Our schools could be better

Iowa slides toward middling

A Storm Lake Times Pilot editorial

Iowa is among the richest places in the world. We have the soil, the water and abundant energy generation. We should be first-rate, but we are not. We used to be the best. We were Number One in education. Now we are Number 14 for preK-12, by the most generous ranking of US News and World Report. We are fast on our way to middling.

We do not have mountains or oceans or high-tech metroplexes. We are right at the center of everywhere and nowhere. If we want to be someplace, we must be the best at what we can do.

Iowa should offer the best education anywhere. We talk a good game, but the test results say Nebraska is better. We are lagging our neighbors. We do not think it is mere coincidence that we rank near the bottom of the 50 states in economic growth. Education and growth go hand-in-hand.

The Iowa Legislature should make education our priority again.

There are no excuses for frittering away the legacy we were left. Our Regents universities were at the top of the world in their respective strengths. They are not today. We are allowing private colleges like Iowa Wesleyan to close. We are banning books and hiding our history from K-12 students. Iowa suffered for many years over the past 20 with essentially no school budget growth over the inflation rate. This is a bipartisan neglect. The decline took an especially sharp turn south during the Culver Administration. It has been made worse during the Branstad and Reynolds Administrations.

Considering that revenues will shrink $600 million this year because of income tax cuts, and even more next year, the legislature will be miserly. The governor’s main interest is in banning cellphones in schools, which Storm Lake already did without an act of the legislature. We could hope for something better, for example, enabling schools to teach students how to write again. With all the emphasis on math and science, we find that many cannot complete a sentence. If you cannot read critically and think logically, engineering is difficult. Making Iowa the best in reading and writing would be a good place to start.

You cannot be the best in reading when you ban books. You are doomed to repeat mistakes when you prohibit an accurate rendering of history, which the current administration deems “divisive concepts.”

We cannot hope to undo what has been done. We can beg to do no more harm. Lay off the state universities with your Higher Education Committee. Let the teachers teach, and if you didn’t raise your children stupid they will separate the wheat from the chaff by the time they are 18. Start funding the Iowa Tuition Grant the way it was intended — to make the cost of a private college roughly the same as public school for those who need it.

You can’t do those things if you are bound for a budget deficit.

We can stop driving off top teaching talent simply by not being hostile to education. It doesn’t cost that much to teach reading — we became Number One at it in one-room country schools. If you are contemptuous of books and people who read them, and the ideas they generate, you cannot be first in literacy.

Our absurd politics is driving our mediocrity. Teachers become groomers. The politics has schools infringing on the sanctity of families. When you approach education with such a tight purse and an adversarial tone it only follows that performance will suffer. It is. We are not as good as we were, relatively speaking. Iowa used to be the best. It has fallen from that position under our watch.

We can do better if we simply stop doing harm. We could afford that.

If we could just stop the slide. The erosion has occurred while cutting income taxes repeatedly over the past 20 years, and now being on the precipice of eliminating the income tax altogether. It would be Gov. Reynolds’s historic legacy to get rid of the income tax before 2026. If you cap property taxes, it will be more of the same for education, a slow and steady drain to our second-rate place. A bright young person cannot afford Iowa for the tuition debt. Why stay if the schools are in decline? Is that what young families want? Is this how to strengthen rural communities, by suffocating schools?

We could change that. Just not this year.

There was a time in Iowa when that attitude was unacceptable.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this editorial appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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