Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

It has happened to many of us. While cruising down the highway, a dashboard light flashes on. You may not recognize what the light is telling you. You can ignore it and pray to the car gods your engine doesn’t die, or you can pull over, look for the car manual, and find out what it means.

My dad called these dashboard warnings “idiot lights.” I can still hear him say, “You’re an idiot if don’t stop and check what’s wrong.”

Once that light flashes you’ll feel your wallet thinning as you curse the car, forgetting you’re responsible for preventive maintenance.

Idiot lights are flashing across Iowa, trying to warn us our state’s public schools are beginning to crumble from neglect. It’s time to pull over to discover the problems.

Chronic underfunding

Republicans love to shout about inflation, but develop selective amnesia when it’s time to approve a budget for schools.

State Senator Herman Quirmbach is the ranking member of the Iowa Senate Education Committee and a retired economics professor at Iowa State University. 

He examined public school funding from fiscal years 2017 to 2024, comparing what school funding would have been if the Republican-controlled legislature had adjusted the cost per pupil for inflation versus the actual cost per pupil the legislature allocated. Here are his findings:

During these seven years, the per pupil amount fell further and further behind inflation. In the 2023-24 school year, schools were shorted $899 per regular education student. For that school year alone, it was a total cut in school funding of $528 million.

During the 2024 session, the legislature increased the per pupil state funding for K-12 schools (called Supplemental State Aid) by just 2.5 percent for fiscal year 2025, which begins on July 1. That will likely cause the cost per pupil to fall further behind the rate of inflation. 

What are the consequences of underfunding? Schools have been forced to lay off teachers in the middle of a teacher shortage. Iowa dropped four places in the latest Kids Count Report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. For the first time since data has been published, Iowa is no longer number one in on-time high school graduation rates. We’ve also slipped four places in the overall ranking, to seventh.

Orient-Macksburg School District in southwest Iowa is another casualty. Recently, its board of directors voted to dissolve the district. 

Some may shrug, saying it’s natural selection, and Orient-Macksburg was just too weak to survive. But that’s little comfort to students, parents, and a community losing its identity. 

It’s an “idiot light” for other rural communities, signaling that they should pull over and challenge Iowa leaders.

A two-tier public system is unsustainable

When Republican lawmakers approved Governor Kim Reynolds’ private school voucher entitlement in early 2023, the program was projected to cost taxpayers $107 million for an estimated 14,068 students in the first year, and $132 million in its second year. 

However, the first-year cost totaled $128 million, with 29,025 students applying. That’s an overrun of $21 million and the voucher plan is not fully implemented. Republican lawmakers allocated about $179 million to pay for “Education Savings Accounts” in year two of the program.

We also now know that about two-thirds of students who received state funding for private school tuition in the current year were already attending private school. When you take into account the kindergartners whose families would have sent them to private school with or without vouchers, it’s likely that only about 15 percent of students using ESAs were previously enrolled in a public school.

Iowa taxpayers are supporting a two-tiered publicly funded education system, which is separate and unequal. It’s unequal because public schools accept all students, while private schools can reject them for any number of reasons. In addition, public schools are required to have yearly audits, which makes them accountable to taxpayers. Iowa does not require audits for private schools that now receive a massive infusion of public funds.

The voucher program has triggered a flashing “idiot light,” because there’s no way the state can adequately maintain a two-tiered publicly funded school system. The fiscal engine will seize up.

If Iowa doesn’t pull over to check out the warning signs, our kids’ future will be at risk.

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Top image of car dashboard is by Evgenii Panov, available via Shutterstock.