Alabama lawmakers today are expected to vote on next year’s $7.1 billion education budget, a budget that at first glance looks like a high water mark for investment in public education. But when adjusted for inflation, it becomes clear Alabama has not yet restored the money put into schools in 2008, before the recession.

And national studies show Alabama trails much of the nation when it comes it restoring the education budget to pre-recession levels. However, this year’s budget recovers more ground and includes a pay raise for teachers.

House Education Budget Chairman Bill Poole, R-Tuscaloosa, said he is pleased that Alabama teachers will receive a 4 percent raise this year, noting it’s the third raise for teachers since 2017.

That raise increases the starting teacher's salary in Alabama to over $40,000 for the first time. The average Alabama teacher salary in 2018 was $51,040, up from $49,765 in 2017, according to reports from the Legislative Services Agency.

A quick glance at education spending makes it look like things are going well, with spending on education increasing year over year.

In current dollars, here’s what education spending has looked like.

A look at receipts and expenditures since 2001.

But when inflation is taken into account, it becomes clear that education spending is still a billion dollars below 2007 and 2008 levels.

Poole told AL.com, “People need to feel good about where we are, but not complacent at all.”

"We have needs, and I don't think anybody would dispute we have needs on the K-12 sides of the equation," he said, adding, "but the point everybody also has to remember is that funding isn't going to solve all of our challenges in education."

Here's a look at the budget when adjusted for inflation:

While 2007 and 2008 are often seen as the high-water mark for education budgets, in both years, lawmakers budgeted far more in spending than what the state actually took in for tax revenue. That resulted in four straight years of proration from 2008 through 2011, though $437 million in transfers from the Rainy Day Fund---which had to be paid back----offset some of the effects in 2008 and 2009.

But lawmakers can no longer spend money they don't have, as they did in 2007 and 2008. At least not since enacting the Rolling Reserve Act in 2011. That law acts like a safeguard, making sure expectations don't exceed certain parameters like average growth over the past 15 years.

Since the implementation of that law in 2013, no proration has been needed. But tax receipts haven't rebounded to the growth rate they experienced prior to the recession, either.

"The recovery has been slow and steady, which is not all bad," Poole said, "but we would have liked it to be a little hotter pace. We've picked up some fiscal steam over the past couple of years."

Income and sales taxes make up the majority of the revenue going into the Education Trust Fund. But those two sources are also the first to take a hit during a recession, Poole said.

Alabamians historically have not supported raising taxes, so any increases must come from those two sources.

Lawmakers are considering authorizing a lottery, but disputes over how proceeds should be used---for education or for prisons---have likely killed the bill, according to the bill's sponsors.

So here’s a look at Education Trust Fund receipts since 2001, in current dollars. At first glance, just like spending, tax collections look pretty good, year over year.

But when those figures are adjusted for inflation, that slow recovery is clearly seen.

To be sure, Alabama isn’t alone in that slow recovery, according to a recent study from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Pew looked at whether taxes collected at the state level met or exceeded a state's peak tax collections prior to the recession and if so, when. According to Pew, who bundled tax collections from Alabama's Education and General funds together for the study, it took Alabama until the third quarter of 2018 to reach that benchmark.

[Alabama, along with Michigan and Utah, are the only three states that have separate education and general fund budgets.]

Nine states---including the southeastern states of Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi---haven't yet reached that mark. The other six states are Alaska, Wyoming, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma and New Jersey.

Alabama also made news as one of the states with the deepest funding cuts to K-12 and higher education since the recession in reports from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has been tracking state spending on education following the recession.

The CBPP's findings, looking at state-provided funding per student, show:

Alabama is providing 15 percent less funding than it was in 2008 through the Foundation Program, a formula-based program providing more than half of total funding for most school districts, and

Alabama is providing nearly 35 percent less funding to the state’s two- and four-year colleges than it was in 2008.

Poole said he realizes K-12 and higher education are not yet fully funded, acknowledging the nuance that, "Fully funded means different things to different people."

Poole noted that college tuition has continually increased, in part as a response to decreased state appropriations. Five Alabama colleges recently announced they would not raise tuition for the 2019-20 academic year.

Tuition costs across the country have continued to soar for decades. In Alabama, the median increase for in-state undergraduate students at four-year public colleges has been 71 percent over the last 10 years, according to the Alabama Commission on Higher Education.

But while colleges can raise tuition, covering costs the state no longer covers, K-12 schools don't have that ability, relying instead on property taxes and other local support to fill in for what the state no longer provides.

While Poole said the most recent recession was an outlier in terms of how bad things got, he knows some form of economic downturn is inevitable, and he wants the state to be ready for when that happens.

Poole said more than $250 million has been put into a budget stabilization fund, should proration become necessary in an economic downturn. For now, Poole is cautiously optimistic.

“We’re not where we need to be,” Poole said, adding, “We’re heading in the right direction.”

4:40 p.m. Graphs used in this article were clarified to show current dollars were retrieved from the Fiscal Division of the Legislative Services Agency and inflation-adjusted numbers were calculated by AL.com.