation, is still down during his tenure, however. 

Earlier this month, Walker signed a bill to make it easier for school districts to raise more tax money without referendums, even though he had opposed a similar bill last year. Walker’s likely Democratic opponent this fall plans to make education a central issue. “He can pretend all he wants,” said Tony Evers, the state’s schools superintendent. “He has now funneled all this money into schools, but it is not back to where it was. People get it, and they remember.”

But as the article points out, this tactic is playing out nationwide in every regressive Republican state:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, another proud cost-cutter, is bragging about his more recent increases to school funding as he prepares to launch a bid for the U.S. Senate.

In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey, who won office on a “shrink government” platform, now boasts of his own plan for more school money, backed by a $1 million advertising campaign promoting the increases from supportive state businesses.

The new rhetorical approach represents a major turnabout for a generation of conservative leaders who came into office promising to get better results with less taxpayer money for public schools. The schools in all of these states have not yet gotten back to the levels of per-pupil spending they had before the 2008 recession, when adjusted for inflation, and school administrators say teacher quality and student results have suffered as a result. 

Teachers have seized on the public’s emotion, pushing legislators for more money even in states where they lack collective bargaining rights.

Between 2008 and 2015, the total state per-student funding for grade schools dropped in 29 states, with the sharpest drops coming in Republican-led places such as Arizona, Florida, Alabama and Idaho.

In Oklahoma, where tax breaks and declining oil prices have sapped state revenue, the number of teachers has dropped by 700 over four years, even as enrollment has increased by 15,000. More than 2,000 classes — in foreign language, art, music and consumer science — have been canceled, according to the Oklahoma Policy Institute.

In Arizona, another of the lowest-paying states for teachers, funding per student dropped 37 percent between 2008 and 2015. Gov. Ducey has been boasting of a 10 percent increase in funding, paid for largely by redirecting money from the state’s land-trust fund.

“When I first came to the legislature, there were Republicans on the floor that referred to public schools as ‘government schools,’ ” said Democratic Arizona state Sen. Steve Farley. “Now I am seeing Republican superintendents, particularly in rural areas, just outraged at the state of public schools. They know we have the money and have just given it away.”

On March 21, more than 60 Kentucky schools agreed to close so that teachers could travel to the capitol to protest the cuts. Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, who is not up for reelection until 2019, has dismissed the teachers as “selfish” and “ignorant.”

Walker speaks without thinking again, bought into and pushed "2.8 students per faculty" lunacy.

Going for broke in his war against education and the University of Wisconsin, Scott Walker made up something so ridiculous for his low information voters, that no fact check or pants on fire rating will ever be able to take back. Common sense would have told most people that a statistic like that isn't possible, but what the hell. Bravo! JS

Our rating: Charging that the ratio of students to faculty at UW-Milwaukee is shrinking, Walker said the school has "2.8 students per faculty" member, "tied for second-lowest in its history since 1994."

But Walker cited the wrong statistic. In fact, UW-Milwaukee has 29 students for every professor, associate professor and assistant professor -- and that ratio has been growing, not shrinking, since 1994.

For a statement that is false and ridiculous, our rating is Pants on Fire.

Scott Walker's Cuts to your Public Schools....

School Funding Reform for Wisconsin is featuring an amazing list of graphs detailing just how much your district will lose under the proposed biennial budget. Check out your districts cuts here.

example of district graphs

STATE BUDGET FOCUS:
CUTS TO PER PUPIL AID IN 2015-16 SCHOOL YEAR
The graphs to the left summarize, by county, cuts that will be made to school districts in year one of the proposed state budget.  School boards will be unable to raise their tax levies to make up the losses.  

The Journal Sentinel just posted a detailed look at Walker's hit on schools.

Scott Walker: The Dumbing Down of America's Poster Boy!!! Wisconsin's so proud.

It's never a good sign when your own governor and - yikes - candidate for president, is the poster boy for the current anti-education movement within the Republican Party. Even "stand with Walker" idol worshipers, with their own families to worry about, can't be happy with the downward direction their party is taking on education. College nowadays is as standard as having a high school diploma. That scares Republicans, who have for years believed universities brainwash students with liberal socialist ideas. It's time to block the school house doors again, but this time, to everyone. Salon:

If you ever want to make a conservative touchy, the quickest way is to hint that the connection between ignorance and holding right-wing views is more than a coincidence. But when you look at what Republican politicians are up to these days, especially in state legislatures, it starts to look like Republicans are purposefully trying to make Americans more ignorant. Here are 5 recent examples.

1) Oklahoma is about to ban AP history classes. Under the guise of “emergency” legislation, the education committee in the Oklahoma legislature had an 11-4 vote to advance a bill that would ban the advanced placement history curriculum from Oklahoma schools. There’s not even a real attempt here, as with other conservative assaults on education, to hide that the goal is to keep students ignorant so that they are more susceptible to right wing propaganda. The bill’s sponsor, state representative Dan Fisher, argued that the schools should be teaching “American exceptionalism,” and avoiding teaching parts of American history that are less than flattering. The Republican National Committee has endorsed the idea that AP history courses should teach less strife and present a more rah-rah view of American history. In Colorado, attempts to whitewash the history classes even resulted in student walkouts, garnering national attention.

2) Scott Walker has it out for the University of Wisconsin. Walker … not caring that it’s the state’s pride and joy … The goal is to slash a whopping $300 million from the University of Wisconsin system over the next two years … Walker and his staff haven’t really taken many pains to hide that this is rooted in a deeper hostility to the very idea of knowledge itself. “…his staff proposed changing the university’s ethereal focus on the pursuit of truth, known as the ‘Wisconsin Idea,’ to a grittier focus on ‘workforce needs,’” reports the Washington Post. Walker backed off recasting higher education as nothing more than job training … but the fact that this wording change was proposed at all shows that the hostility to education is ideological and has little to nothing to do with saving money.

3) Redefining education as “welfare” Mississippi state representative Gene Alday made national headlines recently … “I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call ‘welfare crazy checks.’ Alday went on his rant in part because he was trying to justify his opposition to increased funding for elementary school education. Alday’s little racist spiel was an attempt to insinuate that teaching kids reading and writing amounts to “welfare” and to suggest that education is wasted on black people in particular.

4) Threatening to arrest teachers for sex education. In Kansas, Republicans are no longer satisfied with laws requiring teachers to pretend that it’s normal and expected for people to wait until marriage to have sex. Now there’s growing support for having teachers fear jail time should they ever hint, during sex education, that sex is a thing people do for pleasure. Using a teacher who had a poster up in class that suggested—gasp!—that sex is sometimes used to show affection, Republicans in the state are sponsoring a bill that would allow officials to criminally charge teachers for daring to acknowledge such a thing ever again.

5) Continued demands that science education be replaced with magic … creationists haven’t gone anywhere. In South Dakota, Republicans once again pushed for a bill that would “allow” teachers to “question” evolution in the classroom, which is a fancy way of saying that teachers would be permitted to treat being ignorant as the equivalent of being educated. Asked recently about evolution, Gov. Scott Walker stuck to the narrative that elevates ignorance over education, saying, “That’s a question politicians shouldn’t be involved in one way or another. I am going to leave that up to you.” The comment was the exaltation of ignorance over education. Evolutionary theory is a knowable thing. Walker epitomized the new conservative mentality of ignorance uber alles.