(The Center Square) – Separating the funding for Wisconsin’s school choice program from the state’s public school funding formula could either be a smart fix to simplify funding Wisconsin’s school choice program or it could lead to a large cost increase on the state budget.
The term decoupling is used for the process, which Badger Institute wrote “helps both districts and taxpayers” while a report from the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials said that it would “obscure the state and local fiscal impacts of the program and impede crucial public scrutiny of private voucher costs at the local level.”
Last year, a decoupling bill passed the Wisconsin Assembly but not the Senate. The plan could be a topic of discussion soon in the Legislature this year.
The reports come as Forward Analytics published a report showing that decoupling would have saved local property taxpayers $337 million this year but that expense would have been shifted to $343 million in additional state funding.
“Contrary to the notion that the term ‘decoupling’ refers to a small fix to correct a simple problem, we find that such proposals could contribute to the expansion of vouchers in Wisconsin without contending with the significant surge in costs they could impose on the state budget and Wisconsin taxpayers or the policy tradeoffs such costs would require,” wrote WASBO Research Director Anne Chapman.
Chapman claimed that many of the students funded through school choice are students who previously had their private school tuition paid by parents.
“Chapman just misreads the data,” Badger Institute’s Jim Bender and Patrick McIlhern wrote. “When she says that 95% of choice students came from a private school, that’s because the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction counts every child who returns for another year as having come from a private school, regardless of whether they previously switched from public school.
“This past year, 80% of choice students simply returned for another year, their parents satisfied with the education delivered. Only 5% were new to choice because they switched from paying on their own.”
The Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty said last year that the decoupling plan was a benefit to public schools, taxpayers and choice schools.
“School districts would no longer see their aid reduced for the cost of the voucher or charter students, leading to a property tax cut and access to more state aid,” WILL wrote. “Instead, choice and charter schools would be funded by the state. In addition, the bill includes a provision for school districts to recoup 25% of the revenue limit authority they used to receive for voucher students—leading to additional revenue per pupil for the vast majority of districts in the state.”
The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association recently wrote about its opposition of decoupling, claiming that voucher supporters don’t want the public to know how much is being spent on school choice programs despite the fact the plan would separate school choice program funding into one line in the budget.
“De-coupling vouchers from local school district funding makes a constitutional court challenge to the voucher program much more difficult (or as a report from 2023 points out, de-coupling “insulates” vouchers from court challenges),” AFT President Jon Shelton wrote. “Second, it means it will be even more difficult for taxpayers to understand how vouchers threaten public schools.”
