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Jay Matthews: After a one-hour bus trip, including one transfer, they reached the private Nannie Helen Burroughs School in Northeast Washington, which the children began attending in the fall under the D.C. school voucher program. Then their mother took a 45-minute bus trip to her job as a store clerk in Pentagon City. In the […]
Will Flanders and Kyle Koenen Like any budget that is a result of compromise in divided government, there are positive and negative aspects. But one definite positive to come from this year’s budget agreement is the continued closing of the spending gap between private, charter, and traditional public schools. Without getting too deep into the weeds, […]
Rich Kremer: According to the governor’s office, new spending under the state budget deal will include: Earmark Transparency Report. ——- Meanwhile, federal taxpayer news: New voucher provisions in the OBBB vote tonight include:Feds and states can regulate private schools who participate and the SGOs that manage them.Unlimited amount of funding for this- no $4b cap […]
Cate Zueske Property taxes most hated tax for fixed income families About 1,153 students in the Green Bay Area Public School District use a voucher to attend a private school, amounting to $12 million in state aid. That’s just 3.8% of the district’s $311 million budget—even though those students represent over 6% of enrollment. A similar story […]
Jim Bender and Patrick McIlheran A paper from an insiders’ group offers bad-faith arguments about Wisconsin school choice and the “decoupling” reform that would increase transparency A reform that wonks are calling “decoupling” — an excellent way to simplify school choice funding and eliminate choice’s impact on property taxpayers — is being opposed by the Wisconsin Association […]
Jess Huff: The board closed the schools due to declining enrollment in the East Texas district. The last few months have been spent deciding where the dislocated students, teachers and staff would go. Lufkin ISD lost about 1,600 students to other nearby school districts and independent charter schools over 15 years. The district now faces more competition […]
Kayla Huynh Lighthouse is now home to the largest number of voucher students in Madison. A majority of the school’s students identify as Hispanic or Black, and nearly all are from low-income households. The school’s website says, “We are facing unprecedented demand with 150 children on our waitlist as of fall 2024.” Lighthouse and other private voucher schools have […]
Will Flanders Yesterday, this article was published that talks extensively about Wisconsin’s private school choice programs. It is full of many misconceptions and half-truths about the programs I will address here 🧵. a The article claims that private schools deny admission to students with disabilities. I’ve yet to see a single credible claim that VOUCHER […]
The Economist: In Louisiana, where a lottery system made the impact of school choice easy to study, voucher-carrying students saw their maths test scores fall dramatically within a year and were 50% more likely to fail than those who stayed in public schools. The evidence on whether public schools improved is mixed; in some places, […]
Dave Cieslewicz: “We’re voting for Kinser as much as we’re voting against incumbent Jill Underly. Underly is underwhelming. In our view, she rigged state test scores just before the election to make her record look better. Even Gov. Tony Evers, who once held her job, disagreed with her. Then she further eroded her credibility by submitting a […]
John Nichols summary The contest pits two people with very different views against one another. Underly — who taught in rural schools before becoming an elementary school principal, school district superintendent, university academic advisor and administrator, and assistant director at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction — was elected to serve as superintendent in 2021. […]
Kayla Huynh But Wisconsin students remain behind years after the public health emergency disrupted learning, according to a national study on academic recovery this month. The average Wisconsin student is over a third of a grade level behind in math and half of a grade level behind in reading compared with pre-pandemic levels, according to results […]
Matthew Yglesias The basic story is that during the aughts, we had a bipartisan education reform consensus that was focused on improving school quality as an attainable and important driver of social and economic progress. This consensus wasn’t perfect — its problems included overpromising on addressing achievement gaps and overreliance on fiddling with teacher pay […]
Kaylah Huynh: In a Marquette Law School Poll last year, about half of Wisconsin respondents said the state’s school choice program was a “complete success” or “mostly a success.” A quarter said the program was “mostly a failure” or a “total failure.” —- Jill Underly and ongoing rigor reduction. Much more on the taxpayer funded dpi. […]
Michael Petrilli: Eli Hager and his colleagues at ProPublica have published some eyebrow-raising articles lately about Arizona’s universal education savings account (ESA) program. Most recently, Hager dug into its testing and accountability requirements—or lack thereof. When it comes to the public’s ability—and that of policymakers—to know whether Arizona’s program, or the schools and other vendors that it’s funding, are effective, there’s […]
Dairyland Sentinel: In conjunction with School Choice Week, Dairyland Sentinel provides this chronicle of this history of School Choice in Wisconsin 1990s: An Idea Becomes Reality The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) emerged in 1989 as a response to the dissatisfaction of Milwaukee families with traditional public education. Despite facing significant opposition, key figures like Governor […]
Andrew Handel: We are in the midst of an educational renaissance in America. At the time of writing, a record 12 states are empowering (or will soon be empowering) every family and every student with education freedom. These states recognize the unique needs of each student and that parents, not government bureaucrats, are best positioned […]
WILL: Since at least 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has made changes that obscure the true performance of schools, making it harder for Wisconsin families to make informed decisions about their children’s education. Today, Senator John Jagler (R-Watertown) and Representative Bob Wittke (R-Caledonia) introduced new legislation (LRB-0976) aimed at restoring transparency and accountability […]
Alec MacGillis: In both Ohio and Wisconsin, opponents, led by teachers’ unions, were challenging the programs on the grounds that they violated the separation of church and state. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld vouchers; a federal appeals court in Ohio ruled against them. The U.S. Supreme Court took up a First Amendment challenge to vouchers, […]
Joanne Jacobs: The most satisfied — 70 percent — have a child in a parochial or other religious school, and non-religious private schools and homeschools are close behind at 65 percent. About half of those with kids in public magnets, charters, online schools and microschools are satisfied. Support for school choice — especially parent-controlled Education […]
David Blaska: The canary in the coal mine has already died when a city’s schools are in decay. So we must double down on school choice, aided by vouchers that allow the state’s school district contribution to follow the student to the school of his/her family’s choice. Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government […]
Robert Schmad: We leverage a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to private school vouchers across markets as well as students to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. To do this, we estimate several choice models on data only from control markets before turning to the treatment data for model validation. This exercise […]
Nancy Moews: Many understand Wisconsin’s eventual inability to adequately support two school systems(public and private voucher schools). I would not oppose vouchers to non-religious private schools that would be required, like public schools, to accept all applicants and to provide for special needs students. Also, required reading and math scores should be made public at the end […]
Joshua Cowen: Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such […]
Alan Borsuk: “Instead of focusing on declining academic achievement in Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction is working to hide the problem,” wrote Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm and think tank. “Unfortunately, changing standards for political correctness and to avoid accountability will hurt students today, […]
Megan Henry: “Ohio is on the cutting edge of implementing universal vouchers,” Collins said. “Ohio is the Wild West when it comes to universal vouchers.” Project 2025 would then take it a step further by expanding education savings accounts — something Ohio is also trying to do. Rep. Gary Click, R-Vickery, introduced House Bill 339 […]
Joshua C. Robertson: Black voters have repeatedly expressed support for school choice, with nearly 80% endorsing policies like education savings accounts and vouchers, according to Morning Consult. Polling by RealClear Opinion Research also shows that black voters support school choice more than any other race. Clearly, our communities want our children to have the same […]
Sara R. Shaw, Robert Rauh, Jeff Schmidt, Jason Stein and Rob Henken: We can show that by looking at the overall operating funds available to the district from local, state, and federal sources. Using a metric developed for the Forum’s School DataTool, we found that MPS had operating spending in the 2022 school year of […]
Alec MacGillis: School leaders in Hardin County — with its cornfields, solar panel installations and what was once one of the largest dairy farms east of the Mississippi — are deeply worried that vouchers stand to hurt county residents. Only a single small private school is within reach, one county to the south, which means […]
Patrick Mcilheran: 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. Big ask Perhaps Madison […]
David Blaska Contrast that with a public school system here in Madison in which so-called safety monitors try to prevent police from removing pistol-packing pupils from the hallways of La Follette high school in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Read & Weep!) In the spirit of transparency, our new superintendent of schools gave an interview to […]
Andrew Atterberry Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice. They have been wildly successful, with tens of thousands more children enrolling in private or charter schools or homeschooling. Now as those programs balloon, some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment […]
By Shannon Whitworth It’s been a rough cultural transition back to schools since the lockdowns, and we are starting to see the price that will be paid for keeping our kids out of the nation’s schools for as long as we did. We are fighting to reclaim our schools for the sake of the children […]
Henry Tyson has run Milwaukee’s St. Marcus Lutheran School for the past 20 years. St. Marcus serves over 1000 predominantly low-income, African-American students on Milwaukee’s northside and is widely recognized as a leading voucher school in Milwaukee. During this presentation, Henry will describe the school’s successes, failures, challenges and opportunities. He will also explore America’s […]
Neal Morton: A Hechinger Report analysis of dozens of private school websites revealed that, among 55 that posted their tuition rates, nearly all raised their prices since 2022. Some schools made modest increases, often in line with or below the overall inflation rate last year of around 6 percent. But at nearly half of the schools, tuition […]
Alex Tabarrok: In my 2011 book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance, I wrote: At times, teacher pay in the United States seems more like something from Soviet-era Russia than 21st-century America. Wages for teachers arelow, egalitarian and not based on performance. We pay physical education teachers about the same as math teachers despite the fact that math […]
Will Flanders: Of note is that the only Milwaukee school on here—Reagan—has selective admissions. Meaning, unlike voucher and charter schools, they get to “pick and choose” the best students. Yet I don’t hear anyoutcry from public school advocates about this 🤔
Jeramey Jannene “I intend to break from decades of disconnection between City Hall and our schools,” said Johnson. Short of sharing a city attorney with Milwaukee Public Schools and the city authorizing a handful of charter schools, city government and Milwaukee’s public, charter and voucher schools are merely passing ships in the night. But that’s not how […]
Milwaukee Teachers Union, via Debbie Kuether: Fascinating maps of referendum results! Support for the referendum was moderately correlated with race (won in most majorty white wards) but even more strongly correlated with (not) having kids. In wards where 20% or less of residents have children, the referendum overwhelmingly passed with ~2/3 of the vote. Wards […]
Jennifer Berkshire: We owe the concept of school vouchers to libertarian economist Milton Friedman. In a 1955 essay and manifesto, Friedman argued that it was time for the “denationalization” of schools. The government should get out of the business of running schools, he wrote, and instead give parents vouchers that they could use at the […]
Rory Linnane: At the same time, the biggest reason funding for MPS has dropped, the report says, is that MPS doesn’t have as many students as it used to. That’s partly because there are fewer children in the city, and partly because of the growth of non-MPS schools, like independent charter schools and private schools […]
Alan Borsuk: The approach is best known for emphasizing phonics-based instruction, which teaches children the sounds of letters and how to put the sounds together into words. But when done right, it involves more than that — incorporating things such as developing vocabulary, comprehension skills and general knowledge. More:What is phonics? Here’s a guide to […]
Denise-Marie Ordway About half of U.S. states offer private school choice programs, which help families pay for private school. It’s a highly politicized, complicated issue involving multiple types of tuition assistance, hundreds of thousands of children and billions of taxpayer dollars. It’s also an issue journalists need to examine closely. News coverage grounded in academic research is […]
WILL: The Assembly is currently considering AB900—a bill that would “decouple” public school spending from spending on the voucher and independent charter school programs. While the concept likely sounds quite confusing, it’s actually relatively straightforward, and will benefit public schools, taxpayers, and choice schools as well. We’ll explain how below. PUBLIC SCHOOLS Currently, when a student […]
WILL: Decoupling public school funding from choice funding is a win-win from the perspective of both public-school districts and choice/charter schools. School districts will no longer face the uncertainty of voucher enrollment numbers when crafting their budgets for the upcoming school year. In an era of declining enrollment across Wisconsin, this additional stability is important. […]
The Economist: A year ago New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, proposed to adjust a state cap on charter schools, the publicly funded but privately run schools that have become a locus of innovation and controversy in American education. Ms Hochul’s plan was not ambitious, but it would have allowed dozens of new charter […]
Alex MacGillis The program was the first in the nation to provide public money for tuition at religious schools, and by 2000, virtually all Cleveland voucher recipients were using them at a religious private school (mostly Catholic) rather than secular ones. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly rejected a challenge to the Cleveland vouchers; the court […]
IMPORTANT ACT 20 LITERACY UPDATE TODAY, council MAY soft-approve first batch of reading curriculum. (DPI and legislature must agree.) District/charter/voucher that pick them get partially reimbursed. If not, they pay for new Themselves. NOT recorded, so follow this thread! — Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) January 12, 2024 Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004- —- Underly […]
Josh Cowen: First, why are these new voucher schemes such bad public policy? To understand the answer, it’s important to know that the typical voucher-accepting school is a far cry from the kind of elite private academy you might find in a coastal city or wealthy suburban outpost. Instead, they’re usually sub-prime providers, akin to predatory […]
Wall Street Journal: This has been the year for school choice—from vouchers, to homeschooling, to pod schools with parents who use education savings accounts. The winners include charter schools, as union-run K-12 schools lost hundreds of thousands of students during Covid-19 who haven’t returned. Yes they do. The trend holds for states of all sizes […]
Daniel Buck: Early in the fall, a far-left PAC filed a lawsuit, charging that Wisconsin’s school-choice program somehow violates the state’s constitution — hoping that our state’s supreme court, which flipped to a progressive majority last election, would whack their political lob and smack down vouchers in our state. Thankfully, on December 13 the state supreme […]
Bob Peterson Establishing two school systems — one public and one private, yet both supported with tax dollars — only expands the ability of private schools to pick and choose the most desirable students Supporters of Wisconsin’s voucher schools make it seem that the schools are just one of many variations of our public schools. Don’t be fooled. Voucher […]
David Blaska: Who is behind the lawsuit seeking to bring down Wisconsin’s school choice program that helps 52,000 low-income, often minority students, escape failing public schools? Guy named Kirk Bangstad. Killing school choice is written into the Democrat(ic) party platform. Obeisance to the teachers union and the one-size-fits-all government school monopoly is central to Woke progressivism. […]
Wayne Shockley: Kirk Bangstad and Julie Underwood attempted to make a case against private school vouchers in their column on Wednesday, “Why we’re fighting against private school vouchers.” While they do make a couple of good points in their arguments, such as the need for greater accountability, most of their points are not valid. One […]
Wall Street Journal: Progressives tee up a case for the state Supreme Court’s new majority. This should be an easy case, but the new 4-3 progressive majority on the Court is cause for worry. If the lawsuit is successful, it could end school choice in Wisconsin without a possibility of appeal because the case is […]
Alan Borsuk: The definition of a public school? For a third of a century, Wisconsin has stretched it and bent it into new shapes — and fought about it. The state is still doing all of these, especially the fighting. How people define a public school often says a lot about where they stand on […]
Hannah Cox: Earlier this year, Florida joined a growing list of states with universal school choice programs—meaning any student in the state can access a portion of the money the state spends on their education and use those tax dollars to homeschool, attend a private school, or do some sort of mixed-learning program. Families have […]
Quinton Qlabon I feel like when Minocqua Brewing Company turns in homework, it should not have factual errors in it. Anticlimactic. Locally, Madison spends > $25k per student. Corrine Hess: Wisconsin’s choice program serves over 52,000 students and plays a vital role in Wisconsin’s education system,” Esenberg said in a statement. “Unfortunately, far-left interest groups […]
Marquette: Please join us for an “On the Issues” program at 12:15 p.m. on Oct. 20, 2023, at Marquette Law School. A new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning education journalist Cara Fitzpatrick takes up the rise of the school choice movement across the United States. The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War over Education […]
Tyler Cowen: North Carolina’s budget for the new biennium would expand school choice across the state to an unprecedented level. The budget, slated for votes Thursday morning, would enlarge the piggybank for the Opportunity Scholarship Program — the state’s voucher that enables families to choose a private school education for their children — to $520 […]
Duey Stroebel: A couple months after the bipartisan agreement over shared revenue and education were enacted we are already seeing the effects. Besides the record increase in public school resources of $1.2 billion, the deal included the passage of Act 11, which significantly increased state payments to school choice and charter schools. Until earlier this year, voting on education […]
Ruth Conniff: Still, the inequities among public schools in richer and poorer property tax districts are nothing compared to the existential threat to public education from a parallel system of publicly funded private schools that has been nurtured and promoted by a national network of right-wing think tanks, well funded lobbyists and anti-government ideologues. For […]
Corrine Hess: Wisconsin’s private schools are receiving more taxpayer funds than ever before, but a coalition of groups is objecting to that public money being included in an online dashboard about school district finances. Last week, the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee rejected a proposal by the state Department of Public Instruction to include private […]
Laura Mechler: Her program is part of a company called Prenda, which last year served about 2,000 students across several states. It connects home-school families with microschool leaders who host students, often in their homes. It’s like Airbnb for education, says Prenda’s CEO, because its website allows customers — in this case, parents — to enter their criteria, […]
Megan Tagami: Amanda Ray’s son attended public school from prekindergarten to fifth grade. But when he qualified for West Virginia’s school voucher program for the 2023-24 school year, Ray jumped at the opportunity to enroll her son in Eyes and Brains STEM Center, a small private school serving a total of six students in kindergarten […]
Rory Linnane St. Augustine Preparatory Academy unveiled a new $49 million elementary school on Milwaukee’s south side Tuesday, showcasing a major expansion as school leaders also discussed plans for a new north-side branch on the former Cardinal Stritch campus. About 730 students in kindergarten through fourth grade are expected to start school this week in the new […]
Ameillia Wedward: Janet Protasiewicz’ recent confirmation as a member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this month has conservatives worried about the possible end of a decade of conservative reforms, from Act 10 to voter ID laws. But another concern receiving less attention is the prospect of challenges to Wisconsin’s school choice programs. School choice has stood […]
Ashley Rogers Berner First, rigorous, knowledge-building contentworks. Across the K–12 continuum, mastery of rigorous content exercises an independent, positive impact on young people’s opportunities. When American schools fail to provide this, they are leaving one of the most powerful levers off the table. In practice, this means that while a wide variety of public and private schools […]
Richard Hanania The first thing to point out about public education is that it involves an extreme restriction of liberty beyond anything we usually accept. How common is it for government to force you to be in a certain place at a certain time? What I call “time-place” mandates are rare. Sometimes you have to […]
Wall Street Journal So much for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s gutsy support for school choice. After backing a Senate proposal for school vouchers for K-12 students—one of his 2022 campaign promises—the Democratic Governor caved this week to his party and the unions and will nix the scholarships from the state budget.
Stephen Caruso, Kate Huangpu, Katie Meyer: This story has been updated to reflect a statement from Gov. Josh Shapiro that confirmed earlier reporting by Spotlight PA. HARRISBURG — Gov. Josh Shapiro says he plans to scrap his push for private school vouchers in Pennsylvania’s state budget in order to close a deal with the commonwealth’s […]
Rory Linnane: To address some of the gaps in funding between districts, lawmakers previously set a minimum allowance for each school district, allowing them to collect at least $10,000 per student since 2020. As part of the voucher bill, lawmakers hiked the minimum to $11,000. About 221 of Wisconsin’s 421 public school districts would be […]
Gillian McGoldrick: Gov. Josh Shapiro canceled his Saturday appearance before a state teachers union conference in Philadelphia, as he continues to negotiate a budget deal that missed its deadline on Friday. However, it also comes as Shapiro continues to receive intense backlash from teachers unions and organized labor for his support of a private school voucher program […]
Will Flanders and Cory Brewer: The recent article by Wisconsin Watch, “Wisconsin students with disabilities often denied public school choices,” suggested private schools that participate in Wisconsin’s school choice program can discriminate against students. The article specifically alleges that choice schools “expel” students with disabilities, without providing a single example of when this has occurred. […]
Vince Bielski: What’s more, most of these states have also enacted education savings accounts, or ESAs. They give families much more freedom than traditional tuition vouchers, depositing state funds into private accounts to spend on virtually anything related to learning, from homeschooling and online classes to therapy and supplies. The universal laws amount to a […]
Corrinne Hess In the 2021-22 school year, Wisconsin’s public schools received a total of $16,859 per student, which came from a combination of local property taxes, federal sources and the state. Of that, about $7,728 came from the state, according to the Department of Public Instruction. “In fact, some of the federal funding factored into […]
There was a lot of good news for #SchoolChoice in WI yesterday, but it was disconcerting to see that some remain either grossly misinformed on the issue or are intentionally misleading. One of the worst offenders was @RepKristina, who made claimed the program is racist (1/x). pic.twitter.com/OrrC3sEHxx — Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 15, 2023 School […]
Alexander Shur: The Legislature’s GOP-controlled finance committee on Tuesday approved increasing K-12 education spending by $1 billion, $1.6 billion less than what Democratic Gov. Tony Evers requested in his budget. The increase will go toward funding both public schools, which Evers prioritized, and the state’s voucher programs, which Evers had originally sought to limit in his […]
Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Journalism School (along with Marquette University), the formation, affiliation(s) and funding sources of Wisconsin Watch have generated some controversy. Jim Piwowarczyk noted in November, 2022: “Wisconsin Watch, a 501(c)(3) organization that disseminates news stories to many prominent media outlets statewide and is housed at the taxpayer-funded UW-Madison campus, has […]
Phoebe Petrovic: Wisconsin Watch reviewed public materials for about one-third of the state’s 373 voucher schools and found that four out of 10 had policies or statements that appeared to target LGBTQ+ students for disparate treatment. Some had explicitly discriminatory policies, such as expelling students for being gay or transgender. All 50 of the voucher […]
Alan Borsuk: Year after year, MPS reading scores are abysmal, strong signs of the problems with educational success that lie ahead for many students. There are bright spots; some MPS schools consistently have better results. But overall, in spring 2022 — the most recent results available — more than half (54.1%) of MPS third- through […]
Wall Street Journal: The union also wants reparations for black students to remedy alleged historic injustices. How about instead remedying the enormous learning deficits the union has caused by protecting bad teachers and closing schools during the pandemic? Perhaps the district could extend the school year, or, better yet, provide families with private school vouchers? […]
Frederick Hess: The reason for this success isn’t hard to fathom. During the pandemic, mediocre remote learning, bureaucratic inertia, and school closures taught many parents that they couldn’t count on school districts when families needed them most. Parents were left hungry for alternatives, especially amidst bitter disagreements over masking and woke ideology. This was all […]
Walker [17-19] Last Biennial Budget: $76 billion Evers[19-21] First Biennial Budget: $87.5 billion Evers [23-25] Proposed Biennial Budget: $103.8 billion Will you get $27.8 BILLION more value from govt? Sell underused properties, consolidate overlapping agencies. $0 INCREASE! pic.twitter.com/DNXG1aSozd — Will Martin, Business Owner & Govt Reformer (@willmartinWI) February 20, 2023 WILL budget primer: Massive Spending […]
Laura Meckler: For years, school-choice advocates toted up small victories in their drive to give parents taxpayer money to pay for private school. Now, Republican-led states across the country are leaving the limitations of the past behind them as they consider sweeping new voucher laws that would let every family use public funds to pay […]
Jonathan Turley: Below is my column in the Hill on moves by some states to create greater choice and control for parents over the education of their children. The move to use funding to change the status quo could soon be used in higher education. Not only are alumni beginning to withhold contributions to schools […]
Scott Girard and Jessie Opoien: The results, as Vos mentioned, have been poor. Reading and math scores on what’s known as the Nation’s Report Card dropped across the country last year, including in Wisconsin, where the gap in scores between Wisconsin’s Black and white students is the highest of any state, with only Washington, D.C. having […]
Laurie Roberts: Charter schools would be exempt from the cuts. They didn’t exist in 1980 and so they aren’t subject to the spending cap. Ditto for the state’s universal voucher program. The kids who are getting public money to attend private schools would see no decline in state support. Only the children who attend traditional […]
Baker A. Mitchell and Robert P. Spencer: The Fourth Circuit’s finding appears to have been based on little more than the convention of calling charters “public charter schools” and their being mostly funded by public sources. But hundreds of American cities contract municipal services out to private companies, which generally aren’t considered state actors. The […]
Alan Borsuk: Here are thumbnail sketches of issues that will be fueling action in the hives: Revenue caps. Since the mid-1990s, the state has imposed caps on the general spending by school districts. Increases in the caps have been minimal in the last dozen years. Two years ago, Republican majorities in the legislature did not […]
Scott Girard: MMSD had its strongest ratings in the growth and on-track to graduation priority areas, though both were down slightly from last year’s scores. In growth, the district received a 73.6 out of 100, while it scored 77 out of 100 for on-track to graduation. In the other two priority areas, MMSD scored a […]
Jessica Winter: The 2022 midterm elections offered many snapshots of the contemporary school wars, but one might start with the race for Superintendent of Education in South Carolina, a state that languishes near the bottom of national education rankings and that’s suffering from a major teacher shortage. Lisa Ellis, the Democratic candidate, has twenty-two years of teaching […]
Steven Walters: Public school funding in Wisconsin is at a political crossroads, with the two candidates for governor disagreeing over how state aid should be distributed in the future. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers wants $2 billion more spent on public schools, noting a projected $4.3 billion budget surplus by mid-2023. His Republican challenger, Tim Michels, […]
Scott Girard: “This means a lot to me because I don’t want students who are younger than me to lack various resources and opportunities that will be offered,” La Follette’s Yoanna Hoskins said. “I want my teachers to be well compensated and respected for all the hard work they put in every single day.” Adding […]
John Hindraker: Minnesota, as in other states, concerned parents have banded together to try to wrest control of the public schools away from teachers’ unions, in order to improve the quality of education and to stop left-wing indoctrination. Earlier this year, we started a 501(c)(4) organization called the Minnesota Parents Alliance to lead those efforts […]
Rory Linnane: The picture isn’t complete, as the count excludes homeschooling and students who pay tuition in private schools. And the numbers released by the Department of Public Instruction on Friday are unaudited. According to the preliminary numbers, the decline for public school districts is less dramatic than earlier years of the pandemic but continues a downward […]
Mitchell Schmidt: A new coalition of conservatives, policy groups and advocacy organizations has begun developing a package of education goals for the coming legislative session — with expanded school choice as a top priority — that could play a considerable role in the upcoming race for governor this November. Officials with the Wisconsin Coalition for […]
Mitchell Schmidt: A new coalition of conservatives, policy groups and advocacy organizations has begun developing a package of education goals for the coming legislative session — with expanded school choice as a top priority — that could play a considerable role in the upcoming race for governor this November. Officials with the Wisconsin Coalition for […]
Chuck Ross: Pennsylvania Senate hopeful John Fetterman (D.) opposes vouchers that let children in failing public school districts attend private and charter schools. But the progressive champion, who lives in one of Pennsylvania’s worst performing school districts, sends his kids to an elite prep school. Fetterman’s kids attend the Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh, where […]
WILL-Law: The News: Attorneys with the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit against the City of Milwaukee on behalf of Wisconsin Lutheran High School after the City unlawfully assessed the school for $105,000 in property taxes. The City is trying to tax Wisconsin Lutheran for a campus building that is owned by the school […]