May/June 2007

On the Ground With...

Rep. Steve Kestell (R-Elkhart Lake)

interview by Bob Jacobson

BJ: Your thinking on government investment in early education seems to have evolved over the years. Why did that happen? What changed?

SK: My opinions have evolved, and the environment's been evolving too. I still believe strongly that the ideal would be for young children to be at home with mom or dad in an intact family. But that is not the reality we find ourselves in. More and more, we have both parents working or we have single parent families. And so the next ideal is to try to make sure that if children are going to be in early childhood programs, we have a public interest in making sure that they are high quality programs.

What are the political barriers to increasing the state's commitment to early care and education?

Some are really obvious. We have a large state budget, and in many cases the state has taken on greater responsibility than what it can afford. Our commitment to K-12 education already represents over 40 percent of our general purpose budget, and that's growing. So that makes finding more funding for early childhood an even bigger challenge. And then there's also the camp that believes very strongly that government should not be taking on the role of parents, that we are treading on dangerous ground and setting the wrong precedents by investing heavily in early education. I think those are the two main challenges that we face.

Given the budget realities currently confronting us, how do we get out of this mess? How do we maintain, or better yet, improve, our commitment to early childhood education in the face of increasing costs, and revenues that will not keep pace with those costs?

First of all we have to recognize that Wisconsin already is investing a great deal. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Wisconsin has made an enormous commitment to early education for a long time, and we've really been ahead of other states. We fully fund 4-year-old kindergarten, for example. There's a growing number of public schools participating in that. Then we have an enormous investment in child care subsidies that is growing rather than decreasing. I don't see any likelihood that there's going to be a great influx of new revenues into the state's coffers any time soon, so my suggestion would be that we have to use money much more wisely. For example, in K-12 education, when we look at neighboring states like Minnesota and Iowa, we see comparable student performance to ours, but we're spending a lot more per child than they are. We should examine why that is, and see if we can do a more efficient job of running our K-12 districts, and convert some of that savings into early childhood. The notion that we're just going get a lot of new money from somewhere is not likely to happen.

Can you identify some specific ways that we could be spending more wisely?

Well, let's look at 4-year-old kindergarten. One thing we know is that the state is paying more than what it actually costs to run those programs. So 4-year-old kindergarten has become a profit endeavor across the state. What I'd much rather see is for those available dollars to be used to fund more programs rather than overspend in the ones that are already participating. Right now we have about a third of the state's 4-year-olds that are enrolled, and half of those are in Milwaukee, so we've got a long way to go, even though there are districts signing up each year. I think we made a mistake when we set up the program the way we did years ago. We overfunded, and that has made it difficult to fund, for example, incentives or grants to districts to help cover the initial costs of starting a program. We want to make sure also that districts are collaborating within the communities to make the best use possible of existing infrastructure and do things in the way that is most accommodating to the parents of the kids in those districts. I think that's been developing quite well, in terms of collaborative efforts.

As a member of Joint Finance, you're in a pretty good position to prognosticate about the future of funding for child care and early education. What's going to happen?

I think for this budget, the agreement, the package that was placed in the budget at the Joint Finance level will be the ultimate result. I don't think there will be many changes to that. For the future, if we determine that Wisconsin Shares is a priority over other programs, then we'll have to change some things. We have to recognize that monies are not as available as they were just a few years ago.

The most important goal we can have is not for the government to figure out how we're going to assist more people, but for the government to figure out how to reduce the number of people who need assistance. We should be working toward a goal of having less people who need Wisconsin Shares, and are self-sufficient rather than relying on a government program. Government will never be able to do what families are supposed to be doing for themselves. The key is to help families become stronger so that they don't need the government involved.