Let’s talk about education. McKee proposes $911 million for local public school aid, a 3% bump, but also proposes charter schools get a 9% bump
By
Tom Sgouros
It
is budget season in Rhode Island, and the discussions at the state house are
perhaps a little less panicked since the Biden administration has come through
with some badly-needed aid. 
Tom Sgouros
You can tell there is breathing room because we now hear how we don’t really need to revisit our tax policy. For the record, the state plans to spend $100 million on a tax cut this year, but only to people whose cars are worth over $4,000.
And both the new Governor McKee and new Speaker Shekarchi seem interested
in ignoring the issue of taxes, letting the car tax cut stand and resisting the
call to restore income taxes on high incomes.
Let’s
talk about education. The Governor is proposing to spend $911 million on local
public school aid. This is about a 3% bump up from last year, which is
certainly not awful. Charter schools get a 9% bump, though.
Time
for some history. What $911 million actually means is that we may finally reach
the education funding levels of… the Almond administration. The 2003 budget of Lincoln
Almond, not exactly a profligate spender, gave $904 million (in 2020 dollars)
to fund local public schools. After him, Governor Carcieri pretty much
level-funded education until he slashed it mercilessly when the financial
crisis hit in 2008.
The
story was not all bleak. Over his term, Carcieri managed to triple the state
budget for charter schools. And between 2008 and 2011, when our traditional
public schools were seeing a 20% cut in state aid (again, correcting for
inflation), charter schools saw a 33% increase.
Governors Chafee and Raimondo managed to restore some funding, but not nearly what was lost. (Though they did manage to triple charter school funding again.)
Over the past two decades, we have cut a
truly devastating amount from traditional public schools. Had we only kept pace
with inflation since 2003, we would have spent more than $1.8 billion more on
supporting our schools over that time.
But we didn’t do that. We gave away money instead. Aside from the hugely expensive car tax cut. There was a capital gains tax cut in 2001, then the “flat” tax slashed tax rates (only for the rich) every year from 2007 until 2012.
The top income tax rate on the richest Rhode Islanders is now below 6%, down from over 12% in the early 1990s while the top rate on the median taxpayer only went down from around 4% to around 3.75% over that same time.
Not
only did the state cut the money available to schools, we added new testing
mandates, reporting mandates, curriculum standards, financial mandates, and
more. This has meant perennially strapped school budgets, property tax
increases, and a tremendous amount of budgeting uncertainty at public schools
as sometimes the state education department manages to throw some extra
scraps.
During
the past 20 years, my children went through the public schools in my relatively
prosperous town. I could not help notice that even here, each year the
opportunities available to them shrank as elective classes were canceled,
school buildings closed, art and music teachers shared between schools and much
more. The bargain was supposed to be this would be made up by the economic boom
powered by the hundreds of millions of dollars we gave away.
It
seemed like a bad bargain at the time, and I’m afraid it seems even worse in
hindsight. We gave away tons of money and got essentially nothing for it except
weaker government and worse services, education only one among many.
There are bills in both the House and Senate this year, to increase the top income tax rate from the current 5.99% to 8.99% on incomes over $475,000. These will not even get back to the 1990s rates, but will at last maybe show we begin to recognize what a terrible bargain those tax cuts were.
Tom
Sgouros is a software engineer and freelance public policy
consultant who lives very close to sea level.
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