Most of the media coverage of the painful funding cuts for the Iowa universities and K-12 schools overlooks and inadequately reports the real reason the Iowa Legislature does not have the funds to pay for K-12 and higher education: drastic changes to the state’s commercial property taxes that have led to lower revenues.

Gov. Terry Branstad recommended and the Legislature passed a huge tax cut in March 2014 (Senate File 295) that significantly lowered commercial property taxes but did not allow sufficient revenue for education funding. These tax cuts were promoted as a way to attract businesses and increase their profits. Much of these profits will flow out of our state through corporations that own local chain businesses. Landlords will not pass these tax cuts on to their renters.

Ironically, these commercial tax rollbacks will discourage corporations and the families that run them from moving to Iowa because of the failing schools. If schools and the local economy start to fail, property values will fall. Many people will lose jobs, including teachers. Funding cuts in every K-12 school district will result in the loss of essential school administrative staff, teachers, and programs such as sports and music. Class sizes will become too large for effective teaching. The universities will not be able to attract many of the best students if their costs go up and the quality of education goes down. Research and graduate programs will be cut, damaging the reputation of our highly rated universities.

As the budget cuts sweep through our local schools, parents will swarm into the school board meetings and angrily demand that their favorite program not get axed when they could have been helping get more progressive legislators elected who would adequately fund their schools.

Journalists need to clearly and convincingly tell people that our Legislature does not value our educational systems and is more interested in serving the members, political interests. They are undermining and starving our schools and universities by excessively and unnecessarily cutting our state revenues that are necessary to maintain a good educational system in Iowa.

-— John Macatee is a resident of Iowa City and an osteopathic physician.