The ongoing conservative economic laboratory experiment that is Kansas continues.
As you may recall, there was a possibility that public schools in Kansas would be shut down next month unless the state legislature appropriates more funding for disadvantaged and poor school systems.
I hesitate to call it good news, considering everything the state's school systems have been through, but the legislature did approve a funding measure during a special session that boosts funding by a meager $38 million dollars.
Obviously, that's not going to last very long. A bigger fight looms ahead and given some of the statements made recently by state lawmakers, this could be even uglier.
After the state government was originally ordered to increase funding for poor school districts in early 2015, the legislature responded by converting the state's school funding program into a block-grant system which cut funding for some districts in the middle of the school year, leading to early closures for some schools.
A little over a year later, the legislature is considering abandoning the block-grant system and devising a whole new system for funding public education.
"We need to get some permanent structure in school finance," said state Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, a conservative Nickerson Republican.
Drafting a new funding formula ratchets up regional tensions, as lawmakers from different areas scramble to prevent their schools from seeing their aid redistributed elsewhere. [...]
Educators across the state argue that regional tensions would ease if Kansas increased its overall spending on schools. But Brownback, who blames the state's ongoing fiscal woes on larger regional and national economic issues, said the budget will remain "very tight."
The "regional tensions" the Associated Press refers to include, among other things, lawmakers complaining earlier this month that taxpayer money from their districts may be redistributed to fund education in another part of the state. More specifically, a group of Republican senators in Johnson County complained about their taxpayer dollars being used to fund schools in Wichita which is home to districts that sued the state for more funding.
Some Republicans have actually called for finding new sources of revenue, which is another way of calling for tax hikes, but Governor Sam Brownback is having none of that.
Brownback may blame "regional and national" economic issues for the state's budget woes, but the Grand Conservative Norquist-ian Experiment of Kansas is a clear outlier that most of the nation can point to as a lesson in failure. That is not the say the status quo is necessarily preferable in other states controlled by Republicans but, with the exception of Louisiana, Kansas stands out among the rest.
It's hard to imagine anything other than a train-wreck happening every fiscal year until Brownback leaves office.