things to do when not legislatin’
Once again Iowa’s legislature becomes the laughing stock of Iowa through its lack of action concerning Iowa schools at all levels. Iowa was once the gold standard for schools in this country and stood well across the world. Thanks to some real as backward leadership we sink every year.
While we give the collective blame to that group “legislature,” the truth is we should be much more specific and narrow it down to “Republicans in the legislature and Governor Branstad.” Led by tea baggers, Republicans these days have just a couple of criteria – cutting taxes for their cronies and then funneling what tax money they do get to those same cronies in sweetheart deals.
We can see both of these in action this year in Iowa’s government. We see Terry Branstad acting as if he is a one man wrecking ball in taking our tax money and handing it to some private for profit company to run Iowa’s portion of the Medicaid program. This will no doubt result in huge profits for that company and a loss of services for those in the Medicaid system through denials and new processes. It is good to be a friend of Terry’s.
But the most cynical is the way Republicans in the legislature have refused to even discuss school budgets, let alone do any serious negotiations. They claim that they are offering a substantial rise in school funding, but in reality theirs is a cynical game that has been played out in states across the nation. As usual Iowa’s Republican party is a party of followers whose last major accomplishment was to do what they could to maintain as much Prohibition in the state even after it was repealed nationally.
The process for wrecking local school systems has an established recipe that various legislatures have followed. It goes like this:
1) cut taxes especially for corporations claiming this will entice businesses to move to your state -(hint: it doesn’t)
2) cut services, especially education which is usually the states largest single expenditure.
3) Schools can not maintain previous standards or meet new more stringent standards due to lack of resources.
4) Schools and teachers (as lazy government employees) are vilified for the perceived failures.
5) the fire of perceived failures are fanned by Republicans up and down governmental offices. Corporate media report such stories without telling the whole story.
6) A few more years of underfunding worsens the problem for school
7) Republican leaders claim for profit charter schools are the answer to the “failure.” (hint: they are worse than public schools)
8) Money is found to pay for charter schools by removing it from the public system.
9) In Iowa, new governor Kim Reynolds will oversee the dismantling of the public school system declaring it “great for Iowa, praise the Lord.”
In an editorial earlier this week, the new blog on the block the iowadailydemocrat.com hits the nail square on the head in chastising Republicans for their cynical actions:
“It’s as predictable as the start of the baseball season, but Branstad’s status-quo approach to nearly everything creates long-lasting and complex harm to everyone involved and causes Iowa to fall behind when it comes to educational excellence. And experts across the ideological spectrum tell us educational excellence is the single biggest factor in whether a given city, state or region succeeds in the global economy.
Branstad’s accomplishments on education for the 2015 session are nonexistent. The Governor may actually be doing more harm than good.
On pre-K (or preschool) education, there’s absolutely no progress. The U.S. Department of Education released its report “A Matter of Equity: Preschool in America” two weeks back. While Iowa ends up near the middle, ranked in the second quartile of states, we’re actually losing ground since 2007 when Governor Chet Culver proposed statewide universal preschool and began providing the funds to make it happen. Branstad singled out that program by name for repeal and has done a fantastic job at hammering away at our 4-year-olds, making sure they don’t all have preschool. Now, 30 percent of our eligible 4-year-olds don’t have access to state-funded preschool. It’s worthy of shame, but the Governor is long past that point in his career.
The K-12 picture isn’t much better as the Governor and Republican legislators are stuck on a below-inflation funding level of 1.25 percent, and the Democrats seem intent on negotiating against themselves now that they’ve adjusted their ask to 2.62 percent. As usual, the two parties will wait until the end of session, far too late for most school districts trying to plan fall budgets and make hiring decisions. They’ll agree on a paltry 2 percent and all go home calling themselves heroes for doing their basic constitutional duty, and doing the barest minimum at that.
At the higher education level, though, Iowa is drowning by comparison with states that are serious about higher education. The Regents are spending more than a million dollars on two out-of-state consultants whose job is to find places to cut at the three state universities, all while attendance costs go up every year and student debt for Iowa’s public universities ranks 6th in the nation. (Did you realize the cost of books and supplies, over and above tuition, is north of $1,200 a year at our state schools?)”
In a few short years Iowa has moved from the top of the heap to the middle in a slide that has us headed down to eventually challenging Mississippi for the bottom if the trend continues. But it should be noted that other once proud states like Kansas will be fighting us for that position. But will we ever really know when for profit corporations are in charge of our educational structure and it will be nearly impossible to measure?
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