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On Monday, September 12, the Madison Board of Education will vote on proposed revisions to the district’s Equity Resource Policy. The revisions gut the current policy and replace it with an already existing formula for allocating staff to schools based on socioeconomic factors. The meeting is a Special Board meeting called by President Carol Carstensen. At the meeting administrators will recommend this change and the full Board will vote on the recommendation. Not much notice to the public, not much opportunity to hear public opinion and analysis, no analysis by any Board committee. Only very savvy people who closely watch the Board agendas will know that this vote is coming.
What’s at stake?
Kristian Knutsen nicely summarizes the upcoming spring 2006 Madison School Board election politics and mentions that the election will likely include a non-binding referendum to overturn the tavern smoking ban (Isthmus’ The Daily Page):
There is ongoing speculation as to whether either incumbent will run for another term. Whether or not they do, the “anti-status quo” group of school board activists that support Robarts, helped boost Kobza to victory in April, and were mostly in opposition to the defeated May referendum questions, is gearing up for the next round, an election that could advance them to a majority position.
More here.
In May, voters rejected referendums for more operating money and a new “Leopold” school. That failed budget meant significant staffing cuts. But in the case of the new school, the district admits, they had no back-up plan. Now, the board is working to address student issues, as Madison continues to grow.
“Both parents and staff are going to find things a lot more difficult… We cut custodians, we cut teaching positions, we cut services, we cut people downtown,” says school board president Carol Carstensen.
A long range planning committee has been asked to seriously evaluate boundary changes in the district.
The Madison School Board flirted Monday night with the idea of holding another referendum to seek funding for a second school on the Leopold Elementary grounds, but then backed away from it for now.
The board’s Long Range Planning Committee met with parents from Leopold at the school and heard their pleas for another referendum. Two of the three committee members – Juan Jose Lopez and Bill Keys – favored holding another referendum but ultimately moved to table the idea when it was clear that a majority of board members were not ready to go back to the voters so soon after the defeat of a similar referendum on May 24.
Jason Shephard emailed a copy of his article on Madison Schools’ Healthcare costs. This article first appeared in the June 10, 2005 issue of Isthmus. The Isthmus version includes several rather useful charts & graphs that illustrate how the Madison School District’s health care costs compare with the City and County. Pick it up.
In the aftermath of the votes on the May 24th Madison School referenda, it is critical that the Madison School Board not rush to vote on layoffs of teachers and other staff. Currently, the Board is scheduled to vote on layoffs at noon on Thursday, May 26. This deadline for layoff votes is self-imposed by the district and Madison Teachers Inc (MTI). State law sets a later deadline. The district and the union could change the May 26 date by mutual agreement. In 2003 the vote on layoffs following a referendum for the operating budget was scheduled for June 4.
Jennifer Alexander sent an email to local chamber members urging them to be informed and vote.
The Capital Times has posted consolidated links to its referendum coverage, editorials, and forum responses to editorials on the May 24 questions. The URL is:
http://www.madison.com/tct/news/stories/index.php?ntid=40948
I oppose the Leopold School referendum.
I oppose it not because I’m a Republican (I’m not), not because I’m a Democrat (I’m not, though the Mayor would have you believe that that would constitute an oxymoron — a sad commentary on what it means to be a Democrat, seems to me), but because opposing the Leopold referendum is the responsible decision.
(My political leaning, if you must know: A left wing conservative! “Always do the right thing, leaving as much money as you can to do more right things.”).
The Leopold referendum wastes $10M over 15 years.
The only real motivation for this blindness was “we promised the Leopold parents back in 2002”, and great lobbying by the Leopold crowd — to the potential detriment of other schools and kids in the district. Placing this promise in perspective, in 2002, when the promise was first made, the estimate for a new school at Leopold was $7M. In 2004, the initial estimate became $11M; the referendum now calls for $14.5M — a 200% increase from 2002. Quite a jump!
The most responsible decision the Board could have made was to construct another addition to the Leopold school, borrowing up to $10M from the State Trust Fund (no referendum is required), as we did for the 2003 addition to Leopold. And we wouldn’t have to pay for a new principal at this new school, at $100,000+ per year, because their wouldn’t be a new school! Another savings. (Or maybe build the $7M school, originally promised?).
Our savings of $10M over the referendum is the difference between the 15-year cost of the referendum and the anticipated principle and interest payments back to the State on the $10M loan. Our 15-year cost is $23M, not the $14.5M, which is the money we get to keep. The $23M is this $14.5M plus the 60% increase Madison taxpayers are required to pay under the State’s Equalization Forumla — we’re paying welfare to other school districts!
What could we do with the $10M not spent on the Leopold site? Make additions to southwest schools to accommodate expected growth (also limits growth at Leopold), and additions to schools on the east side: both will be needed anyway.
And this would have been the prudent thing to do, given the flux in the Ridgewood apartments area, which calls into question the growth estimates for Leopold.
The School Board failed to follow their own policy and consider an addition to Leopold as an alternative, instead jumping full speed ahead, without deliberation, to building a new school. In fact, the Long Range Planning citizen committee, that was charged with the initial deliberations, spent the majority of their time at meetings, practising their Leopold referendum campaign speeches, instead of deliberating over the substance. Their lack of even reasonable due diligence in the execution of their responsibilties leaves the voters to make emotional instead of logical and factual decisions.
Send the referendum back to them. Demand that do their job. When they’ve done their due diligence, then we can talk.
On May 24th, citizens in the Madison school district will vote on three referenda questions affecting whether to build an addition to Leopold School, exceed revenue caps, and renew the maintenance referendum.
For many people the answers are an easy yes or no vote. Others, like me, have wrestled with their choice for each question.
Why is the choice so difficult? It should be easy, right? Strong public education is a good thing. We want to support teachers and students in the district. We know that overcrowded schools all too often undermine education.
I can’t speak for others, but I know that I have several barriers to an automatic yes vote. The issues are different for Leopold than for the operating and maintenance questions. For me, the issues come down to what I do – and do not – know about what the questions mean. I feel that my duty as a representative of the community is to make informed decisions on behalf of our children and not to commit to proposals that lack sound justifications.
Madison Cares, a group formed to support the May 24, 2005 Madison School Referendums has published an updated introductory letter that includes a list of supporters (32K PDF).
7MB MP3 audio file from their WTDY appearance. (last 20 minutes only – sorry). Bill Keys is a former teacher and current member of the Madison Board of Education. Thuy Pham-Remmele is a retired Madison schools teacher.
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Kirby Brant is President of local PAC Get Real (he’s also a former Watertown School Board member and was a candidate for the Madison School Board in 2002). Brant gives his views on:
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I’m happy to post views from all players interested in the May 2005 referendums. Email me at zellmer at mailbag dot com if you’d like to post an interview. |
Joe Wineke, Don Severson & Mitch Henck discuss the upcoming Madison School Referendums, administrative consolidation and the budget in this 40 minute mp3 file (via 1310)
But several parents in an audience of about 50 said they have little hope that the May 24 referendum to build a new school will pass. Meanwhile, they said, school district officials need to reconsider their plans if the school isn’t built, and also, perhaps, consider alternative building plans.
…..
But she said the main reason she did not support the contract was because the administration provided board members only a few details from it.
“I would have a hard time approving an agreement unless I see it in writing,” said Kobza, who is an attorney. “Maybe it’s just the line of work I’m in.”
Back in October, I testified at a meeting of the Long Range Planning Committee. I asked the committee “to do only three simple things.” To my knowledge, the Board and Long Range Planning Committee have not done them, so I’m going to vote against the referendum on Leopold.
If the Board has done what I suggested, I welcome a response on all three points.
Here’s what I said in October:
First, take the time to understand the budget consequences of a new school. By this I mean that you needed a referendum for operating expenses for this school year. How much additionally will you need to ask from taxpayers in annual referenda to fund a new elementary school?
Second, take the time to understand the enrollment impact of a new elementary school on the middle school and high school it will serve.
Third, citizens of the broad Madison school community include people with a tremendous amount of expertise in education, management, finance, urban planning, real life, and more. You should use every possible opportunity to tap their knowledge.
Ed Blume
This link was forwarded to Madison School Board members by Joe Quick
Racine School Board decides its next move after failed referendum.
Is it me, or is this a forshadowing of the future of Madison School District?
In the May 24 referendum for the operating budget, voters will determine whether the Madison schools will have an additional $7.4 million to spend next year and for all the years thereafter. Superintendent Art Rainwater and the management team issued a cut list in March. According to Rainwater, the board should cut the programs, staff and expenses on this list if the referendum fails. http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/budget/mmsd/0506/2005-06_Budget_Discussion_Items.pdf
Before the referendum election, the school board can take items off of the cut list. One of the items that should come off the list is the proposed elimination of the elementary strings program, a program that costs $500,000 within a budget of more than $350 million.
Timing is everything. Timing is the reason that I believe a one-year operating referendum has a better chance of passage than a two or three year referendum.
Since being elected to the Madison school board last year, it has been very clear to me that many people in our community are educated in school board politics via local media. Unfortunately, television snippets, radio sound bites and newspaper articles rarely tell the entire story. However, in the March 31st Opinion section of the Wisconsin State Journal gets the story right! The article states, Tapping property taxpayers for more money is a regrettable option, but the finger of blame does not point to the board. Rather, outdated and unproductive state school financing rules are at fault. They put school districts like Madison’s in a no-win situation. In response, the School Board, with a few exceptions, has been taking the right approach. By cutting, combining and conserving, the board has held down spending while keeping school quality high. Thank you Wisconsin State Journal for telling readers the truth!
I support the one-year operating referendum because I believe it is the right thing to do and the right time given the other referenda on the ballot (building a new school and maintenance being the other two). I am also sympathetic to community concerns regarding higher property taxes and the uneasiness that leaves in the communitys sense of economic security. For instance, gas prices are increasing, President Bush is advocating privatizing social security and many lawmakers are still promoting the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR).
The timing for any school board referendum will never be optimal. However, it is important to make any referenda as palatable as possible for as many people as possible. Given our circumstances, the time to do that is for one year. That time will be on Tuesday May 24th.
It�s official, Madison homeowners will be asked to vote on three school referenda in late May.
School Board President Bill Keys said, �This community is at a crossroads. This will determine what type of schools we want.�
But one man opposed to the referenda thinks Madison residents can keep good schools if the district is more creative.
Karyn Saemann also covers Monday Night’s Board Decisions. Sandy Cullen has more.
Extensive Madison Schools budget coverage is available here.
I received this message from Brian Grau, a teacher from LaFollette who recently visited his hometown of Racine, who like Madison is going to referendum. Enjoy!
The Journal Times, Racine, WI, 3/24/05
Referendum means it’s time for finger pointing
By Jeff Ruggaber
Hey Racine! It’s that time again. Time to complain about money spent on schools! Who’s to blame? Let the finger pointing begin! Hey, there’s a group of teachers. Let’s blame them. They are just over paid baby sitters! I wish. I figure if I got paid $5.00 for each kid (25 per class), for 6 hours a day, for 180 days. I would make $135,000 a year! Let’s give those with a master’s $7.00 and hour per kid. That’s $189,000. Reality $39,000. Between my wife and I, last year we paid close to $7,000 just to keep our jobs (property taxes, classes to renew licenses, fee for licenses, and out of pocket expenses to supplement our classroom’s). I love paying close to $1000 of my own salary in property taxes. Healthcare. The district offered us the plan. Would you have turned it down? Should we pay more? Remember that teachers did trade salary for benefits.
Let’s point fingers at the school district. All they have done is cut spending year after year. Costs go up, spending goes down. You do the math!
Attention Racine: we have schools that were built during the Abraham Lincoln administration! Can you accurately guess from year to year how much it costs to keep these buildings running, when the ghosts of the 1800s still run through the halls! More cuts need to be made even if this does not pass. This district does not have the money to give you what this city deserves. Kids learning in run down, overcrowded buildings is a very real thing.
Next, let’s point fingers at the taxpayers. Those same people who spend $1 to $2 for a bottle of water. Those people who spend a dollar a day at the soda machine at work! Those people who don’t think twice at paying $4-$5 for one beer at Harbor Fest, Summerfest, Lambeau Field and the rest. Those people who are still driving their SUVs, pick-up trucks, Cadillac’s, and other gas guzzling cars. Those same people who pay $40-$50 a month so they can make sure their 12-year-old has a cell phone, $50 cable bills, $200 utility bills, $40 video games to baby-sit your kids, 20 cent increase for a gallon of gas this past week, the list goes on! Complain about those. Oh yeah, those things don’t go to a referendum, Why is it that when schools need more money, everyone complains? One person wants a user fee. The more kids you have, the more you pay. So I should pay more for the fire department if they put out my fire and I have 10 kids? Same concept! I’ve never used the fire department yet, can I get a refund? One lady offered the keys to her house. You got it! That will save three teachers jobs. Thanks! For those who think you don’t benefit from Unified because you have no more kids there, well then I think we need to make Unified and Non-Unified lines at every place of business. So when you go to the store, doctor, or gas station you can only go to the line where your tax money is spent.
Now the Racine Taxpayers Association gives the referendum a thumbs down. They say not enough cuts have been made. Have you been to our schools? Have you seen the plaster falling on kid’s heads? Have you seen the paint chipped so bad the wood is rotting underneath? Have you felt the below zero wind blow through the cracks in the 100 year old windows? Have you tried to teach in a classroom where the temperature varies from near 90 degrees to 60 degrees all in one day? Oh, that’s right, you think teachers should pay more for their insurance. Well if we do, then I want a raise back on my salary that I gave up for the past 10 years. The bottom line is that we have a serious problem.
So either fight for a better educational system and support it, or get out of our way. The future is now!
Without support, you can’t imagine how bad things are going to get.
Jeff Ruggaber is an art teacher at Red Apple School.
Lee Sensenbrenner on the 119M in planned May 24 referendums:
If the voters approve a referendum May 24 to prevent classroom and extracurricular cuts for three years, along with two other referendums to ensure adequate maintenance for five years and to expand Leopold Elementary School on the south side, the five-year property tax impact of the three referendums could amount to more than $119 million.
An alternate plan the board is considering, which would keep the maintenance and school construction but guarantee against educational cuts for just two years, would collect about $66 million in additional property taxes over the next five years.
All of this is done in the context of a school budget that totals $317 million for this year.
Board member & candidates comments.
On March 28, the Madison School Board will vote to place three referendums on the ballot in a special election on May 24. The total bill for the referendums will be $85.1M if the operating budget referendum is for three years, as proposed by Finance Chair Carol Carstensen.
I realize that many people in this community arent happy about the recent decision made by the Madison School Board to go to referendum for the operational budget shortfall. This will indeed raise property taxes. I am more than sympathetic to senior citizens (or others) on fixed incomes and how this decision affects them. I also empathize with those who might not agree with the direction of the district by stating additional cuts in services should be considered or discussed. While Im agreeable with those rationales, I will NOT stand for what I believe is blatant racism by members of this community who will use the changing demographics of the school district and community as an excuse for not voting for a referendum. Listed below is a copy of an e-mail recently sent to school board members. The sender is a City of Madison bus driver who has sent e-mails to the School Board before. I have retracted the senders name.
dear board members;i think it is an insult for you , not all of you.to ask for tax increases for the school budget problems.these schools are supposed to be so great in this city.they dont seem to be any better than when i went to school here.my niece was going to east high until a black girl that was 14 years old and already had 2 kids was giving her a hard time.my niece ended up going to another school.and just the other day, a gang of black kids were beating up a white kid at the east transfer point.also at east high.i know some people that said they have seen the black girls walk down the halls and push the white girls out of the way.i bet the public doesnt know about half the things that go on in this city.if you ask me i think you people should actually have better schools than just say you do.i thought schools were bad when i went and they were,i would hate to be a kid going to school here now.getting bullied and the school doesnt do anything about it.and you want us to pay more.i not only think that these schools suck ,this city is starting to also.
This is my response:
It is absolutely incredible to me that in 2005, there are people who perform public services in our community that are without question racist. It seems to me that you are indeed troubled with the changing demographics in the City of Madison. I want to remind you that as an employee working as a bus driver for the City of Madison, taxpayers are paying your salary as well. And, so are the thousands of Black and other racial and ethnic minority persons who probably ride the bus that youre driving. To be frank, it must be very difficult to drive with the white sheet covering your eyes. Thank you for wasting the taxpayers time for me having to respond to your ignorance.
Johnny Winston, Jr.
School Board member, who is Black and deeply offended by your bigoted comments. And I wish we didn’t have to ask you for your money!
I am more than willing to understand those who disagree but racism has no place in our schools and in our community! I hope we can all agree on that!
Freeculture.org sponsored blogshine Sunday, a day when news organizations run stories and editorials in support of public access to government information.
The internet has substantially improved citizen’s ability to see who is funding elected officials directly and indirectly.
The Madison City Clerk conveniently posts campaign finance information on their website. I took a quick look at PAC (political action committee) spending on school board races and found this:
Madison School Related PAC’s:
Every active member of the Madison School Board was endorsed by and received direct and indirect support from Madison Teachers, Inc. The only current exception is Ruth Robarts, who, while supported in the past by MTI, was opposed by MTI in her 2004 successful re-election campaign.
Overseeing the building of a new school on the Leopold site is one of the responsibilities of the Long Range Planning committee, of which I am a member. On this committee, board and citizen members have voted to ask the public via referendum to build a school on the Leopold grounds. This has been part of a long-range plan for quite some time. In 1988, I worked at Leopold Elementary School as a Parent-Community Liaison. My supervisor was the late Don Stern who was Principal at the time. Mr. Stern always told me that Leopold was the biggest elementary school in the district and the Leopold community was going to get bigger. Despite Leopold being the biggest elementary school, he had no Assistant Principal. This was never a burden for him. He loved Leopold School. But he knew that eventually another school would be built on the property. He told me this, and this was in the late 80s!
Im not supporting this building referendum only because of Mr. Stern. Im supporting this because it is the right thing to do. The Leopold neighborhood has grown by leaps and bounds as will the whole Westside of Madison. The increased enrollment dictates that something must be done to alleviate the overcrowding in the school. Building on the current grounds is a fiscally efficient thing to do. Building else where in the community would add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the project. Building a smaller facility with a reduced capacity puts the community back in the same place it is now and will cause additional overcrowding at other west side schools. Not building a school on the Leopold site will increase the timetable for which another new school will have to be built on the far west side of Madison. One thing that is for certain, as these new developments are built and enrollments increase on the far west and far east sides of Madison, new schools will need to be built. The effect of this action will cause closing schools to be strongly considered on the north side and Isthmus. Future school boards will make these difficult decisions in five to ten years as growth dictates or perhaps even sooner as the financial challenges warrant.
The current school board receives many opinions regarding its lack of long range planning. In the case of Leopold, a great deal of planning has been done for the new school. The PTO, community leaders, parents, teachers and students have been heard loud and clear. This is what they want. If there are additional questions and concerns, they need to be addressed in the Long Range Planning committee. We have yet to have such concerns placed on the agenda. Anyone who has a dissenting opinion should use the Long Range Planning committee meetings as a forum to vent their concerns. Although, I am supportive of building a new building on the Leopold grounds, I want to hear from those who might question this logic or have concerns. Once these concerns are addressed, school board members can make an informed decision and be able to live with their decision and the decision of the voters on May 24th.
Spring is definitely coming. On February 17, the Madison School Board performed Act 1 of the four-act play that is our annual school budget process.
Act 1 is the unveiling of the Budget Forecast. In this Act, the administration solemnly announces that the district faces-once again-“The Budget Gap”. The Budget Gap is the difference between what the Board wants to spend and what we can spend without a successful referendum to increase operating funds. It is not a gap caused by a drop in state funding.
To nobody’s surprise, the Budget Gap is big and ugly. Under current state law, revenues from property taxes will increase about 2.35% for next year. However, the administration’s “same service” budget requires a revenue increase of more than 4%. The Gap for next year is $8.6M.
The credibility of the Madison Metropolitan School District comes into serious question with the public when Board of Education members and district staff present erroneous information through the media to the public.
Recent examples include:
In order for the general public to understand the implications and consequences of financial decisions for which the public is requested to support, the Board of Education members and the administration must present accurate and complete information within the context of the total framework of the district’s budgeting, taxing authority and actions.
Don Severson
www.activecitizensforeducation.org
donleader at aol dot com
Watch a recent Madison School Board Maintenance Referendum Hearing (video). Don Severson, Roger Price, Art Rainwater and others discuss the planned maintenance referendum.
On Monday, February 21, the Long Range Planning Committee of the Madison School Board will hear the administration�s explanation of five options for reducing overcrowding at Leopold School and providing seats for students from new housing developments on the west and southwest side of the district. Last Monday, after I asked the administration to withdraw options that it will not recommend, a set of nine options dropped to five. Of the remaining five options, the administration recommends only two choices. Option A (3A2 PDF) depends on passage of a referendum to build a second school building on the Leopold grounds. Option B (3D1 PDF) assumes that the referendum fails. Madison Schools Boundary Change web page.
I cannot support Option B, the fallback option in the event that the proposed Leopold referendum fails. There are important but unanswered questions about how the proposed school boundary changes would affect the middle and high schools on the west side. However, more compelling to me is that this option moves 1137 students to new elementary schools, including 516 low income students, and moves them in a way that will excessively disrupt many of the eleven affected schools.
A reader forwarded me comments that were sent to the Madison School Board regarding the proposed athletic field fees:
As you would guess, many of us who have watched a soccer game, t-ball game or football game and enjoyed the unencumbered spirit and play of our children and have personally mowed the grass, or lined a field, you may oppose the school board proposal of a user fee for the athletic fields during non-school hours.
I sent a letter to the comments section of MMSD school board. Send yours to: comments@ at madison.k12.wi.us
My letter to the school board stated:
The Madison School Board’s Long Range Planning Committee is holding a public hearing on the proposed maintenance referendum (one of potentially 3 referendums this spring) Wednesday night, January 19, 2005 @ 6:00p.m. at the Doyle Administration Building, McDaniels Auditorium.
I’ve emailed the MMSD TV folks to see if they are broadcasting this event, but have not heard back from them. I will post broadcast information here upon receipt.
Madison Metropolitan School District
545 West Dayton Street
Madison WI 53703-1995 [Map]
Given this and the probability of three spending referendums this spring, I would like to see the Madison School District’s finance folks publish the following information (in html, on their web site):
The District’s sources and uses of funds over the past 10 years, including:
- total spending (education, special ed, services, staff/admin, other)
- Employment numbers (teachers, staff, part time, mscr)
- revenues (by source: grants, local taxes, state & federal funds), fees
- Student counts, including low income changes, special ed and population changes across the district (from school to school)
- Supporting numbers, notes and comments to the data.
This type of detailed, background information would be rather useful to all Madison citizens as we contemplate further increases in education spending. There’s been some discussion of eliminating the deduction for state & local taxes for federal tax purposes. IF that happens, there will be quite a blowback from places like Wisconsin that have relatively high taxes.
On October 11, the administration will recommend to the Long Range Planning Committee of the Madison School Board that the district go to referendum on April 5, 2005 seeking funds for construction of a second elementary school building on the grounds of Leopold Elementary School. The new school would house kindergarten through second grade and the current school would convert to third through fifth grade, if this plan succeeds.
The LRP will hold a public hearing on this recommendation on Monday, October 18, at 7 p.m. at Leopold School at 2602 Post Road in Madison.
On September 13, the administration for the Madison Metropolitan School District advised the Long Range Planning Committee of the Board of Education that the district needs $27M for maintenance projects between 2005 and 2010.
A referendum would be necessary to raise this amount, because the administration is seeking a total of $46M for maintenance over the five years. The $27M would be in addition to $19M that the Board will spend on maintenance if it continues to earmark $3.8M from each annual operating budget for maintenance.
On August 13, Madison Board President Bill Keys and I agreed to recommend nine citizens plus the two student School Board members to the 2004-05 Advisory Committee to the Long Range Planning Committee.
On August 30, the Board will vote on the nominations:
Hardin Coleman (nominated by Johnny Winston, Jr.)
Dawn Crim (nominated by Johnny Winston, Jr.)
Joan Eggert (nominated by Bill Keys)
Jill Jokela (nominated by Carol Carstensen)
Lucy Mathiak (nominated by Ruth Robarts)
Patrick Mooney (nominated by Bill Clingan)
Jan Sternbach (nominated by Juan Lopez)
Teresa Tellez-Giron (nominated by Juan Lopez) and
Xa Xiong (nominated by Shwaw Vang).
The student members are the students elected to serve on the Board for 2004-05: Oliver Kiefer and Lena Song (alternate).
In the late spring of 2004, I had the idea that inviting a group of citizens to work with the Long Range Planning Committee of the Madison School Board might help the Committee ask better questions of the administration and explore more options during the next year. In 2004-05, the Committee will consider the possibility of another referendum to fund maintenance of the district’s buildings and try to solve overcrowding problems at Leopold Elementary School. It will also develope a 3-5 year long range plan for presentation to the Board by the end of the spring semester
In this log, I will relate our progress toward this goal.
On July 12, the Madison Board of Education will review proposals from Superintendent Rainwater that may mean the end of a long and successful collaboration between the district, the City of Madison and private child care providers to ensure quality after-school child care for elementary students. Apparently the superintendent plans to argue that MMSD can do a better job and can afford to expand into the after-school care business.
As the Madison School Board ends the 2003-04 school year, the Finance & Operations Committee is beginning to develope the budget for 2005-06. Committee Chair Carol Carstensen asked for Board suggestions. This memo gives my suggestions.
You can participate by sending your suggestions to the entire Board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us
Lee Sensenbrenner writes about Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater’s recent comments regarding three possible 2005 referendums:
“Facing growing subdivisions on the city’s edges, the expiration of a maintenance fund, and state laws that annually force cuts, the Madison School Board may be looking at three referendums next year.”
State laws do not directly “force cuts”. Rather, Wisconsin has controversial state laws that control the annual rate of increase in local school spending (“revenue caps”) and teacher contract compensation growth (QEO). Indeed, there are state caps on most, but not all school spending growth.
Interestingly, according to this Active Citizens for Education document (270K PDF), Madison school spending has increased from $180M in 1993 to $308M in 2003/2004 – with revenue caps in place ($12,419/student). The document also mentions that enrollment “has stayed virtually the same during the past ten years: 24,800”.
Given the spending growth, there must be more to this than is mentioned in Lee’s article.
It’s true, there isn’t any windfall to be found in next year’s Madison school budget. But small changes in the budget could have a major effect on Madison’s families and direct educational services to our children.
The following opinion piece was published in The Capital Times on Saturday, May 29, 2004.
http://www.madison.com/captimes/opinion/column/guest/75315.php
NEW: CNBC host Joe Kernen rolls his eyes and laughs after Harris’ economic advisor Bharat Rama tries arguing in favor of Harris’ unrealized capital gains tax.
Rama sat in silence as the hosts poked fun after he tried saying that property tax was an unrealized gains tax.
“It’s probably unconstitutional… it’s not income.”
“And it’s never gonna happen.”
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A tax on unrealized capital gains is a path to a market crash & potential Great Depression.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Ann Saphir and Howard Schneider:
“In this environment, large-scale asset purchases by central banks in response to a large government spending increase have undesirable public finance implications,” they wrote. “These purchases, which provide temporary price support, destroy value for taxpayers but subsidize bondholders” and may also encourage governments to overestimate their true fiscal capacity, they wrote.
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Notes on the upcoming $607,000,000 (!) Madison k-12 tax & $pending increase referendum – achievement?
More.
Still, Couture said she plans to vote “no” on the property tax referendum.
“Am I surprised that these are the threatened services? Not a bit,” she said. “The city needs a hard stop on the current ways they are spending our money.”
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Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Illinois now ranks as the least affordable state for housing in the Midwest, with 1 in 3 households paying more than 30% of their income for housing as property taxes continue to rise.
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Madison’s taxpayer funded k-12 system has a huge fall referendum on the November ballot….
Rebecca Greco, a librarian who worked at the school when Terrell was hired, said she does not recall any engagement with staff prior to the hiring of Terrell as principal. Greco also served on the site-based leadership team but now works as a librarian in a different school district.
She said the district did not make an effort to seek community feedback through virtual meetings or other formats, either.
“You could have gone to a community in good faith and said, ‘Look, we need a principal in place for the start of the school year. This is how we’re going to proceed. This is our reasoning. These are the ways you can provide input,’” Greco said. “But that’s not the way it happened.”
Greco is among the 24 current and former staff members from Southside Elementary School who filed a complaint against Terrell and the school’s assistant principal, Annabel Torres, this spring.
Parents of students filed a separate complaint in June, saying the current state of affairs at the school is at an “epic level of untenability.”
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Madison’s taxpayer funded k-12 system has a huge fall referendum on the November ballot….
Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…
Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The Chicago Teachers Union Foundation is seeking to significantly reduce the property tax bill for its West Loop headquarters, according to documents from the Cook County Assessor’s Office obtained by FOX 32 Chicago.
The Assessor recently reappraised the value of the CTU’s building, estimating its fair market value at $19 million. However, the CTU is appealing this assessment and has hired a private appraiser who argues that the building’s value should be reduced by more than half, to $9.2 million.
Based on the county’s appraisal, the CTU would owe approximately $1 million in property taxes. According to the Cook County Clerk’s office, 55% of Chicago’s property tax revenue is allocated to the Chicago Board of Education. This means about $550,000 of the CTU’s tax bill would fund Chicago Public Schools. If the CTU’s appeal is successful, it would cut that contribution by more than half, depriving the school district of approximately $275,000.
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Rethinking city governance and cost:
A massive part of Trump’s 2nd-term agenda is to charter TEN new mega-futuristic cities in various states on federally-owned lands
“Almost one-third of the landmass of the United States is owned by the federal government, with just a very, very small portion of that land… we should hold a contest to charter up to ten new cities and award them to the best proposals for development. In other words, we’ll actually build new cities in our country again.”
Madison’s taxpayer funded k-12 system has a huge fall referendum on the November ballot….
Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…
Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The first half of Rhodes-Conway’s signature initiative, a Bus Rapid Transit system, is also expected to launch this fall, and while the federal government is picking up from 75% to 80% of the costs to build it, that still leaves the city on the hook for at least $70 million. City officials say the borrowing needed to cover that amount will not be significant, and the system will not cost more to operate than the traditional bus system it replaces.
Madison’s population has grown by 13.3% over the last five years, the city’s Finance Department reports, and the consumer price index, also known as inflation, is up 23% in that time.
Voters are already sure to see two referendums from the Madison School District on the Nov. 5 ballot. They would raise annual property taxes $1,370 by 2028.
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Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…
Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The district is asking voters for the money as funding from federal pandemic aid and a 2020 referendum are set to expire. If voters also approve of the district’s other referendum on the November ballot — a $100 million request to help fund day-to-day expenses — district officials estimate the owner of an average-value home in Madison would see a $1,376 increase on property tax bills by 2028.
For the larger referendum to rebuild or fix 10 schools, Soldner said the district selected schools partially based on a promise from the 2020 referendum. The School Board pledged future upgrades would target the district’s remaining alternative high school and focus on middle schools. The 2020 referendum had funded fixes at four comprehensive high schools and a new building for Southside Elementary School.
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The School Board has yet to finalize plans for which buildings should be entirely replaced, if any. District leaders are recommending five new buildings and the cost of each would be:
Soldner said some of the original buildings would remain open during construction to avoid displacing students. The buildings could also be used for other students whose schools must be renovated or entirely rebuilt. New schools could be built on existing green space adjacent to old schools, he told the School Board in June.
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As school district leaders ask voters to raise property taxes, demographers are anticipating future declines in enrollment. While district-wide enrollment is expected to remain flat this fall, the student population is likely to trend downward for at least the next five years, according to projections by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
Four of the five middle schools on the referendum are also being used at 60% capacity, according to a June analysis by the Wisconsin Policy Forum. The school district typically targets a 90% use rate.
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Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…
Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Nearly four in ten (39%) of US adults say they worry most or all of the time that their family’s income won’t be enough to meet expenses, according to a new CNN poll. That’s up from 28% who expressed those concerns in December 2021, and it’s similar to the numbers seen during the Great Recession (37%).
To cope, significant shares of Americans said they are adding side jobs, cutting down on driving and putting more expenses on credit cards.
Even higher percentages of Latino (52%) and Black (46%) Americans said they’re worried most or all of the time about making ends meet, according to the poll.
More than half (55%) of those making less than $50,000 a year similarly worry about having enough money to meet expenses.
The findings underscore how, despite national statistics that show unemployment is low and inflation is cooling, millions of Americans are hurting from years of rising prices.
Locally, the taxpayer funded Madison School district is planning a large tax & $pending increase referendum this fall
In Madison, where the possibility of school choice arrived 23 years after Milwaukee, there are six private schools in the choice program that Smith calls “vouchers,” and those six schools enrolled 655 choice students in the school year just ended. The Madison Metropolitan School District, in comparison, has about 25,000 students.
Perhaps Madison families will see some of the growth common elsewhere. Independent private schools in the city of Milwaukee educated about 29,000 children using choice grants last year, and those in Racine educated about 4,000. Nearly 19,000 kids throughout the rest of Wisconsin used choice grants.
Several more Madison schools have been cleared by state regulators to join the choice program in fall, including a second one to offer high school grades. This likely will be a blessing to Madison families looking for an alternative to a school district where, by the state’s most recent figures, only 41% of the students had been taught to read at grade level or better. By contrast, Madison’s largest private school in the choice program, Abundant Life Christian School, got 73% of its students to grade level or better in reading.
Why Senator Smith regards this as “failing” is baffling.
When families take their children to Abundant Life or other independent options, $10,237 of state aid will follow each one, or $12,731 if they’re high schoolers — the entirety of taxpayers’ outlay.
By contrast, in the most recent state figures, Madison Metropolitan School District spent a total of $17,944 per child in taxpayer money.
What’s more, the district may ask voters in November for another $600 million in spending, overriding the taxpayer-protecting limits set in law. The proposal would add $1,378 to the property taxes of a typical Madison home. The district says its budget is in dire straits because it used temporary pandemic aid for permanent expenses. It could have to cut its $589 million budget by about $2 million, or 0.4%.
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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)
Enrollment notes.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The recent news that Milwaukee Public Schools failed to file a required financial report to the state Department of Public Instruction, that its past reports were missing data or inaccurate, and that it might have to payback millions in funds to the state is just another proof point underscoring the need for substantial governance reform. This lays open two serious deficiencies with the MPS board.
First, is the lack of transparency and outright deceit on the part of the board. Do we really believe all this was “discovered” after the district led a push for $252 million in new property taxes? Do we really believe that no one on the board was aware of what was going on? For an elected body to misrepresent and hide the true situation at MPS immediately preceding the spring ballot initiative is outrageous and unacceptable. The board operates in star-chamber proceedings with absolutely no oversight. It no longer holds the public’s trust.
Second, the latest revelation underscores the incompetence of the board. Why weren’t they asking the tough questions? Why weren’t they seeking information as to the delay? Were they so oblivious to good governance that they didn’t even think to ask for this kind of data? No well-governed organization should ever find itself in the situation the MPS board is in right now. Moreover, this incompetence extends to the performance of the school system itself.
As a city, our K-12 educational performance is near dead last, well below the national averages (based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress) in both reading and math. Think about it, we are below virtually every other major city in America. Worse, only 15.9%, and 9.9% of MPS students are on grade level on the state assessment in reading and math, respectively.
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Meanwhile, Madison!
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)
Enrollment notes.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
once you’re auto-graduated from one of the area’s failed schools. But if you’re a Marquette-educated city planner who grew up in Whitefish Bay and now has a place, a goldendoodle, and a job in the Third Ward, Milwaukee is everything a man could ever want. Ride the white-collar novelty streetcar that cost tens of millions to build and bask in how good it is to be anywhere that isn’t steeped in crime-and-grift-maintained poverty.
It just so happens that those moaning about Trump’s assessment of Milwaukee are the latter. Everyone else is fighting for their lives.
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If @MilwaukeeMPS accounting is this bad, can the initial figures it presented when it first pushed for the $252M referendum even be trusted? @WISN12News
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Meanwhile:
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)
Enrollment notes.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
An unreported story is that the infamous MPS Referendum results in $48M in WI Taxpayer money being redirected from non-MPS districts to MPS. Here are some of the revenue reductions these districts will realize: Appleton$1.6M, Madison $2.3M, Racine $2M, @ElmbrookSchools $673k,
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Much more on the “infamous 2024 Milwaukee K-12 tax & spending increase referendum”, here.
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Legislature creates the OSPP to help improve schools in a school district rated as “failing” on state report cards (at the time, MPS)
☑️ DPI then changes report card system so that MPS is no longer listed as “failing”
☑️ County Executive refuses to appoint anyone to run OSPP
If there are fewer teaching candidates, it’s not showing up here.
(Madison) Teachers also delivered a petition with 2,000 signatures to the board that calls for increased staff allocations and smaller class sizes. They presented the signatures on pieces of paper representing each school, receiving applause and cheers from the teachers filling the seats and aisles of the building’s auditorium.
In June, the School Board also will decide whether to add referendum questions to the November ballot to help remedy its budget hole. If the district moves forward with referendums and voters approve the measures, local property taxes will increase beyond the levy limits set by the state.
In 2023, MTI and employees agreed to an 8% wage increase. The district initially offered 3.5%. The district gave employees a 3% base wage increase in 2022. Actual raises vary depending on level of education and years of experience.
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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 $pending.
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The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Salaries for new roles are stagnating – and in some cases, falling. Some employers may be looking to cut costs, but the lack of wage growth may be a matter of post-pandemic correction.
The mass US layoffs of the past few years are continuing. In 2024 alone, thousands of workers across many sectors, including media and technology, have lost their jobs and are on the hunt for new ones. But some are finding an unwelcome surprise as they scan listings for open roles. A salary bump is all but impossible; in many cases, wages seem lower than their previous pay – even for the same jobs.
They aren’t imagining things. A 2023 report on pay trends from ZipRecruiter showed 48% of 2,000 US companies surveyed lowered pay for certain roles.
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The taxpayer funded Madison School District and City of Madison are planning substantial tax & $pending increase referendums.
As MPS (Milwaukee Public Schools) asks taxpayers for $252 million in April, I asked Supt. Keith Posley about national testing data (NAEP) that show Milwaukee 4th graders have been scoring worse than the average big city district for more than a decade.
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and:
For reference, 10 points is about the equivalent for one year’s worth of learning. In 2022, Milwaukee was 20 points lower than the average big city district in 4th grade reading and math results. The gap has worsened over the last decade:
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Plus:
When the media reports that spending in MPS has “fallen far behind inflation,” they are cherry-picking one year of data to make the claim: pre-Great Recession. Real $ over time has largely kept up with inflation, and districts saved billions with Act 10.
More:
This is an interesting outtake from @CBS58’s Milwaukee Public Schools referendum story!
In contrast, here is Miami’s former superintendent in 2015, post-recession, in the midst of making Miami America’s best big district, closing gaps, spending $7,500 less per child than MPS.
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
An April review from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative law firm and think tank, argued that Wisconsin’s system of partially funding technical colleges through the levy contributes to the idea of taxation without representation because district board members are not elected. Districts do go to the voters to approve referendums to exceed their revenue limits.
But the board also took a big leap of faith, one that will likely require the help of the Madison community, once again, with another operating referendum in fall 2024. It could be the third straight presidential election in which the Madison Metropolitan School District asks voters for more spending authority above state limits, funded by local property tax increases.
The 2023-24 operating deficit is $15 million, but that includes some ongoing costs covered by one-time COVID-19 relief funding that expires at the end of the year. Without that money, there’s a $27 million hole to dig out from to build the 2024-25 budget.
The alternatives to a referendum aren’t pretty. During a budget discussion Monday night at the board’s Operations Work Group meeting, outgoing Chief Financial Officer Ross MacPherson estimated that to balance the budget a year from now would require cutting more than 300 positions.
“It’s going to be north of 300 positions if we only go that way,” he said. “Otherwise we really have to look at cost reductions around entire programming or, heaven forbid, we look at our schools if we need to restructure somehow.”
Madison’s taxpayer supported budget information.
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The political action committee of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, the union for MPS staff, first gave about $11,000 directly to candidates’ campaigns in January: $5,000 to Zombor, and nearly $1,500 each to Hart, Herndon, O’Halloran and Siemsen.
In March, the group spent another $41,422 on postcards and digital ads for Zombor, $22,000 for Herndon, $12,000 for Hart, $1,100 for Siemsen and $1,100 for O’Halloran.
The MTEA’s PAC is funded by MPS staff who choose to pay into it on top of their membership dues. That includes over 5,000 teachers and other staff members.
Ben Ward, MTEA executive director, said he thought the school board has been moving the district in a positive direction since the 2019 elections, when union-backed candidates swept their races. MTEA has advocated for board decisions since then to pursue a referendum for arts and music funding, increase minimum wages in the district and implement experience-based raises, Ward said.
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
When you see “school district could shut it’s doors” headlines, be sure to google per pupil funding levels. You won’t learn this from the article. Then google the local budgets of your high achieving choice school. https://t.co/gATUrXRFVU pic.twitter.com/snXeikpsGK
— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) February 19, 2023
The article.
Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at least $23,000 per student.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
It’s been a challenging few years for K-12 education, both locally and nationally. Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly is nonetheless “optimistic” about what’s ahead for the field.
“I think people are coming together, realizing that if we want to improve the lives of all Wisconsinites and especially the kids who are going to be the future leaders of the state, we need to all come together to solve these problems,” Underly said, as she reflected on 2022. “I see that reflected in a budget, I see it reflected in the referendums that our communities have passed, I see it in the policies that our stakeholders are proposing.
“I’m really, really optimistic about it in the long run.”
Notes and links on Jill Underly.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Those totals don’t include the Madison Metropolitan School District or Milwaukee Public Schools, both of which passed operational referendums in 2020 that continue to allow them to surpass the revenue limit. Both districts are among those that are increasing their total tax levies and contributing to the statewide rise, WPF notes.
“Property tax levies increased 3.7% on December tax bills in those districts that have adopted referenda since 2020 while they fell 1.3% in districts that have not,” the report states.
State leaders are expected to begin discussing the next biennial budget early next year. Regardless of what they do with the revenue limit, there are two factors to watch for their impact on property taxes toward K-12 schools.
The first is the soon-to-sunset federal COVID-19 relief funding that has boosted school budgets over the past two years. Most funds must be spent by September 2024, which could leave holes in some district budgets if they’ve used the influx of one-time money on operational costs.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The La Crosse School District has the largest referendum in the state this fall, asking voters to approve nearly $195 million to consolidate its two high schools due to declining enrollment and aging facilities.
Some Oregon residents who oppose the referendum doubt it would have a big impact. Some question whether they’ve been given full and accurate information.
“Many village of Oregon residents can’t afford this referendum, especially with all other current inflationary pressures,” Joshua King said. “But they should at least have the complete picture of the tax burden about to hit them so they can make the best decision.”
King said the referendum has become a “complex and very emotionally charged topic.”
“I’m against it,” Evy Collins said. “I’m not against people having better wages. I worked all my life, most of it as a single mother after (my) husband died of cancer. I know struggles. I always had to make do with what I had, and I still do today as a retired person. Why should our property taxes continue to go up and the propaganda that it’s for ‘the kids’ make me go for it? It’s not for the kids or better education. I’m voting no.”
The November referendums are appearing on the ballot alongside some higher turnout elections, including the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races.
It’s not clear, though, how higher turnouts affect referendums. In the last decade, referendums have passed at slightly higher rates in even-numbered years when bigger elections are held, compared to odd-numbered years, Brown said. But he emphasized that other factors could be at play.
The questions come at the same time districts have received an influx of one-time money through COVID-19 relief funding. District officials have stressed, however, that because the funding isn’t ongoing, it cannot responsibly be used to pay for ongoing operating expenses without creating a fiscal cliff in future years.
The state Legislature, meanwhile, pointed to that funding in denying an increase in the revenue limit in the current biennial budget.
While the Madison Metropolitan School District is not among those asking voters for funds this fall, it is in the midst of implementing the successful capital and operating referendums from 2020. Officials have repeatedly described the current budget as a difficult one, with School Board member Savion Castro suggesting the district may need to go back for another referendum in the near future to continue funding its most important initiatives.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
When I see that we are headed into a significant growth slowdown, even a recession, and bank credit is still growing. The classic definition of a banker used to be that he lends you an umbrella but would take it away at the first sight of rain. Not this time. Banks keep lending, they even reduce their provisions for bad debt. The CFO of Commerzbank was asked about this fact in July, and she said that the government would not allow large debtors to fail. That, to me, was a transformational statement. If you are a banker who believes in private sector credit risk, you stop lending when the economy is headed into a recession. But if you are a banker who believes in government guarantees, you keep lending. This is happening today. Banks keep lending, and nominal GDP will keep growing. That’s why, in nominal terms, we won’t see an economic contraction.
Arthur Burns, who was the Fed chairman during the Seventies, explained in a speech in 1979 why he lost control of inflation. There was an elected government, he said, elected to fight a war in Vietnam, elected to reduce inequality through Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs. Burns said it wasn’t his job to stop the war or the Great Society programs. These were political choices.
You get stagflation after years of badly misallocated capital, which tends to happen when the government interferes for too long in the allocation of capital. When the UK government did this in the 1950s and 60s, they allocated a lot of capital into coal mining, automobile production and the Concorde. It turned out that the UK didn’t have a future in any of those industries, so it was wasted and we ended up with high unemployment.
Board member Savion Castro said, “I think we’re going to have to look at another referendum in the coming year or two, given our fiscal situation.” (Taxpayer supported political activity)
Officials outlined a total of $28 million in additional costs to the School Board Monday night. Of that, $11 million is related to high inflation, $9 million is for additional mechanical and electrical work and $8 million for additional environmental projects.
MMSD chief financial officer Ross MacPherson said those costs are likely to be split over the next three years as the referendum construction projects play out. MacPherson suggested a mix of funds could help cover the additional costs, including the future closure of a tax incremental financing district.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
In one of the most stunning examples of relief fund abuse, the Whitewater, Wis., school board voted to allocate 80 percent of its $2 million Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) grant toward the construction of synthetic turf fields for football, baseball, and softball. When asked why the funds should be used for athletic fields instead of educational projects, Whitewater High School Athletic Director Justin Crandall told the school board that he did not envision the district as one “that would go to a referendum for turf fields.” Rather than put Crandall’s theory to the test, the school board decided instead to bill the American people for the projects.
In South Texas, the McAllen Independent School District Board of Trustees allotted $4 million in ESSER relief funds to facilitate the expansion of the city-owned Quinta Mazatlan nature center. Although the district cited the “rare opportunity” provided by “an authentic science lab right here in our backyard,” the proposal received heavy criticism from district parents. One parent, Tory Guerra, rightfully questioned how the sanctuary was related to student recovery. Because the project won’t be completed until 2024, she observed, “half the kids won’t even get to reap the benefit” of the nature center.
In Douglas County, Colo., the school board spent $800,000 on Edgenuity, an online learning platform, in a no-bid “emergency” procurement. Rather than use local teachers, the platform utilized pre-recorded classes for students to watch. After a period of delays that was “nothing short of chaos,” students were finally able to begin using the online platform at the end of August. Teachers and students were highly critical of the program. One student’s grandmother reported that her grandchild had four different teachers in five days, while another parent described it as “a bait-and-switch.” The district stopped using Edgenuity several weeks into the school year but did not receive a refund.
At face value, these numbers are absurd. Even more infuriating is the fact that state education agencies and school boards are sitting on what they have already been allocated. While some of the early stimulus rounds were spent on PPE and cleaning supplies, the money from the American Rescue Plan is still just sitting there — and it’s billions of dollars. Many districts plan on waiting until as late as 2028 to dip into these funds.
But this isn’t anything new. Since 1960, public education spending per student has increased by 280%, yet test scores have only increased by modest margins at best. It’s become abundantly clear that throwing seemingly endless amounts of money at public schools does nothing for those who the institution is designed to serve: students.
Families are tired of the politics, the drama, and the wasted investments. Their anger is righteous and justified. But if we want these feelings to translate into meaningful policy, the country must get behind education savings accounts(ESAs).
Related: Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district plans an 8.9% (!) property tax increase during the 2021-2022 budget, after receiving $70M (!) in redistributed federal taxpayer and borrowed funds.
At the same time, Stein noted that the infusion of $2.3 billion could ease some of that pressure on school districts to pursue tax increases.
Madison recently received $70M ! in additional redistributed taxpayer funds.. along with substantial recent tax and spending increase referendums.
Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts. This, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
From Wall Street to the White House, expectations were high for a hiring surge in April with potentially a million Americans returning to work. Instead, the world learned Friday that just 266,000 jobs were added, a massive disappointment that raises questions about whether the recovery is on track.
President Biden’s team has vowed that its massive stimulus package will recover all the remaining jobs lost during the pandemic in about a year, but that promise won’t be kept unless there’s a big pickup in hiring soon. There are still 8.2 million jobs left to recover. At the same time, business leaders and Republicans are complaining that there is a “worker shortage,” and they largely blame the more generous unemployment payments and stimulus checks for making people less likely to take low-paying fast food and retail jobs again. Democratic economists counter that companies could raise pay if they really wanted workers back quickly.
One way to make sense of this weak jobs report is to do what Wall Street did and shrug it off as an anomaly. Stocks still rose Friday as investors saw this as a blip. They think there is just a lag in hiring and more people will return to work as they get vaccinated. And they point out oddball months have occurred before, especially with some weird quirks in the Labor Department’s seasonal adjustments.
Madison schools have substantial tax & spending increase programs underway, despite long term disastrous reading results and declining enrollment.
There were 71 referenda on the ballot around the state this spring. Voters only approved 42 of them—a 60.56% passage rate. While this number may seem relatively high, it is actually extremely low in comparison to recent years. The figure below shows the referenda passage rate over the last ten years. Spring and fall passage rates are combined for ease of understanding.
Madison Receives More Redistributed Federal Taxpayer Funds; $70,659,827 (!)
Education will get a whopping $82 billion, about $54 billion of which will go to K-12 schools though many are closed and employ fewer staff. That’s about as much as the federal government spends on K-12 in a normal year.
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district recently raised spending (and property taxes) substantially via fall, 2020 referendum.
The largest measures were here in Madison, where voters approved a total $350 million investment in the district. That includes $33 million in operating funds phased in over four years and $317 million for capital projects, including renovations to the four comprehensive high schools and a new elementary school.
Statewide, 30 of the 51 measures were to fund operational expenses, while 21 were to issue debt to borrow funds for construction and renovation projects. The total is slightly down from April, when there were 60 school ballot measures, of which 52 received approval.
Notes and links on the substantial 2020 Madison K-12 Tax & Spending increase referendum.
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
There has been a flurry of research recently claiming to find compelling causal evidence that increasing school spending would significantly improve student outcomes and avoiding cuts in spending would prevent significant harm. This research has been embraced so quickly as settled fact that over 400 researchers and advocates signed a group letter citing it while urging the federal government to provide financial support to local schools during the COVID recession. The confident conclusion that spending more is the path to improving education is so appealing that the research behind that claim has received remarkably little scrutiny.
A new study by Jessica Goldstein and Josh McGee begins to remedy this lack of skepticism by carefully attempting to replicate the most recent school finance study co-authored by Kirabo Jackson with Cora Wigger and Heyu Xiong, which is forthcoming in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and has appeared in Education Next. Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong examine the effect of K-12 spending cuts during the Great Recession by comparing the downturn in states where much of the funding comes from state revenue to states where more funding comes from local sources. The idea is that state revenue is more sensitive to a recession, and so cuts would be more severe in states that were more reliant on state sources, even when the effects of the recession on the state’s economy were the same. Using this technique, they conclude that K-12 spending cuts hurt student outcomes.
Goldstein and McGee are able to reconstruct what Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong report, but they find that their results are highly sensitive to the non-standard ways in which they construct their statistical model and disappear or even change direction when trivial changes are made. Goldstein and McGee also highlight some serious problems with the data used in the original study.
Madison’s substantial Fall 2020 tax & spending increase referendum notes and links.
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
2020: Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
Charles Blain, Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin:
Really? California, well known for its wealth, had the sixth highest median household income in the nation in 2019, yet has had the highest housing-cost-adjusted poverty rate among the states since data was first published in 2011.2 A net 2.4 million residents left California between 2000 and 2019, 7% of its 2000 population.
Similarly, during the same period New York lost 16% of its population to other states. Political leaders like New York’s Mayor Bill DeBlasio, who has set up a commission designed to uproot the city’s ’institutional’ racism, epitomizes the current fashion. If powerful rhetoric were an elixir, minorities in metropolitans like New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago would be doing better than their counterparts in less ‘woke’ areas. But they do far worse in terms of actual measurements of progress: income, housing affordability, and education. New York and California also exhibit among the highest levels of inequality in the country, with poor outcomes for Blacks and Hispanics. Perhaps most intriguing are the domestic migration patterns that show where they are choosing to live.
Much more on Madison’s substantial Fall 2020 tax & spending increase referendum, here.
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
Annysa Johnson, Samantha West and Alec Johnson:
Enrollment in Wisconsin public schools fell by 3% this year, the largest dip in decades, and private schools that accept taxpayer-funded vouchers saw an increase, though not as much as last year.
In all, according to new data released Thursday by the state Department of Public Instruction, public schools enrolled 818,922 full-time equivalent students in the current school year, down more than 25,000 students, based on the headcount taken in late September. Private voucher schools added 2,577 students for a total of 45,954.
Because school funding is tied to enrollment, the shifts will be costly for many districts around the state at a time when they are spending millions more on expenses related to the coronavirus pandemic. In all, nearly a third of the state’s 421 public districts will see a decline in their state aid totaling more than $23 million this year, losses that will continue because schools are funded in part on a three-year rolling average.
“There will be significant, long-term structural effects on school districts’ finances,” said Dan Rossmiller of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
K-12 Tax, Referendum and budget climate: Madison School District enrollment drops by more than 1,000 students
A substantial 2020 tax and spending increase referendum is on Madison school district voter ballots this fall.
WDPI:
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction today released information on fall student counts and school district revenue limits for the 2020-2021 school year.
Wisconsin school districts, independent charter schools, and private school parental choice programs reported overall slowdowns or declines in enrollment, particularly in 4K. Districts also reported summer school participation declined by more than half between 2019 and 2020. The data published is unaudited and is based off of enrollment counts performed on Sept. 18, 2020, the third Friday of September, and reported to the DPI.
The student count data includes unduplicated(1) headcounts and membership FTE (full-time equivalent). Headcount is the number of students enrolled for instruction in a given school or district on the count date. Membership is a full-time equivalent value used for school finance purposes, where students in preschool special education, 4K, and part-time kindergarten are counted as less than 1.0 FTE. Membership for school districts reflects residency, not enrollment; a student in the open enrollment program is included in the headcount for the district they attend, but the membership for the district where they reside. District membership also includes an addition of summer school FTE(2).
Madison’s enrollment drops by more than 1000 students.
Beth LeBlanc, Craig Mauger and Melissa Nann Burke:
In a landmark ruling with far-reaching implications, the Michigan Supreme Court decided Friday that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer violated her constitutional authority by continuing to issue orders to combat COVID-19 without the approval of state lawmakers.
The state’s high court ruled 4-3 that a state law allowing the governor to declare emergencies and keep them in place without legislative input — the 1945 Emergency Powers of the Governor Act — is unconstitutional.
The court was unanimous in ruling that a separate law — the 1976 Emergency Management Act — did not give Whitmer the power, after April 30, to issue or renew any executive orders related to the COVID-19 pandemic after 28 days without Legislative approval.
The ruling, which was requested by a federal judge earlier this year, serves as advice to the federal court and indicates how the court would rule on a suit challenging Whitmer’s emergency powers.
K-12 Tax, referendum and spending climate: Garver risked thousands of dollars in fines if it continued large outdoor music gatherings
Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled
Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees). Run for office. Spring 2021 elections: Dane county executive.
which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.
While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state.
The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.
The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.
“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”
Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.
All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.
Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Assembly against private school forced closure.
Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
“After reviewing any and all options that appeared feasible in the Rimrock Road area for an elementary size suitable to hold at least 400 elementary students, parking and playground space suitable for a neighborhood school, it became apparent that our first and best option was to work with the school district’s current partner, Rooted, to purchase their land and building located at 501 East Badger Road,” staff wrote in a memo to the board.
Voters will have two MMSD referendums on their Nov. 3 ballots. One, which includes the money for the elementary school, is a $317 million question that would also fund renovations to the four comprehensive high schools and consolidate Capital High School into a single location.
2020 Referendum: Commentary on adding another physical Madison School amidst flat/declining enrollment..
2020 tax and spending increase referendum notes and links.
A presenter [org chart] further mentioned that Madison spends about $1 per square foot in annual budget maintenance while Milwaukee is about $2. – October 2019 presentation. Milwaukee taxpayers plan to spend $1.2B for 75,234 students, or $15,950 per student, about 16% less than Madison.
Taxpayers have long supported the Madison School District’s far above average spending, while tolerating our long term, disastrous reading results.
The concentration of market power in a handful of companies lies behind several disturbing trends in the U.S. economy, like the deepening of inequality and financial instability, two Federal Reserve Board economists say in a new paper.
Isabel Cairo and Jae Sim identify a decline in competition, with large firms controlling more of their markets, as a common cause in a series of important shifts over the last four decades.
Those include a fall in labor share, or the chunk of output that goes to workers, even as corporate profits increased; and a surge in wealth and income inequality, as the net worth of the top 5% of households almost tripled between 1983 and 2016. This fueled financial risks and higher leverage, the economists say, as poorer households borrowed to make ends meet while richer ones shoveled their wealth into bonds — feeding the demand for debt instruments.
“The rise of market power of the firms may have been the driving force” in all of these trends, Cairo and Sim write in the paper. Published this month by the non-partisan Fed Board staff, which doesn’t reflect the views of governors, it’s the latest in a series examining the risks that weaker competition poses to a market economy.
That issue is increasingly prominent on the agenda of both America’s main political parties. Democrats said in a recent summary of policy priorities that they’re “concerned about the increase in mega-mergers and corporate concentration across a wide range of industries.” The Department of Justice under President Donald Trump is probing large technology platforms.
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 system has long resisted student and parent choice.
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
The district and the union have been discussing work expectations for this fall, sparring over the prospect of some instructors providing in-person services. This marks the third straight summer when bargaining talks have cast doubt over the first day of school.
Robinson denied that the idea of a delayed start was being explored because not enough teachers were trained in the spring and summer.
“There is no tie in to some sort of need to make up for deficiencies over the summer,” he wrote.
The district has offered some opportunities to brush up on skills since the closures. Since spring, over 1,400 educators took a course on Schoology, the district’s learning management system, according to a fall “reopening” plan the district submitted to the state. A few hundred more took different courses on topics like recording videos for the internet and digital citizenship. The union represents about 6,000 SPS employees.
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
There is no better time to make a change than right now, when public education is in chaos.
What’s that popping sound? Could it be a million figurative lightbulbs clicking on above public-school parents’ heads?
The vast majority of American families send their children to public schools. Only 11 percent of children attend private schools, and fewer than 5 percent are homeschooled. And as one school board after another gives the no go signal for the coming school year, families are being thrown into crisis. And yet, the great American entrepreneurial spirit is awakening as parents are forced to rethink education for their children. And that is to the benefit of children and the nation.
Even before the pandemic, American families had concerns about the quality of education their children were receiving from our public schools. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called the latest national assessment “devastating.” Two-thirds of American students can’t read at grade level, and reading scores have worsened in 31 states.
The teaching of history has given way to the teaching of social studies, which is now morphing into lessons in civic action from a leftist perspective. A recent study of curriculum in American public schools found that the majority of civics classes teach students how to protest in favor of progressive political causes. Students are not free to disagree.
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
More than twice as many Wisconsin families as a year ago have told the state they plan to homeschool for the 2020-21 school year.
According to data from the state Department of Public Instruction, 1,661 families filed forms to homeschool between July 1 and Aug. 6, up from 727 during the same period a year ago and 599 two years ago. The number of students in those families is up to 2,792 from 1,279 last year and 1,088 two years ago.
The same is true locally, as 122 Dane County families with 202 students filed forms in that period, up from 55 and 80 last year.
Michelle Yoo, the administrator of the Madison Area Homeschoolers Facebook page, said she’s seen evidence of the uptick in interest.
“When Madison announced they were doing online school, I think I had about 100 requests to join in about a two-week period,” Yoo said. “I can’t tell you what I used to get, but it was nowhere near 100.”
With those students go funding, as district revenue limits and state aid both depend on enrollment. The Madison Metropolitan School District discouraged parents from leaving to homeschool or attend a private school in its Aug. 7 family newsletter, citing that funding loss.
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
Jane Belmore retired in 2005 after nearly three decades as a Madison teacher and principal. That wasn’t the end of her career with the Madison Metropolitan School District: She’s since been asked twice to lead when the district found itself between superintendents. Both turned out to be pivotal moments for the district.
Cap Times K-12 education reporter Scott Girard got an exclusive interview with Belmore as she was wrapping up her most recent year as interim superintendent. Today on the podcast, he talks about the expected and unexpected challenges this year brought, and why Belmore was willing to take them
Teachers have access to materials in their classrooms that are not available at home,” – despite million$ spent on Infinite Campus
Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
Though Lee struggled with her online classes last semester, Garcia plans to keep her home again this fall. Lee has asthma, as does her nineteen-year-old sister, who contracted COVID-19 in June and narrowly avoided having to be admitted to the hospital as she struggled to breathe. Garcia has once again requested a hot spot from the district.
For those students whose needs are not met by the program, Rowe insists that this is just the beginning. “Those are the districts where we really need to dig deeper into the analytics and figure out who else has need,” Rowe said. “This isn’t going to be it. We won’t be done. We’ve just got to figure out how to peel back the next layer now.”
“Teachers have access to materials in their classrooms that are not available at home,” – despite million$ spent on Infinite Campus
Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
The Waunakee Community School District Board of Education voted to reverse its decision on an all-virtual start to the school year.
During a meeting Monday night [video], members of the board talked about recent coronavirus numbers and learning options that would best fit the community.
In a 4-3 vote, the board was in favor of a four-day schedule for K-4 students. The younger children will have half-days, either AM or PM, every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
During the meeting, parents expressed they were interested in having their kids attend in-person classes, especially at that young age.
“I believe that in-person schooling is in the best interest of the kids, and that’s what we need to be focused on,” one parent said.
However, some teachers expressed their concerns for students and members of the community.
“I am extremely concerned about the safety of our students, teachers and community members,” Molly Petroff, the music department chair said.
“Teachers have access to materials in their classrooms that are not available at home,” – despite million$ spent on Infinite Campus
Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
Protesters from four of Wisconsin’s largest cities gathered Monday in a National Day of Resistance caravan to demand that legislators and superintendents make the fall 2020 academic semester completely virtual.
Educator unions, community organizations and advocates from Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee and Racine traveled to the Capitol, the state Department of Public Instruction and the state Department of Health Services.
“We have districts marching teachers and students into an unsafe position in which teachers and students are likely to contract COVID,” said Angelina Cruz, president of Racine Educators United. “It is unsafe, because our schools are not fully funded in a way that can address all of the safety concerns we have.”
The caravan, which started in Kenosha, traveled through Racine and Milwaukee before arriving in Madison about 1 p.m. Teacher unions from Beaver Dam, Cudahy, Greendale, Middleton, Oak Creek, South Milwaukee and St. Francis also joined the effort to push for virtual school in the fall.
Similar marches and caravans calling for safe schools took place in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
Organizers of the Wisconsin caravan wrote a letter July 20 to Gov. Tony Evers, Superintendent of Public Instruction Carolyn Stanford Taylor and Secretary of Health Services Andrea Palm, detailing their dissatisfaction with the state’s resources and social distancing practices in schools.
The growing COVID-19 outbreak has some teachers fearing for their lives, organizers said.
A Milwaukee attorney is offering free wills to teachers returning to classrooms in the fall, noted Tanya Kitts-Lewinski, president of the Kenosha Education Association and co-organizer of the protests. “Educators are afraid, to say the least,” she said.
“Teachers have access to materials in their classrooms that are not available at home,” – despite million$ spent on Infinite Campus
Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
When schools shut down this spring, Congress sent them $31 billion — nearly half its annual schools outlay — for sanitation and online learning, even though students weren’t in schools to theoretically contaminate them and online learning barely happened for millions of children. The vast majority of this money has not even reached schools yet.
Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal reportsthat education special interests are demanding, through their Democrat representatives, nearly half a trillion in additional deficit spending for the fall without requiring schools to operate. Yes, you read that right: Democrats want nearly $430 billion extra to put kids in the equivalent of Khan Academy online math lessons. Did I mention that Khan Academy is free? And that the ask to duplicate it is 600 percent more than annualfederal spending on K-12?
“There is absolutely no way that federal funds included in the next COVID relief package…will reach schools in time to open in August and September,” notes Inez Feltscher. “Due to bureaucratic inertia and the requisite multiple rounds of paperwork, new federal COVID-response funds are unlikely to reach schools before 2021.”
Even though schools haven’t spent a fraction of their existing coronavirus loot, Republicans are also on board with larding on more. They merely want to inflate federal K-12 spending by 150 percent, $105 billion. In case you were concerned that Congress isn’t spending the next generation’s money fast enough while neglecting to ensure schools prepare the nation’s young to gratefully contribute to their country, WSJ reports neither side will even require schools to operate to have their federal funds increased by several magnitudes:
Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
University life is going to look very different this fall, and as faculty scramble to work social distancing into their “campus culture,” students will be left paying the price for a half-baked education.
With exceptions for science labs, fine arts studios and a few small tutorials — Ontario’s university courses will run online this fall, either asynchronously through pre-recorded lectures and Powerpoints or through the video conferencing app Zoom. And tuition fees won’t be going down a cent.
The schools claim that, despite these changes in delivery, they will still provide “exceptional education and engaging experiences” and the calibre of their courses will remain the same. But who are they kidding?
Costs continue to grow for local, state and federal taxpayers in the K-12 space, as well:
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
Kati Pohjanpalo and Hanna Hoikkala:
Scientists behind a Nordic study have found that keeping primary schools open during the coronavirus pandemic may not have had much bearing on contagion rates.
There was no measurable difference in the number of coronavirus cases among children in Sweden, where schools were left open, compared with neighboring Finland, where schools were shut, according to the findings.
Commentary on 2020 K-12 Governance and opening this fall:
Unfortunately, the Madison School District announced Friday it will offer online classes only this fall — despite six or seven weeks to go before the fall semester begins. By then, a lot could change with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Dane County recently and wisely implemented a mask requirementfor inside buildings that aren’t people’s homes. That should help ease the spread of COVID-19, making it safer for in-person classes.
The AAP recently stressed that “the preponderance of evidence indicates that children and adolescents are less likely to be symptomatic and less likely to have severe disease resulting” from COVID-19. They also appear less likely to contract and spread the infection.
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
Breaking away from Madison’s recent decision to remove police officers from its schools, the Middleton-Cross Plains School Board on Monday voted to extend its contract for school resource officers.
Citing the need for relationship building between officers and students and protection from school shootings, the board voted unanimously to re-approve the contract with the Middleton Police Department. But board members said the district would conduct a “comprehensive evaluation” of the program.
The board had already approved on June 22 contracts with Middleton and the village of Cross Plains to continue stationing officers at Middleton High School and Kromrey and Glacier Creek middle schools. Middleton officers have been at the high school and Kromrey for some 30 and 20 years, respectively.
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides. (
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
Unfortunately, the Madison School District announced Friday it will offer online classes only this fall — despite six or seven weeks to go before the fall semester begins. By then, a lot could change with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Dane County recently and wisely implemented a mask requirementfor inside buildings that aren’t people’s homes. That should help ease the spread of COVID-19, making it safer for in-person classes.
The AAP recently stressed that “the preponderance of evidence indicates that children and adolescents are less likely to be symptomatic and less likely to have severe disease resulting” from COVID-19. They also appear less likely to contract and spread the infection.
The Madison teachers union last week demanded online classes only until Dane County goes at least 14 straight days without new COVID-19 cases. That might be best for older teachers with underlying health conditions making them more susceptible to the pandemic. But it’s definitely not best for our children. The district should reject such a rigid standard that fails to consider the needs of our broader community.
Lower-income students, who are disproportionately of color, are less likely to succeed with online schooling if they have fewer resources at home — and if their parents can’t work remotely because of front-line jobs.
The Madison School Board should have waited to see how COVID-19 plays out this summer. That’s what other school districts, such as Chicago, are doing. It’s possible the plan that Madison schools outlined to parents recently could have worked in September. That called for half of students to attend two days of in-person classes each week, with the other half of students attending two different days.
Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:
Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.
Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides. (
(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)
MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]
Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
Carlos Avenancio-Leo ́n and Troup Howard:
We use panel data covering 118 million homes in the United States, merged with geolocation detail for 75,000 taxing entities, to document a nationwide “assessment gap” which leads local governments to place a disproportionate fiscal burden on racial and ethnic minorities. We show that holding jurisdictions and property tax rates fixed, black and Hispanic residents nonetheless face a 10–13% higher tax burden for the same bundle of public services. This assessment gap arises through two channels. First, property assessments are less sensitive to neighborhood attributes than market prices are. This generates racially correlated spatial variation in tax burden within jurisdiction. Second, appeals behavior and appeals outcomes differ by race. This results in higher assessment growth rates for minority residents. We propose an alternate approach for constructing assessments based on small-geography home price indexes, and show that this reduces inequality by at least 55–70%.
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district has for decades raised property taxes via annual increases and referendums.
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21
2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
4. Total expenditures per pupil: +19.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21
5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 2020
Andrew Van Dam: Unfair property assessments lead to widespread overtaxation of black Americans’ homes: African Americans have long said they bear a disproportionate burden for taxes that support local police, schools and parks, but nationwide measures of this type of systemic racism are hard to come by.
To expose the structural and historical factors behind these discriminatory property tax assessments, the economists analyzed more than a decade of tax assessment and sales data for 118 million homes throughout the country.
In almost every state, property tax assessments were higher in areas with more black and Hispanic residents. In city after city, the authors show it is not just differences in the buildings or land but also the racial composition of the neighborhood that matters. The gap between white families and minority households remains large — 10 percent — when you combine data for Hispanic and black families.
More than a third of Wisconsin businesses say they will be forced to shut down permanently if the state’s economic shutdown — implemented to slow the spread of COVID-19 — persists for more than three months, according to a new survey.
The results come as Gov. Tony Evers’ Safer at Home order finds itself before the Wisconsin Supreme Court after the Republican-controlled state Legislature filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to suspend the order. The order was issued to maintain public safety amidst the pandemic, but also has resulted in skyrocketing unemployment statewide.
The voluntary survey, which was conducted by the Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP) and the eight other regional organizations in the state along with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. and UW-Oshkosh, yielded results from only about 1.3% of businesses in the state, but officials say more respondents are expected in May.
Officials with the survey say it is meant to help the state, regional economic development organizations and chambers of commerce identify businesses most in need of financial aid in order to stay in operation.
Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.
“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.
Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.
In this sense, Kansas City, Missouri is no different than most communities in the United States and Canada. In the last 70 years, the physical size of Kansas City has quadrupled while the population has remained relatively stable. (Put another way, every resident of Kansas City is on the hook for maintaining four times as much of the city as his or her predecessors.) In Kansas City, there are 6,500 linear miles of lanes just in the city street system—so not including county, state and federal roadways. This is the equivalent of driving from New York to San Francisco and back, with a bonus trip to Portland, Maine. According to the Kansas City public works department, to maintain and replace existing roads it needs ten times more money each year than it can ask for.
While these stats are specific to Kansas City, Missouri, the story is familiar to anyone who has come to recognize the effects of the suburban development pattern: we’ve built cities we can’t afford.
Yet there are two assets that set Kansas City apart from many other communities. One is that the city has “great bones.” As Dennis Strait, managing principle of Gould Evans Kansas City, describes in the video above, Kansas City grew quickly from a village to a city following many of the best lessons humans have gleaned from 5,000 years of city-building. The positive effects of this ancient wisdom can still be felt today, and Kansas City’s most productive neighborhoods are often its oldest. The negative effects of bad policies—such as racist redlining—can still be felt too, Strait says.
Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.
“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.
Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.
2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?
Recreating the Conditions for Autocracy
Throughout history, crises – like the Covid-19 pandemic – have been ideal opportunities for expanding centralized control of life, ostensibly for our own good. We are already seeing the potential rise of a new police state and in some countries, such as France, a rising incidence of informers, conspiracy theories, and even vigilantism.
Propaganda, relentless and clever, is critical for creating any kind of police state. The green movement and supporters of unlimited authoritarian steps to address the pandemic can now rely on the mainstream media’s often hysterical and innumerate reporting to provide political leaders with a rationale for uber-control.
Expertise and Oligarchy
A scientifically-based crisis offers an ideal terroir for the promotion of oligarchy. The current approach to reducing climate-altering emissions offers enormous opportunities not only for expanded government but also for Wall Street and the large tech firms to profiteer on our energy “transition.” This illustrates sociologist Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy,” articulated in the early 20th century, that the more complex the issue, the greater the need for elite-driven solutions.
Like the pandemic, climate change is an extraordinarily complex issue that has been promoted by consistent exaggeration and predictions of catastrophe. Alarmed by the threat of imminent doom from a changing climate, some progressive pundits openly favor replacing democracy with a global “technocracy” that would preempt popular control and allow experts to implement policies of their own design.
The problem here lies with the notion of an “expert” class, which likes to see itself as “scientific” and unencumbered by prejudice. But having a PhD does not suppress the human desire for unbound power and influence. As the “experts” grow in power, as James Burnham noted, they see themselves as responsible not to the public, but to others in their peer group from whom they seek approval and support.
In this and other crises, we need to remind ourselves that enforced orthodoxy among “experts” – which we often seek – can prove very dangerous. After all, we have had so many miscalls from our cognitive betters on everything from “peak oil” and dietary advice to policy toward Syria and the Soviet Union. Facing pressure from the virus’s spread, there is already danger of embracing the same kind of centralized groupthink practiced so disastrously in China.
Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.
“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.
Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.
2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?
My recent email to the Madison School Board and District Chief Financial Officer:
I hope that you, your families and colleagues are well.
I write to see if anyone has modeled the implications of a property tax base drop on the proposed 2020 referendum? Madison’s property tax base has increased substantially over the past decade, somewhat due to a significant federal taxpayer ($38B+) electronic medical record backdoor subsidy.
How might a construction slow down and declining property values due to a recession/deep downturn affect the proposed tax & spending increases?
I further wondered if the looming substantial federal funds might be applied to replace part or all of the planned property tax based referendum?
Finally, I was part of the group that reviewed Infinite Campus (and other similar systems) years ago. Some time ago, the District completed a teacher, staff and parent usage study. Has that been updated? Please forward the % of teachers who use IC daily, weekly and monthly along with the % of parents, staff and students for similar time frames.
Best wishes,
Jim
“When enough people who can afford to leave New York State are gone, who will be left to pay for the infrastructure, health care, schools and other necessities?” said Sen. Tedisco. “This is a bi-partisan effort to shine the light on this problem that’s causing people to leave our Upstate communities and to find out why the Empire State is fast becoming the ‘Empty State’ so we can change the agenda to keep them here,” he said.
Roundtable discussions with small businesses, workforce development, health care, education, economic growth and development, manufacturing and technology representatives will be held once data from the questionnaires have been collected.
According to U.S. Census information, N.Y.’s population has steadily decreased over the past 4 years. The Empire Center said they estimate approximately 1.4 million residents have moved out of N.Y. and gone to other states.
Let’s Compare: Middleton and Madison Property Taxes
2019: Madison increases property taxes by 7.2%, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results
In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.
Meanwhile, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.
The nearby table borrowed from our friends at Cornerstone Macro captures the magnitude of the tax increases on labor and investment income that Democratic presidential candidates are proposing. The top marginal federal tax rate on labor is currently about 40% including the Medicare tax.
Eliminating the ceiling for the payroll tax would increase that to above 50% including both the individual and employer shares of the increase. Including both is right economically because it captures the full cost of hiring an additional worker. The much higher top marginal rate for Mr. Sanders in the table is for his Medicare for All tax.
And that’s before the candidates’ proposed income-tax hikes. It’s also before state and local taxes, which in some states could bring the marginal rate north of 60%.
And that’s before the Democratic tax increases on investment income, specifically capital gains. All of the leading candidates want to tax capital gains at the same rate as regular income or higher, which hasn’t been the law since the top individual tax rate on income was 28% after the 1986 Reagan tax reform. Higher taxes on capital reduce investment, which means slower productivity growth and ultimately slower wage growth.
Meanwhile, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.
schoolinfosystem.org