There’s a growing divide between the school districts in Wisconsin. There are school districts that can spend more money after their voters approve school referendums, and school districts that cannot.
This leads to actual disparities in how students across our state are educated, according to a recent report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
Take the April 7 election results: 46 of 75 school district referendums passed, including two locally in Glendale-River Hills and Lake Country. School districts say they need to go to referendum more frequently because state funding levels have not kept pace with rising costs since the Legislature decoupled state revenue limits from inflation in 2009.
In April, 61.3% of school referendums on the ballot passed. Although that would constitute a decisive victory in other election contexts, Wisconsin Policy Forum Deputy Research Director Sara Shaw says that actually represents a backslide in the education world. In 2018, for example, 90% of school referendums passed in Wisconsin.
Locally, Whitefish Bay voters rejected a school funding referendum that would have added $260 to property tax bills for every $100,000 of assessed value.
WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal spoke with Sara Shaw about her findings.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Katherine Kokal: Let's start with the approval rate, and what you mean when you say 'revenue gaps' between school districts that pass referendums and those that don't.
Sara Shaw: So these referenda, to start with them, are school districts going to their voters and saying, "Look, the state tells us that we can only receive this amount of money through our two largest lots of money — local property taxes and state general school aids. We would like to ask you to authorize us to bring in more money. And some of that is going to come from you, the taxpayers, and some of it may come from the state." When that referendum passes, that's voters saying, "Yes, we agree, raise that revenue limit."
And so that 61.3% passage rate for the 75 school referenda on those April 7th ballots means that well over half of our voters said, "Yes, raise that revenue limit. We will support you." I say that first because over half is pretty good in a lot of election scenarios. If we were to have 61% of anyone passing in a Supreme Court race, for example, we would call that a very decisive victory.
But it is notable in the K-12 referenda landscape that that 61% passage rate is weakened pretty substantially from where it was back in 2018. In 2018 we had 90% of school referenda passing. And it appears to be aligning with a general increased concern amongst residents about property taxes, where they're choosing to hold down property taxes rather than increase school funding.
I think we need to talk a little bit about the higher and lower-funded school districts and the gap between them in Wisconsin. You found that this gap has grown over time. What does that mean on the ground?
So when revenue limits were first put in place back in 1993, they locked in where districts were currently at, and there were differences there. What was concerning in our findings was we looked at the districts that were lower-funded, the districts that were higher-funded, and found that the gap between those two has been growing over time.
So back in 2005, the difference between these two was 25%. So if you're in the 90th percentile of our school districts, you're receiving 25% more funding than those in the 10th percentile, which is a pretty substantial difference. But that difference has actually grown. And we talk about how the difference has really become, if it was not before, disparity now.
So in 2025, instead of a 25% difference, there's now a 38% difference, which amounts to about $4,400 per student. As that gap grows, it raises some real questions about fairness of the system.
What can you tell us about the affordability discussion and how it's impacting people's decisions on whether to increase their property taxes for schools?
So one piece of evidence that we've really been looking at are the results from the Marquette University Law School poll. This poll has asked over many year whether those responding to the poll would favor increasing spending on public schools or reducing property taxes. There was a poll in February of 2026 where it was only 40% favored increasing spending on public schools over reducing property taxes. That was the lowest share of those who would support the spending on public schools instead of reducing property taxes since the question was first asked in the poll in 2013.
However, when we look at Wisconsin compared to other states...we used to spend more on K-12 education than the rest of the country, and we now spend less on education than the national average. At the same time, we used to have a higher tax burden than the rest of the country, and we are now below the national average.
Do you have a question about education or how schools work in our area? Submit it here to WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal.
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