The Wisconsin Policy Forum recently highlighted their top five research findings for 2022. These were chosen using the “criteria that the finding contains newly uncovered information and that it is relevant to upcoming policy debates at the state or local level”. Included in their top five:
“Wisconsin falls to middle of the pack in school spending. In July, we took one of our periodic looks at Wisconsin’s school spending compared to other states and found a continuation of the decline in the state’s ranking that we had observed in recent years (Wisconsin’s Ranks in School Spending, Tax Burden Fall Together). Per 2020 Census Bureau data, Wisconsin’s spending of $12,740 per student on public elementary and secondary education was 25th in the nation and 5.6% below the national average. In 2002 – the earliest year for which comparable data are available – Wisconsin ranked 11th. Not surprisingly, given that state and local taxes are the primary funding source for K-12 education, the decline in Wisconsin’s school spending rank was consistent with its declining tax burden (measured by the ratio of state and local taxes to personal income), which fell from fifth in the U.S. in 2002 to 23rd in 2019.”
We had previously blogged about the study here.
