If Idaho’s Republican legislators won’t properly fund education, voters have to do it

Over the next several months, you may be presented with an opportunity to sign a petition from Reclaim Idaho to put something called the Quality Education Act on the November 2022 ballot.

If you get that opportunity, you should sign the petition.

If for nothing else, putting the Quality Education Act on the ballot would send a strong message to Idaho Republican legislators that they’re not doing their job when it comes to public education funding.

The Idaho Legislature has underfunded K-12 education year after year after year.

Even though Idaho residents send the message that we need more public education funding, the Legislature isn’t listening, just like they didn’t listen year after year after year on Medicaid expansion.

The folks bringing you the Quality Education Act, Reclaim Idaho, are the same ones who brought you Medicaid expansion. After years of the Idaho Legislature dragging its feet on expanding Medicaid, 61% of Idaho voters approved expanding Medicaid, illustrating how Idaho legislators were acting against the wishes of their constituents.

Public education funding is similar.

In a nutshell, the Quality Education Act, if approved by voters, would raise an estimated $324 million to be used for public education for such items as increased teacher pay, full-day kindergarten, reducing class sizes, career technical education, counselors and school psychologists, textbooks and supplies for students, art, music and drama programs and enhanced instruction in civics, American history and American government.

The act would secure the money by raising income taxes on Idahoans who make more than $250,000 a year and raising the corporate tax rate from 6.5% to 8%.

We have our misgivings about fiddling with Idaho’s tax structure, and we particularly have misgivings about the need to even raise taxes, when Idaho is sitting on a $1.5 billion budget surplus.

Idaho should just take some of that surplus and direct it into public education, right?

Unfortunately, Idaho legislators have proven that they can’t be trusted to do the right thing when it comes to public education funding.

Idaho continues to be 51st in the nation in per-pupil funding, and dozens of school districts around Idaho are operating on more than $200 million in supermajority voter-approved supplemental levies. Some school districts are operating on four-day school weeks.

Meanwhile, Idaho legislators continue to cut taxes that disproportionately benefit the wealthy and out-of-state corporations while starving basic government functions such as public education.

Earlier this year, Idaho Republican legislators approved a bill that cut taxes by $163 million per year and handed out $220 million in tax rebates this year.

At the same time, average teacher pay in Idaho has gone down since the Great Recession, when factoring in inflation.

While teacher salaries in Washington, Oregon and Wyoming grew by an average of 12% between the 2009-2010 and 2019-2020 school years, Idaho teacher salaries fell by 2% in the same time period, according to the Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy. Idaho’s annual teacher salaries fell from $55,000 in 2009 to $53,000 in 2019, after adjusting for inflation.

Idaho’s “go on” rate, students going on from high school to college or a career technical institution, was already low and has been dropping from 50% in 2017 to 45% in 2019, according to Idaho Ed News.

Idaho doesn’t require kindergarten and funds only half-day kindergarten if a school district offers it. In the 2021 legislative session, while legislators were chopping more than $435 million out of the budget, they failed to pass a bill that would have added $42 million to the public education budget to fund full-day kindergarten.

Forget about pre-kindergarten, which has been shown to help children show up better prepared for school. Idaho Republican legislators actually killed a $6 million federal grant for pre-K programs throughout Idaho over unfounded fears about left-wing indoctrination.

Meanwhile, even before the pandemic, only 69.7% of Idaho students in kindergarten through third grade were reading at grade level in 2019.

When we conduct interviews at election time, Republican legislators, who hold a supermajority in the Legislature, express a “good enough” attitude when it comes to public education. Idaho’s test scores are “pretty good” on a national scale, showing that we can get away with cheaping out on education and get some test scores that are just “good enough.”

Imagine what Idaho could accomplish with more teachers, more training, more resources and more teachers staying in their school districts longer.

We can certainly do better than “good enough.”

Every time Idaho gets a surplus of cash, legislators cut taxes. Yes, it may incentivize growth, but at what cost? If we can’t pay for that growth, why incentivize it?

Time and again, legislators prioritize tax cuts over adequately funding education.

Passage of the initiative would send a clear signal to the Legislature that they are on the wrong side of this issue and that they need to really prioritize education funding — not just add a few extra crumbs to the plate each year, which is what’s happening.

This helps rural Idaho school districts, particularly those that can’t get supplemental levies approved. More and more school districts in Idaho — particularly rural districts — are relying on alternative teacher certifications to fill their ranks.

We are hesitant about raising the corporate tax rate to 8%, but Reclaim Idaho argues that’s mostly paid by out-of-state corporations. You can bet those corporations are still going to come to Idaho, even at 8%, and still make a ton of money.

We’re also concerned about what mechanism would be used to disperse the funds fairly and most effectively, ensuring that rural and struggling districts get what they need.

In the end, we see this initiative largely as a referendum on the Idaho Republican Legislature, which has failed the children of Idaho by skimping on public education funding.

If they don’t see the importance of investing in Idaho’s future, then voters will have to do it for them.