When Davenport Community Schools Superintendent Art Tate announced in March that he planned to violate state law by spending more money per pupil than the state allowed, it highlighted the strangeness of Iowa's rarely questioned status quo: There's no mechanism for school districts to consistently exceed the base-funding level.
It's not quite as simple as saying that Davenport's school district can't spend more than $6,366 per student this year. But in the name of funding equality across Iowa, the state is unusually restrictive - meaning that even if citizens in a community would support higher taxes for educational operations, there's no way to make that happen.
At heart, Iowa's system takes the admirable goal of adequate education funding and turns it into a straitjacket.
