Austin_Slack / WCIJ
Governors Whitmer and Evers
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers ran and won on promises to restore their states’ public schools.
In Michigan and Wisconsin—two states where Republican-dominated legislatures have worked to wrest power from newly elected Democratic governors—voters have organized massive rallies to support Democratic plans to fund education that have come under attack in the legislature’s budget process.
Public schools, along with health care, are among the biggest-ticket items in state budgets nationwide—a fact that once prompted billionaire Rupert Murdoch to declare, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”
The rightwing effort to “transform” education has included steady cuts to public-school funding, and the siphoning of public money into school-voucher programs and other privatization schemes.
Public schools, along with health care, are among the biggest-ticket items in state budgets.
Against this backdrop, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers ran and won on promises to restore their states’ public schools.
Whitmer proposed a school budget that aims to bring Michigan, home to U.S. Education Secretary and school-privatization activist Betsy DeVos, back into the top ten public school systems in the nation. Whitmer’s plan gives $300 million more to schools than Michigan’s House-passed education budget.
In Wisconsin, Evers, formerly State Superintendent of Public Instruction, proposed to spend $900 million more on education than the Republican legislature, including a major bump in special-ed funding—a mandatory item for school districts that they have had to cover at the expense of other programs.
The state legislature slashed funding for special ed in Evers’s proposal from 60 percent to 26 percent in the first year, but kept the reimbursement rate for voucher schools at 90 percent—leaving public school districts even further behind.
On Tuesday, June 18, thousands of public school advocates gathered on the Capitol lawn in Lansing, wearing red T-shirts in a “Red for Ed” rally to support Whitmer’s effort to reverse years of cuts to Michigan schools.
“There’s no one more important in my life, as a mom, as the people [my children] spend all day, everyday with,” Whitmer told the crowd of 2,500.
The National Education Association (NEA) began organizing “Red for Ed” rallies around the country after a series of teachers’ strikes galvanized public school supporters in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, highlighting the toll years of budget cuts and privatization efforts have taken on schools in states across the country.
In Wisconsin, public-school advocates are planning a series of pep rallies statewide, and a 60-mile march from June 22 to June 25, ending at the state Capitol building in Madison, to call for restoration of the $900 million cut made by the Republican legislature to Governor Evers’s proposed education budget.
“We are marching to demand the budget our children deserve,” said march organizers Heather Dubois Bourenane, executive director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, and Milwaukee Public Schools Board director Megan O’Halloran. “We are marching to demand lawmakers take seriously addressing the crisis they themselves created by chronically underfunding our public schools.”
As the state legislature gets ready to pass its version of the budget (and threatens to walk out with no budget deal until next October, if Governor Evers doesn’t sign it by July 1), public school advocates are promising to let voters know how their legislators vote, and to hold them accountable come election time.
“A common-sense, fully-funded, bipartisan-supported plan that could have set Wisconsin on a path toward school funding fairness is in the garbage,” Dubois Bourenane and Halloran added, lamenting the legislature’s revision of Evers’s plan. They say the fact that the Republicans call their own plan a “historic investment” adds insult to injury. “[It] doesn’t even keep pace with inflation.”
The battle over school funding goes to the heart of the struggle for democracy in states with divided government, including Wisconsin and Michigan. In both states, Republican-dominated legislatures benefitted from partisan-friendly redistricting and remained in power even as voters elected Democrats in every statewide race in 2018. And in both states, the Republican leadership held lame-duck sessions to take away powers from the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general before they could take office.
Now, through the budget process, these same Republican leaders are attempting to continue to starve public schools, despite public opinion that runs contrary to their budget priorities.
And while they have drawn maps to give themselves that power, voter disapproval, evident in the huge public rallies in both states (and in “Red for Ed” rallies across the country) shows a shifting tide.