The Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) held a very informative Legislative Issues Conference in Stevens Point on November 3, attended by more than 200 school board members from around the state. The program was focused on the issues of school funding reform and taxation.
An overview of UW-Madison Professor Alan Odden’s two-year study of school funding and achievement, supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, was presented by two researchers who work with Odden.
The UW’s Consortium for Policy Research in Education also includes participation by the Universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and Northwestern. Their current printed report is titled “Moving From Good to Great in Wisconsin: Funding Schools Adequately And Doubling Student Performance,” and opens with a telling quotation from Michelangelo: “The greatest danger for most of us is not that we aim too high and fall short, but that we aim too low and achieve our mark.”