The biggest news out of the Iowa House this week is that yesterday, we passed our education funding proposal out of the Iowa House. If you read last week’s Grassley Bulletin, I outlined the details of the plan in that newsletter. You can read that HERE. This week I want to focus on how this compares to ESA funding since there seems to be a lot of confusion.
How does this compare to ESA Funding?
Altogether, our school funding proposal equates to a 3.93 increase in state funding to public schools. In FY 2025, we allocated $3.7876 billion to public education. This proposal would allocate $3.9368 billion.
Democrats have circulated the misleading claim that we are increasing ESA funding by 44% while increasing public school funding by 2.25%. They say this to make it sound as if we are spending more on private schools than on public schools. But that is far from the truth.
The cost of ESAs increases each year at the same rate as the number we set for SSA. This year is the final year of expansion in the ESA program that allows all families to qualify. Which is why the increase looks greater this year. The increase to the ESA program under the House proposal would be $97.4 million. To be clear, this is on top of the $149.2 million increase that is just for public schools.
Even with this expansion, the cost of the ESA program does not even come remotely close to the amount we spend each year on public schools. Check out this graph for a side-by-side comparison.
In the FY 2025 budget, state aid to public schools accounts for 43.62% of the entire state budget. That’s the biggest piece of the pie by far. ESAs, meanwhile, account for 2.01% of the total state budget.
Moral of the story: ESAs are not breaking the state budget and they are not preventing us from properly investing in our public school system.
