WisGOPs want to make costly voucher scam even larger?

While the Wisconsin state budget is on hold, let's go over a recent Ruth Conniff article in the Wisconsin Examiner which tells us that WisGOPs are more than willing to increase state funding on at least one item – school vouchers to private schools.

The plan, contained in two bills that failed in the last legislative session, would stop funding school vouchers through the same mix of state and local funding that supports regular public schools, and instead pay for school vouchers just out of the state’s general fund.

“It’s certainly something that I personally support. … I’m sure it will be part of the discussion,” Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam), co-chair of the powerful Joint Finance Committee, told Lisa Pugh on Wisconsin Eye when she asked about “decoupling” Wisconsin voucher school funding from the rest of the school finance system.

“Decoupling” would pave the way for a big expansion in taxpayer subsidies for private school tuition. While jettisoning the caps on available funds and enrollment in the current school formula, voucher payments would become an entitlement. The state would be obligated to pay for every eligible student to attend private school. It’s worth noting that most participants in Wisconsin’s voucher programs never attended public school, so what we are talking about is setting up a massive private school system with separate funding alongside the public K-12 school system. That’s more than Wisconsin can afford.

Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials (WASBO), has followed the issue closely. “It could come up last-minute, on very short notice,” she warns.

What’s funny is that I’ve long wanted a version of “decoupling”, but that’s because I think it’s ridiculous that most vouchers in Wisconsin are paid for by taking away state funds from the local public K-12 district, even if the child never attended a day of public school in that district.

The other effect of this is that the local public school district often has to raise property taxes to make up the difference in the lost state aid. And I think that if we are going to use state tax dollars to pay for 2 separate K-12 school systems (bad enough, but also the reality in 2025 Wisconsin with the GOPs still in control of the Legislature), then let’s pay the full costs of this scheme. Let's not not jack up property taxes in communities because some families choose not to send their kid to the local school and instead wants to have them attend a (usually religious) private school.

And let’s get some parity in per-student state aids between vouchers and public K-12 districts, as vouchers get significantly higher payments from the state than the community schools do. Chapman points out in Conniff's article that state taxpayers shell out twice as much for a student to get a voucher than we pay on a per-student basis for higher-need special education.

Yet, Chapman reports, we are now spending about $629 million for Wisconsin’s four voucher programs, which serve 58,623 students. That’s $54 million more than the $574.8 million we are spending on all 126,830 students with disabilities in Wisconsin, as school districts struggle with the cost of special education.

Chapman says we should watch for the GOPs in the Legislature to try to give even more of a funding advantage to these voucher schools and try to make us turn to a system similar to Florida’s, where the state government gives a handout to all parents of up to $8,000, resulting in a total cost of nearly $4 billion in the last school year. I don’t know about you, but I never want us to follow the lead of Florida in 2025. That's true for anything, but especially in government policy.

In the current budget, Governor Evers wanted to limit the amount of kids using vouchers in any district to 10% of the district’s enrollment, and limit the total of the (already larger than public school) payment for voucher schools to serve kids with special needs. But those were among the many provisions Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee removed from the budget earlier this month - the one bit of action they've taken on the budget so far.

So those limitations on the state costs of vouchers won’t happen, and on top of that, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau projects that the 3 main voucher programs will see their combined costs grow by another $140 million 2 years from now.

Any voucher expansion that Republicans may try to get through can fortunately be vetoed by Governor Evers, and I doubt we will see a repeat of the 2023 deal that greatly increased the number and amount of the vouchers in exchange for more spending and an increase in revenue limits for public schools over the next 2 years (which Evers later turned into increases in revenue limits for the next 402 years through a veto that was recently upheld by the state Supreme Court).

Which means that vouchers could be a main point of conflict as budget debates heat up in the coming weeks, and if the GOP tries to push to funnel even more of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars they’ve been able to send to these mostly religious schools, it could increase what seems to be a higher-than-normal chance of a budget not being passed in time for the start of the next fiscal year on July 1.