Sen. Tammy Baldwin toured La Follette High School in Madison on Tuesday. (Photo by Baylor Spears/ Wisconsin Examiner)

Opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts to close the U.S. Department of Education is gaining momentum, Sen. Tammy Baldwin said Tuesday during a visit to La Follette High School in Madison.

Baldwin visited the school, part of the state’s second largest school district, as new educators met for an orientation ahead of the start of the school year on September 3. 

“[New educators are] coming or returning to teaching at a time where we have seen this administration doing devastating things to education and education funding,” Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, told reporters after a tour of the school. “It has proposed the abolition of the Education Department. He wants to dismantle it. He’s called for the end to it, but he also knows that there are some constraints because the Education Department was set up by Congress and it’s funded by Congress.” 

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March ordering Education Sec. Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.” McMahon has said she is “dead serious” about putting herself out of a job.

In June, schools across the country were thrown into uncertainty when the Trump administration withheld over $6 billion in federal funds meant to support English language learners, migrants, low-income children, adult learners, after-school programs and more. The frozen funds included $70 million for Wisconsin. The administration decided to reverse course and release the funds in late July after Republican and Democratic Senators both called on the administration to do so. 

Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Joe Gothard said that, as of Tuesday, the district had expected $3.4 million and is “still waiting for direct language to ensure that we are going to be reimbursed for the cost that we plan to incur this school year.” 

Without that money, “students would not receive the services they deserve, and that could be by way of reading interventions, it could be some of the outreach we’re able to do with communities, with families,” Gothard said. “$3.4 million out of $6 billion may not seem like a lot, but those are targeted funds at students who need it most.” 

“I’m grateful that we’ve had support for the unfreezing of these funds,” Gothard said, adding that uncertainty of funding “undermines public education and who it’s for.” The lack of certainty is leading the district to rely more heavily on the local community and government for the support the district needs.

“I’ve got a range of students,” Thompson said, adding that the City Center allows for students to “come in and get what they need.”

Baldwin also got to see the school’s music room, library, gymnasium and technical education spaces, including an autoshop. 

“One of my most popular classes is our cooking classes, right, and kids get to learn basic life skills, and then, they actually do cooking for the school,” Thompson said. 

“And nutrition and all that stuff,” Baldwin added. 

“Yeah, you know, everything kids don’t want to hear,” Thompson joked. 

The Trump administration’s efforts to close the Education Department comes even as some Republican lawmakers are balking at the idea. Politico  reported that Republican lawmakers looking to fulfill Trump’s agenda are considering breaking the process down into smaller bills given the opposition to shutting down the department, especially from those in school districts that have benefited from funding and those that rely on the agency for guidance. 

When it comes to challenging the ongoing federal uncertainty, Baldwin pointed to a recent bill that came out of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, and Education and was recently approved by the full committee. 

“We have seen him propose to put some of the career and technical education programs in the Labor Department rather than keeping them in the Education Department,” Baldwin said. “He’s talked about putting the IDEA program” — which serves students with disabilities under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act — “into the Department of Health and Human Services, where it would not be suited, and he is defunding programs left and right, so we’re fighting back.” 

According to Baldwin’s office, the bill would provide $79 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Education  and would put measures into place to limit the ability to downsize the department’s role. The bill includes a requirement to make formula grants available on time and maintain the staff necessary to ensure the department carries out its statutory responsibilities and carries out programs and activities funded in the bill in a timely manner. 

Baldwin said the bill is “wildly bipartisan,” noting it passed the committee on a 26-3 vote at the end of July. 

“We have more work to do. It has to go through the whole process and end up on the president’s desk before its law,” Baldwin said. “I feel like we have momentum in standing up against this president’s plans with education, so when we return to session the day after Labor Day, we’re going to continue to press to restore all funding, and fight back against this idea of abolishing the Department of Education.”

Middle income Wisconsinites got a $180 tax cut and lost services worth much more than that. | 3D illustration rendering by Getty Images Creative

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and state legislators cut taxes by $1.3 billion in the new state budget, paying out a quarter of the state’s $4.6 billion surplus so that Wisconsinites who earn up to $200,000 can get a tax break worth an average of $180 per year.

That’s not a lot of money to trade for losing access to child care, reducing services that help veterans find jobs and housing, and cutting programs at schools. But somehow cutting taxes has become an agreed-upon, bipartisan top priority, even as the defunding of everything begins to take a major toll on our quality of life.

As Baylor Spears reports, more than 65% of Wisconsin school districts will face a reduction in funds under the new state budget. Many will go to local property taxpayers to ask for more – to the annoyance of citizens who are getting tired of the constant begging from schools that no longer receive adequate funding from the state. Local residents were willing to say yes to a record number of school funding referenda in 2024. But there are signs their patience is wearing thin.

Republican legislators are tapping into that annoyance with a bill to repeal the results of Evers’ partial veto of the last budget, which extended a temporary increase in the cap on revenue school districts could raise for the next 400 years. Evers’ maneuver outraged Republicans, who challenged the veto before the Wisconsin Supreme Court and lost. The new bill would undo the veto’s effect on school revenue caps (and the bill itself will also, presumably, be vetoed by Evers).

“The pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock 402 years before this veto,” the Republican sponsors of the bill write. “It is hard to justify locking in a funding increase for just as long into the future.” 

But like the 180 bucks a year in “tax relief” Republican legislators are touting as a major victory for middle class Wisconsinites, Evers’ 400 year veto amounts to less than meets the eye. For one thing, it doesn’t lock in an increase — it just allows districts to raise an additional $325 per pupil through a combination of local property taxes and state aid. Individual school boards must still vote to pass any property tax increase. And the state could head off those property tax increases by putting more money into schools. Instead, Republican legislators insisted on no increase at all in general school aid in the budget. The same legislative Republicans who are howling about property tax increases created the problem, refusing to fund education and then blaming districts that turn to the only other source of funding they can tap.

Overall, the Wisconsin Policy Forum reports, Wisconsin has slipped from one of the top states for education spending into the bottom half over the last 25 years. Tax-cutting replaced education as the state’s top priority. While most other states increased spending on education after the pandemic, in Wisconsin spending on schools went down. And we spend far less as a share of personal income on education now than we did in the early 2000s, and less than the national average.

Behind all of this budget math is the sad reality that, if we don’t agree to shoulder some expenses as a society, a lot of the elements of a decent life are out of reach for most people. Not paying for things through taxes doesn’t make expenses go away. It just makes them more burdensome on the smaller group that has to pay. It takes a bigger bite out of local property tax payers to pick up the cost of their schools than if the cost is spread across the state in the form of income taxes, and it’s even more expensive for individual families to pay the full cost of educating their kids. In the early 2000s, Wisconsin had the best school system in the Midwest at a cost of about 5% of personal income for taxpayers, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. That’s about $2,500 of a $50,000 income. Try to find full-time private education for less than that. 

Not just schools but a clean environment, public safety, good roads and reliable services and infrastructure that doesn’t fail are things we’ve long taken for granted. Those things are all threatened now. 

When I was a high school exchange student in Quito, Ecuador, I learned that running water in the affluent suburb where I lived was not guaranteed. Sometimes the water would go out when you were taking a shower. Keeping a bucket of water in the bathroom just in case was normal. Then a well known government official moved into the neighborhood and the problem, temporarily, cleared up. 

We are moving toward that sort of social setup now in the U.S. 

The assumption that drives tax-cutting mania at the state and national level is that we shouldn’t have to spend money toward collective, public goods. We should all pay our own way. That’s fine if you can hire your own private security firm, send your kids to private academies, and avoid contact with an increasingly desperate populace. For most people, it’s a terrible bargain.

It’s both cheaper and better for all of us, as individuals, to support a decent society for all. It only becomes unaffordable when we start pulling apart the fabric of society, convincing people they’ll be better off going it alone, after liquidating our collective wealth.

Undermining confidence in public institutions and cutting taxes so those institutions are underfunded and strained are part of the same push to increase the wealth of the already wealthy, and help them shirk any responsibility to contribute to society

Why should poor people have health care? Why should the elderly and disabled be protected from being thrown out on the street? Why should little kids have nutritious meals? If you weren’t clever enough to be born rich, you deserve nothing. That’s not exactly how the Trump administration puts it, or the Republicans in the state Legislature who have been insisting for years on frittering away the state’s budget surplus on tax cuts worth very little to anyone who doesn’t already make a ton of money. But it’s the basic, underlying idea.

This argument is compelling only to people who don’t understand the math.

Elon Musk, whose $400 billion fortune is more than the wealth owned by one-half of all U.S. citizens combined, doesn’t want to pay what for him is a pittance to help maintain the health and wellbeing of our country.

Wisconsin Republicans were unwilling to spend $4 million — .004% of the total state budget — to maintain veterans’ services to keep military vets from becoming homeless.

Efficiency, cost savings — these are the alleged goals of the federal and state austerity programs. But the real goal is to make you forget what it was like to live in a functional society, one where kids had enough to eat and people didn’t die of preventable diseases, the environment was clean and Wisconsin children could get a great, free education, afford to go to college and dream of owning a home.

What the anti-government tax-cutters want is a society riven by resentment and anger, where people are divided against each other and the dysfunction makes it easy to “divide and conquer” as our last Republican governor memorably put it.

Down with education, down with clean water, down with health care and nutrition for poor kids. Up with lurid crime stories and hateful, divisive rhetoric.

When society falls apart, it’s much easier for greedy charlatans to plunder and steal the wealth of the state. And after we’ve codified irresponsibility — spent down the treasury and starved society and made permanent the arrangement whereby the richest people in society are not obligated to contribute, well then it becomes much harder to make the rich pay their fair share.

Try to remember what it was like to have a decent, functional Wisconsin. Try not to give in to the politics of distraction and division. Because $180 is a pathetic bribe to give up stability, security and the opportunity for the kids of today to grow up with hope that they can still have a decent life.