Data from the governor’s office showed Evers’ administration during his first term took more time to complete open records requests than Walker’s administration did during his second term. Evers’ office on average completed requests in 38 days compared to 33 days under Walker’s office, though Evers’ office handled approximately 40% more requests and did not include some routine requests from journalists in tabulations.
Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, urged Evers to revive the website. He hoped a new transparency initiative would improve response times, which he said are “worse now than ever.”
Democratic governors have responded by dropping mask mandates, urging that schools remain open and emphasizing there is a light at the end of the dark covid tunnel. They also are trying to change the subject, with a focus on education investment and recovery and warnings about the consequences if Republicans are elected.
But some Democrats worry that the responses, to date, are insufficient given the hardball politics the GOP is playing on these emotional issues.
“Democrats are giving away one of their greatest assets, and that’s being associated with public education. And giving away that advantage is going to get Democrats’ clocks cleaned this fall,” said Joe DiSano, a Michigan-based Democratic consultant. “We are letting the conservative crazies run ragged on us. We have the ammo to fight back, and we don’t.”
Republicans were buoyed by their unexpected victory in November’s Virginia gubernatorial contest, where Republican Glenn Youngkin won after a campaign defined by education issues. Youngkin criticized pandemic-related school closures and a statewide mask mandate in schools, issues that analysts who studied the race found particularly effective. He also promised to ban teaching of critical race theory, an academic framework for examining the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism and a catchall term that many GOP politicians have embraced to describe various racial equity lessons and initiatives they find objectionable.
Youngkin alsoeffectively seized on a gaffe by his opponent, who said parents should not tell schools what to teach.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll after that election found overwhelming support for parents having a say in what their children’s schools teach. It also found 44 percent of Americans say they trust Democrats more to handle education, barely topping the 41 percent choosing Republicans. That represented a significant weakening in Democrats’ historic advantage.
School Choice advocates across the nation were given a gem of an opportunity this past year to prove the value of their programs when teachers unions refused to return teachers to classrooms when it was demonstrably safe to do so. In fact, across 30 states nearly 50 school choice bills were introduced this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers showed again on June 18 that he does not care about children’s education — except to the extent that he can continue to bolster Wisconsin’s failed public school establishment — when he vetoed a bill which would have expanded school choice in the state.
The bill would have broadened the income restrictions to three times the poverty level for the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, which would have increased access for students and parents desperate to get their kids out of failing Wisconsin public schools.
Wisconsin voters should remember that Evers, immediately prior to becoming the state’s highest elected official, was the superintendent of Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction for a decade. Presiding over public schools with the worst achievement gap between Black and white students in the nation and a Milwaukee Public School District in which his own agency graded nearly 75% of the schools as failing to meet expectations for over 50,000 children, Evers is also a staunch school choice opponent.
Expanding school choice would not only benefit urban children. According to a study the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty put out last summer, 44,000 rural students in Wisconsin do not live within 10 miles of a high-quality school. By vetoing this bill, Evers has not only failed inner-city Black children, but children in rural Wisconsin.
Evers’ rationale for the veto was that expansion of the choice program would necessarily take funds away from the public school system. This argument has been debunked a myriad of times. In fact, after a student leaves a district, the public school still receives funds for the student for a rolling period of three years. The real question is, why give a school that is continuing to fail children even more taxpayer money? Outside of government, employees must improve their skills and productivity to merit being paid more money by their employer, and our schools should be no different.
Teachers unions in the state’s five largest school districts are calling on Gov. Tony Evers and the state’s top health and education leaders Monday to require schools to remain closed for now and to start the school year online only, arguing the threat from the coronavirus remains too high for students and staff to safely return.
“I’m looking at the state of Wisconsin, county by county right now, and you have a high (coronavirus) activity level in all but about 10 counties,” said Amy Mizialko, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, who signed the letter alongside union presidents in the Madison, Green Bay, Racine and Kenosha districts.
“We want Gov. Evers to get in the ring and stay in the ring,” she said. “And we believe Secretary Palm has the authority to (order) a virtual start of the school year until there is clear containment and control of the virus.”
Spokeswomen for Evers did not respond to emails from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Sunday and Monday seeking the governor’s reaction.
Evers has said in recent weeks that he would not be issuing an order to shut down schools ahead of the fall semester or if health officials find outbreaks tied to classroom instruction.
He said he’d rather see local health officials take steps to quarantine individual classrooms or schools than issue another statewide order shuttering school buildings.
But the coronavirus outbreak in Wisconsin is worsening with three record-setting days of new cases in the last eight days.
But media law experts say the First Amendment protects journalists’ possession and publication of truthful information in the public’s interest, regardless of how the information was released to them — and even trying to stop a reporter from publishing violates the U.S. Constitution.
“Yes, I get it that if some reporter gets some information that frankly they shouldn’t have gotten they’re going to report it. I get that, but I think it’s very important that somebody sticks up for that kid and that’s us,” Evers said Tuesday.
Hixenbaugh, the NBC News reporter, obtained records related to a child protective services case involving a former emergency room doctor at Children’s Wisconsin Hospital who has been charged with physical abuse of his newborn daughter. The reporter did not ultimately cite the records in his reporting.
The story includes details of the case, including information from medical records, and raises questions about whether the child was injured by an accident, rather than by abuse.
In the warning to NBC News over release of the case’s investigation file, the department cited a portion of state law that says a person who receives such information may not “further disclose it.” The department did not allege NBC News directly participated in the illegal release somehow and does not plan to pursue criminal charges.
“When the agency turns over records to parties under this statute, we are very forward with these warnings as a normal course of action,” Department spokesman Tom McCarthy told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The letter we sent to NBC was to inform them of these laws and what may happen if they violate them, while also maintaining our duties.”
McCarthy said Tuesday the department did not intend to threaten prosecution with its letter to NBC News.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers is calling on lawmakers to use $250 million in newly projected surplus dollars to bolster K-12 funding through school-based mental health services and special education aid in districts across the state.
The former state schools superintendent, who signed anexecutive order Thursdayordering a legislative special session to act on thesweeping plan, also aims to restore the state’s commitment to fund two-thirds of what’s required to educate students and direct $130 million of the funds for property tax relief through the state’s equalization aid formula.
The push comes afterrecent revenue projectionsshow Wisconsin is expected to see $452 million more in its general fund to end the biennium than previously anticipated, opening up a discussion about how the state should spend the extra money.
Republicans have advocated for spending some of the funding on tax relief. But Evers in a state Capitol news conference Thursday said his proposal would both lower property taxes and “invest in our kids,” adding: “We can do both.”
“We need to help around the issue of rising property taxes. We get that,” he said. “Investing in our schools will do that.”
Democratic leaders Sen. Jennifer Shilling and Rep. Gordon Hintz applauded the effort in a statement, saying the investment would give kids better opportunities and give a boost to Wisconsin’s education system.
“We need to ensure we are retaining quality teachers, investing in modern facilities and meeting high education standards to give students the best chance at getting ahead,” Shilling, D-La Crosse, said. “We need to put our money where our mouth is if we want to re-establish Wisconsin’s reputation as a leader in K-12 education.”
But GOP legislative leaders were skeptical of the idea, withSenate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgeraldtaking to Twitterto knock the proposal as one driven by teachers’ unions that are “calling all the shots in the East Wing.”
Gov. Tony Evers’ administration sought to block a journalist from publishing information from a confidential child abuse investigation by threatening prosecution, a rare move that could violate the U.S. Constitution.
A Milwaukee TV station has sued Gov. Tony Evers for withholding copies of his emails — records his office eventually released, in part, minutes after the lawsuit was filed earlier this week.
The lawsuit, filed in Dane County Circuit Court on Tuesday, came after Fox 6 repeatedly filed requests dating back to September for a month’s worth of emails, a week’s worth of emails and finally a day’s worth of emails to and from Evers and his chief of staff, Maggie Gau.
The governor’s staff later sent Fox 6 a copy of a single day’s worth of emails from June 14 only from Evers — records that were released some 10 minutes after the suit was filed Tuesday afternoon.
Governor Tony Evers’ office is denying open records requests for his emails. The governor’s attorney says the decision saves taxpayer resources; transparency advocates say they’re worried about the erosion of the public’s right to know.
“If you want to see what government is up to, you have to see the emails that they are sending,” Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council President Bill Lueders said. “I don’t think [this denial] is a legal interpretation of our open records law.”
Under your leadership, the Wisconsin d.p.i. granted Mulligan’s to thousands of elementary teachers who couldn’t pass a reading exam (that’s the “Foundations of Reading” elementary teacher reading content knowledge exam), yet our students lag Alabama, a state that spends less and has fewer teachers per students.
What message are we sending to parents, citizens, taxpayers and those students (who lack proficiency).
Governor Evers: I’m not sure how many mulligans we issued but they are all mulligans that the local school districts are asking for because there are people that generally speaking were people that worked in those schools while they are trying to pass that test they are very close to getting there hitting the mark there.
So I believe that the mulligans that we did issue were were the right thing to do.
The other thing that concerned me and I supported putting that piece in place around passing that test and I still do but the data that concerned me was that the test may have been biased and that it was probably.
34:09
Yes disproportionate number of people of color were not passing that test and this I know the state of Massachusetts had that problem and the state of Wisconsin had that problem. so given that there were we were and I can honestly say I don’t know what came out of the study but we are working with Massachusetts to take a look at that issue and see how how we can correct it.
Betsy DeVos is coming to Wisconsin. So I’m heading to Milwaukee early tomorrow morning to join @MTEAunion and Milwaukee families in sending a crystal clear message: the Trump/DeVos team might not believe in public schools, but we do. https://t.co/XHUzMPbuVn
Today WILL is releasing “A Deep Dive into Governor Evers’ K-12 Budget Proposal” that goes through nearly every single education proposal in Evers’ budget while utilizing new research as well as LFB analysis and JFC testimony. For each proposal, we explain how it impacts schools and students across Wisconsin.
We dive deep into nearly every provision in his budget, from his infamous voucher freeze – which would cost Wisconsin $110 million in lost economic benefits – to the ending of the Special Needs Scholarship Program – that has a 56% higher parental satisfaction score than public schools for educating students with disabilities. The report looks at lesser known provisions, such as new private school accreditation requirements, new teacher licensing requirements, changes to the early college credit program, the elimination of the private school tuition tax deduction, and more mandates from Madison on local school districts.
Evers’ budget should concern parents and lawmakers alike. It would end school choice as we know it – freezing the expansion of vouchers and charters but also implementing stifling regulations that would halt the growth of private schools in the choice program. It also goes after Wisconsin’s incredibly popular Open Enrollment Program, limiting funding increases for the program and making it less desirable for public schools to participate. Evers’ budget would exacerbate Wisconsin’s teacher shortage problem, making it harder for teachers to work at private and public schools. All in all, Evers’ budget:
Perhaps the most egregious omissions are in the discussion of school funding and its effect on student outcomes. While the author cites one study – not yet peer-reviewed — the preponderance of evidence for decades has suggested little to no impact of per-student funding on educational achievement. This study, and others like it based on court-mandated increases in spending, hinge on the assumption that court-mandated increases in spending are random events when of course they are not. Courts are most likely to act to increase spending in places where there is a public push to improve educational outcomes, or where disparities are so great that legal action is required. None of these situations apply to Wisconsin.
A meta-analysis of about 400 studies by Eric Hanushek of Stanford University finds no relationship between spending and student outcomes. Our research on Wisconsin school districts has found no relationship between student outcomes and spending once important control variables are taken into account. Data points like this ought not to be ignored in the funding discussion.
On the subject of early childhood education, the author says that students enter pre-K more prepared than they otherwise would. However, there is an extremely important caveat here that is not included. While the best research suggests that students do enter kindergarten better prepared, the same research also shows that these effects dissipate rapidly, and even become negative by third grade — meaning students who didn’t have early childhood education were actually performing better by that age. The bottom line is that the preponderance of the evidence is negative on the impacts of pre-K, and to claim that the evidence shows otherwise is a disservice to readers.
When it comes to the achievement gap, the assessment that Wisconsin has some of the largest gaps in the nation is absolutely correct. But Evers’ well-documented anti-school-choice agenda is often at odds with what the evidence suggests can improve outcomes for these students. Particularly for students living in Milwaukee, research shows that private schools in the voucher program and charter schools offer students a better opportunity to succeed academically, graduate, and attend college.
Evers has suggested ending or reducing enrollment in these programs, which would eliminate access to alternatives for many low-income, minority families. Ending programs used by more than 30,000 students is likely to have a far more deleterious effect on minority students than the implementation of softer suspension policies that is suggested in the article, which our research has actually found can have a negative impact on student outcomes.
Evers, a Democrat, is asking for $1.4 billion in additional funds for the state’s K-12 schools in the 2019-21 budget. The $15.4 billion request, submitted by Evers on Monday, comes less than two months before Walker and Evers will meet on the ballot — and Evers’ budget letter includes a swipe at the governor.
“Wisconsin has a proud history and tradition of strong public schools. Our state’s education system — from early childhood through higher education — has served as the pathway to prosperity for generations of Wisconsinites and the key to a skilled workforce and strong economy,” Evers wrote. “In recent years, however, historic cuts to education have impeded our progress.”
Evers’ budget request includes $606 million in new funding for special education programs, bringing funding for the programs up to $900 million by 2021. It also dedicates an additional $58 million to mental health programs, and an additional $41 million for bilingual-bicultural programs.
The DPI budget would also expand and fund new programs in the state’s five largest school districts — Milwaukee, Kenosha, Green Bay, Madison and Racine — which have disproportionate shares of students with significant achievement gaps. The proposals targeted toward those districts include expanding summer school grants, offering new funding for 3K programs and offering extra funding to National Board certified teachers who teach in high-poverty schools in those five districts.
The amounts noted above exclude substantial local taxpayer property taxes, redistributed federal taxpayer dollars and various grants. (The proposed taxpayer expenditure increase was 12.3% a few days ago).
Unfortunately, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), lead for years by Mr. Evers, has killed our one (!) attempt to follow Massachusetts’ successful teacher content knowledge requirement(s) – MTEL.
The DPI has granted thousands of annual waivers for the elementary teacher reading content knowledge exam: Foundations of Reading.
Walker proposed $13.7 billion in total state support for public schools for the 2017-19 biennium. That includes about $2.2 billion in property tax credits that are counted as K-12 funding, but don’t go directly into the classroom.
Walker’s campaign spokesman Brian Reisinger touched on the record amount in a Saturday statement:
“Scott Walker made record actual-dollar investments in our schools, the most in state history in what Tony Evers himself called a pro-kid budget,” Reisinger said. “He will continue to make historic investments in schools without raising taxes on hard-working families and seniors to do it.”
Evers’ spokesman Sam Lau referred questions to DPI’s McCarthy.
McCarthy said in an interview Saturday that the last time school finance was overhauled in Wisconsin this way was for the 1995-97 budget cycle when the state added $1.37 billion.
Evers’ request for $15.4 billion in state support for K-12 schools in 2019-21, up 12.3 percent from the $13.7 billion distributed to school districts in the 2017-19 cycle, is similar to what the Legislature agreed to more than two decades ago, McCarthy said.
Britt Cudaback, spokeswoman for the Evers campaign, did not say how Evers would pay for the increase if elected governor, but indicated he would make education funding a priority.
“Budgets are about priorities. If we can find $4.5 billion for a foreign corporation, we can make the investments needed in our students,” Cudaback said, referring to incentives passed for Foxconn to build $10 billion worth of facilities in Wisconsin. “Tony’s priority is to fully fund our schools which can be done without increasing property taxes or forcing over a million taxpayers to go to referenda to pick up the tab. Tony is prepared to make tough decisions as governor and will do whatever is necessary to ensure we’re doing what’s best for our kids.”
Walker, a Republican, and Evers, the only Democrat leading a major state agency, have been at odds for years over how much funding to provide schools and where to spend it.
In the current state budget, Walker adopted much of Evers’ budget request, which included $649 million in new funding — a plan similar to requests that had been rejected by Walker previously.
Walker spokesman Brian Reisinger didn’t release details of the governor’s plans for school spending in the 2019-’21 state budget, but signaled that he also would continue to make K-12 education spending a priority.
“Scott Walker made record actual-dollar investments in our schools, the most in state history, in what Tony Evers himself called a ‘pro-kid budget,’ ” Reisinger said, referring to Evers’ remarks when the current budget was passed. “He will continue to make historic investments in schools without raising taxes on hard-working families and seniors to do it.”
The amounts noted above exclude substantial local taxpayer property taxes, redistributed federal taxpayer dollars and various grants.
Unfortunately, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), lead for years by Mr. Evers, has killed our one (!) attempt to follow Massachusetts’ successful teacher content knowledge requirement(s) – MTEL.
The DPI has granted thousands of annual waivers for the elementary teacher reading content knowledge exam: Foundations of Reading.
There was once a time when Tony Evers didn’t like cheese. But there was also a time when he didn’t see himself running for governor, and now multiple polls show him leading the field of Democrats vying for a chance to challenge Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
Evers, 66, won his third statewide victory as Superintendent of Public Instruction in April 2017. Before he was elected to head the state Department of Public Instruction, Evers served for eight years as deputy superintendent of schools. He grew up in Plymouth, and worked as a science teacher, high school principal and district superintendent in Baraboo, Tomah, Oakfield and Verona.
Two Marquette University Law School polls over the course of the summer have shown Evers leading the eight-person Democratic primary field, and an NBC News/Marist Poll released last month showed him leading Walker in a hypothetical match-up.
This study examines all 50 states’ and the District of Columbia’s requirements regarding the science of reading for elementary and special education teacher candidates.
“Report finds only 11 states have adequate safeguards in place for both elementary and special education teachers.” Make that “10 states”; with Wisconsin PI 34, the loophole (created by a succession of emergency rules) waiving the Foundations of Reading Test is now permanent.
It wasn’t until the end of Wednesday night’s Democratic gubernatorial forum at the Madison Public Library that someone took a swing at the candidate who has led in all of the polls.
Former party chairman Matt Flynn in his closing statement called State Superintendent Tony Evers “Republican lite” and criticized him for describing Gov. Scott Walker’s most recent budget as “pro-kid.” Evers, given a chance to respond, called Flynn’s attack “an outrageous comment” to which Flynn replied that Walker would “eat you for lunch.”
“Tony misspoke,” his campaign spokeswoman Maggie Gau told us. “We acknowledge it’s not correct. As much as we try to prevent them, no one is perfect and mistakes happen on the trail.”
UW System’s funding streams
The UW System is composed of 13 campuses, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that offer four-year and advanced degrees, and 13 campuses that offer two-year degrees. Currently, its operating budget is about $6 billion per year, with about $1 billion — 17 percent — coming from state funding.
To see whether that percentage has changed during Walker’s tenure as governor, we turned to a state agency, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. (Federal funding and tuition are the two other largest sources of funding, and there are others, as well.)
Here is how much of the UW System operating budgets has come from state funding since the year before Walker took office as governor:
A brief summary of the proposal, provided by Evers’ office, said the budget would, among other things:
Ensure that no district receives less in aid than they previously received.
Allow districts to count 4-year-old kindergarten students as full time for state funding purposes. They are currently funded at 0.5 and 0.6 full-time equivalent.
Index revenue limits for the lowest-spending school districts to inflation so they would rise over time to the state average. Revenue limits cap the amount of money schools can collect in state and local taxes. The change is meant to help districts that were locked in at low-revenue limits when the caps were created in 1993-’94.
Mr. Evers is currently Superintendent of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, an organization that has fought the implementation of just one elementary teacher content knowledge requirement “Foundations of Reading“.
“Tony Evers refused to take action when it was time to protect children, but he moved pretty quickly when his political career was in danger,” said Alec Zimmerman, spokesman for the state GOP.
Maggie Gau, spokeswoman for Evers, was dismissive of the criticism: “The Republicans are now attacking Tony for doing his job and disciplining bad actors who could hurt kids? Give me a break.”
Tom McCarthy, a spokesman for DPI, said there are two concrete things that effect the ability to revoke licenses: the facts of the cases and DPI staffing. He said the education agency had experienced some turnover in the past that limited the number of cases the agency could review.
“Nothing about this process has changed in the wake of Andrew Harris or due to any criticism we received,” McCarthy said.
Records show Evers and his agency has revoked or negotiated the surrender of teaching licenses with 86 professional educators between July 2009 to the end of 2017.
During 2010, for instance, DPI revoked the licenses of only two teachers.
“The constitution creates the role of a state superintendent and gives the superintendent authority to supervise public instruction. That is all the constitution confers upon the superintendent,” Bradley wrote. “The majority creates a dangerous precedent. It brandishes its superintending authority like a veto over laws it does not wish to apply. In doing so, it thwarts the will of the people.”
She said if Evers does not like state laws on how state agencies are represented, “he should take it up with the Legislature to amend them.”
Evers is the only Democrat to oversee a major state agency and he and previous Democratic DPI chiefs have been at odds with Republican governors going back to the 1990s and prevailed in each challenge to their authority.
Evers called the court’s decision a win for common sense and said he expects more challenges to the office’s authority.
“Yipee!” Evers said. “The idea of having no say so in your defense in court makes no sense to anybody — it was good to have common sense prevail.”
Johnny Koremenos, spokesman for DOJ, said though DOJ would not be representing a party in the case, the department would file briefs with the court to argue Evers should be subject to the new law.
Koremenos also said the ruling was narrow and did not give Evers the authority to choose his own lawyer in future cases.
Attorneys for Evers contended Schimel and his aides were violating ethics rules for lawyers because they were not pursuing the case in the way Evers wanted, were not conferring with him and did not honor his decision to fire them.
Past court rulings have determined the schools superintendent has broad authority and that includes the ability to direct litigation strategy, Evers attorney Ben Jones contended.
But Solicitor General Misha Tseytlin argued decisions about litigation belong to the attorney general, not Evers.
“With respect, independent litigation is not the supervision of education,” he said.
Both sides heard comments from the justices they liked.
“There’s nothing specific in Article 10 (of the state constitution) that says you have the power to litigate,” conservative Justice Daniel Kelly told Evers’ attorney.
But Justice Annette Ziegler, also a conservative, noted a recent high court ruling concluded Evers has vast powers. Ziegler dissented in that case, but acknowledged what her colleagues had ruled.
“Coyne set forth fairly strongly that Mr. Evers … is a constitutional officer and certain things cannot be taken away from him by the Legislature or elsewhere because it’s given to him by the constitution,” Zeigler said
She was referring to Coyne v. Walker, the 2016 state Supreme Court decision that handed a victory to Evers’ allies after a yearslong legal fight. That legal battle is being revived with the latest lawsuit.
As state superintendent, I’ve fought Walker’s school privatization schemes. I’ve proudly stood by our educators and fought for more funding for our public schools, while Walker has cut funding. We must never forget that under Walker, over a million Wisconsinites voted to raise their own taxes to adequately fund their schools.
This isn’t political theater for me; it’s a job I take seriously. These are our kids. This is our future. This is about fighting for the constitution, and the trust that Wisconsinites have three times overwhelmingly given me. The people of Wisconsin deserve better than desperate politicians rigging our judicial system for their own political gain.
Mr Evers has not mentioned student achievement on his watch:
State Superintendent Tony Evers said Tuesday he is declining legal representation from the Wisconsin Department of Justice in a lawsuit brought by a conservative law firm. Attorney General Brad Schimel said he will not step aside.
Evers, a Democrat, is one of several candidates seeking to challenge Gov. Scott Walker in 2018. Both Walker and Schimel are Republicans.
The impasse could require the state Supreme Court to determine who represents Evers. The court has not yet agreed to hear the case in question in the first place.
Superintendent Evers should welcome greater accountability at (his Department of Public Instruction), not dodge it,” Evenson said in his email. “It’s not politics, it’s the law.”
The lawsuit centers on the powers of Evers. It was brought Monday by two teachers and members of the New London and Marshfield school boards, represented by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
The group filed its case directly with the state Supreme Court, which last year ruled Evers had more power and independence than the heads of other state agencies.
The group argues the Department of Public Instruction is ignoring a new law that its backers say is meant to keep rules written by state agencies in check. The law, which took effect in September, says state agencies must run the scope of state rules past Walker’s Department of Administration before putting them into place.
Such rules are written to carry out state laws and include more details than the laws themselves.
Evers’ department issued rules this fall without first going to the Department of Administration. That’s because a divided state Supreme Court ruled last year that Evers did not have to abide by a similar law governing administrative rules because he is an independently elected official under the state constitution.
The latest lawsuit essentially asks the state’s high court to revisit that earlier ruling.
State schools superintendent Tony Evers will formally announce his gubernatorial run Wednesday, making him the third Democrat to commit to a bid and the first statewide office holder to challenge GOP Gov Scott Walker.
Evers, who heads the state Department of Public Instruction, will announce his run at a suburban Madison park for children, according to an email sent to supporters Sunday and obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The venue at McKee Farms Park in Fitchburg will highlight Evers’ main credential for voters – his years working on behalf of children as a local school leader and state education official.
“On Wednesday, Tony will officially announce his run for governor because we need a real change here in Wisconsin. That change starts with putting our kids first, investing in our schools, and rebuilding Wisconsin’s middle class,” according to an email sent from the personal account of Jeff Pertl, a top aide to Evers in the superintendent’s office.
The Evers campaign had no comment except to note that Pertl is a volunteer.
Since he was first elected state superintendent in 2009, Evers has asked Walker and the Legislature four times to significantly increase funding for schools, by raising state-imposed revenue limits and changing the equalized aid formula to account for districts with high poverty, declining enrollment and rural issues. His proposal to revamp the state’s funding formula has repeatedly been ignored until this year, when Walker included some of his proposals.
Have their been acheivement improvements over the past decade?
“Wisconsin is the worst in the nation for achievement gaps and graduation gaps,” said Holtz, who believes public charter and private voucher schools could do a better job than some public schools. “We’re leaving a generation of students behind.”
Evers says Wisconsin schools have raised standards, increased graduation rates and expanded career and technical education programs during his tenure. He characterized Holtz as a political opportunist who would expand the state’s voucher program at the expense of public schools and shepherd in the massive cuts proposed by President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that would eliminate before- and after-school programs, teacher training grants and a host of other programs that benefit Wisconsin students.
“The ability for school boards to use charters as kind of an incubator — I think that’s great,” Evers said, who lamented that the public often conflates private voucher schools with charter schools.
Evers, who now opposes the expansion of taxpayer-funded school vouchers in Wisconsin, also once voiced support for them in 2000 — when only students in Milwaukee could use them.
“To me, the key is student learning. I don’t care if we find success in voucher schools, charter schools or Milwaukee public schools. The idea is to find what works and replicate it as soon as possible. So from that standpoint, I believe the (voucher) experiment needs to continue,” Evers said in 2000.
By 2001, however, while running against former West High School principal Libby Burmaster, who would go on to beat him, Evers had publicly opposed the expansion of vouchers beyond Milwaukee and said the system’s level of financial and academic accountability must increase.
Evers said he has tried to “thread the needle” on the issue since then.
1. Why are you running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction?
I’ve been an educator all my adult life. I grew up in small town Plymouth, WI. Worked at a canning factory in high school, put myself through college, and married my kindergarten sweetheart, Kathy-also a teacher.
I taught and became a principal in Tomah, was an administrator in Oakfield and Verona, led CESA 6, and have twice been elected State Superintendent. I’ve been an educator all across Wisconsin, and no matter where I worked, I put kids first. Always.
But I have to tell you, I worry for the future. Years of relentless attacks on educators and public schools have left a generation of young people disinterested in teaching. The words and actions of leaders matter.
We have to restore respect to the teaching profession.
For teachers in the field, endless requirements and policies from Washington, Madison, and district offices are drowning our best educators in paperwork and well-intended “policy solutions” you never asked for.
I know we need to lighten the load.
As your State Superintendent, I have always tried to find common ground, while holding firm to the values we share.
I worked with Gov. Doyle to increase funding for schools and with Gov. Walker around reading and school report cards. But when Walker wanted to use school report cards to expand vouchers and take over low performing schools, we pushed back together-and we won.
When Walker proposed Act 10, I fought back. From the halls of the Capitol to rallies outside, my union thug wife and I stood with the people of Wisconsin.
I champion mental health in schools, fight for school funding reform, and work to restore
respect to the teaching profession.
But I am not a fool. The world has changed.
In my previous elections, we faced weak opponents we outspent. I won 62% of the vote and all but the three counties voted Evers last time.
But last November, Diane Hendricks and Besty DeVos dropped $5 million into the “Reform America PAC” at the last minute and took out Russ Feingold. Devos is likely to be Education Secretary and Henricks has the ear of the President.
And these people are coming for us.
They’ve recruited a field of conservative candidates vying for their support.
The folks at the conservative Wisconsin Institution for Law & Liberty are doing everything they can to undermine the independent authority of the elected state superintendent. These folks have powerful friends and allies through the state and federal government.
But we ore going to win.
We hired great a campaign team in Wisconsin. We’re raising more money than ever, and we
will need to raise more. We’re mobilizing voters and activating social media.
While Wisconsin went for Mr. Trump, those voters overwhelmingly passed 80% of the referenda questions. They love their public schools. That is what we need to connect with to win.
But I need your help. You’ve stood with me before, and I need your help again. I need you to do more than you’ve ever done before. This is the last office they don’t hold, and it is the first electoral battle in the new world. We cannot afford to lose.
2. Do you believe that public schools are sufficiently funded? If no, describe your plan to provide sufficient funds?
No.
My current state budget request restates our Fair Funding proposal. Under my proposal, all students will receive a minimum amount of aid. To provide an extra lift for some students, the general aid formula will weight students living in poverty.
Additionally, the per-pupil categorical aid will be weighted to account for foster kids, English learners and students that come from impoverished families.
Furthermore, changes to the summer school aid formula will incentivize all schools, but
especially those districts that have students who need extra time to achieve at higher levels to engage in fun, summer learning activities.
The people of Wisconsin are on record that they want to keep their schools strong. An
astounding 88% of the districts (600,000 voters) approved revenue limit exemptions just this last November. Ultimately, I come down on the side of local control and support the eventual elimination of revenue limits. In my budget proposal, I requested a reasonable increase in revenue limits. In the future, these increases should be tied to the cost of living.
3. Madison schools have experienced increasing attrition over the past five years and increasing difficulty in attracting highly qualified candidates in a growing number of certification areas. What factors do you have as the causes of this shortage? What measures will you take to promote the attraction and retention of highly qualified teachers and other school employees?
There are several main factors impacting these issues. The first is the negative rhetoric that occurs all too often around the teaching profession. The second is that Wisconsin educators’ pay has taken a significant hit in recent years -an actual decrease of over 2 percent over the past few years (and changes to benefits and retirement have further eroded take home pay). Our current high school students pick up on this, and increasingly they are not look at teaching as a viable career path, and in Wisconsin, our teacher preparation programs are reporting record lows.
We need to continue to highlight the excellent work our teachers do each and every day and bring back teacher voice in to what goes on in the classroom. I am currently working with a small group of Wisconsin educators, including several from Madison, on a project we are calling “Every Teacher a Leader,” an effort to highlight and promote instances of excellent teacher voice and leadership. Let’s highlight the leadership and critical decision-making our educators use every day in their roles. The cultures of our schools must be strong and support teachers as they work with our students. I continue to advocate for additional resources in our schools to address the most pressing needs of our students and to provide resources for teacher to do their jobs.
4. What strategies will you enact to support and value Wisconsin’s large, urban school districts?
I have championed several initiatives to support large, urban school districts, including
expanding access to:
Small class sizes and classroom support staff to help teachers effectively manage behavioral issues;
Restorative justice and harm reduction strategies that reduce the disproportionate impact of discipline on student of color;
Fun summer learning opportunities for students to accelerate learning or recover credits (increased funding, streamlined report requirements);
Community schools, wrap around services and out-of-school time programs that because schools are the center of our communities;
Culturally-responsive curriculum and profession development that helps educators meet the needs of diverse students;
Mental health services and staff integrated with schools to meet students’ needs.
I also support school finance policies that recognize that many students in poverty, English learners, foster youth, and students with special needs require additional resources to succeed.
Finally, I strongly support a universal accountability system for schools enrolling
publicly-funded students. All schools should have to meet the same high bar.
5. What strategies will you enact to support and value Wisconsin’s rural school districts?
In addition to the proposing the Fair Funding changes, my budget:
Fully-funds the sparsity categorical aid and expands it to more rural schools;
Expands the high cost transportation programs; and
Provides funds for rural educator recruitment and retention.
6. How do you feel about the present Educator Effectiveness (teacher) evaluation system? What changes would you like to see to that system?
I support the Educator Effectiveness (EE) system. It was created with input from teachers, administrators as well as school board members and legislators. I believe we have administered the EE program with great care, listening to stakeholders from across that state.
That said, I believe changes need to be made. Recently, I have recommended that results from the state achievement test (Forward Exam) not be a required element in the evaluation process.
We must also continually message that the EE system was created to support professionals through a learning centered continuous improvement process. Evaluation systems implemented in isolation as an accountability or compliance exercise, will not improve educator practice or student outcomes.
7. What is your plan to work with Milwaukee Public Schools to assure that all students receive a quality public education?
While achievement gaps persist across the state, our city of the first class presents unique challenges and requires a multi-pronged approach. Milwaukee is ground zero for our state’s efforts to accomplish major reductions in achievement gaps.
I have worked closely with Dr. Darienne Driver, MTEA and Milwaukee community leaders to support improvement efforts. We are working hand-in-hand to provide more learning time when needed, expand access to summer school, establish community schools, and create a best-in-state educator workforce.
We must continue to have honest conversations about our challenges and provide the resources and support for improvement. Divisive legislative solutions from Washington and Madison have not worked. We need more support for our students and schools, not less.
8. Do you believe the position of State Superintendent of Public Instruction should continue to be an elected position as currently provided in the State Constitution?
Absolutely yes.
The creators of our constitution got it right. Public education was so important they made the State Superintendent independently elected and answerable directly to the people. However, Governors and special interests always try to usurp this authority. The Supreme Court has consistently held up the independent power of the State Superintendent-mostly recently in the Coyne case advanced by MTI. Undeterred by their loss, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is currently working to circumvent the authority of the State Superintendent over the federal ESSA law. Rest assured we are fighting back and must again prevail.
9. Describe your position on the voucher program?
Powerful special interests and the majorities in Washington and Madison have spent years cutting revenue, growing bonding, and expanding entitlement programs like school vouchers. The result: historic cuts to education followed a slow trickle of financial support for public school amidst the statewide expansion of vouchers.
My friend former Sen. Dale Schultz often said, “We can’t afford the school system we have,
how can we afford two-a public and private one?”
It is a good question. A recent Fiscal Bureau reports indicate that over 200 districts (almost half) would have received more state aid without the changes in voucher funding that shifted cost to loca I districts.
When we move past the ideological battles, we’re left with tough choices about priorities and responsibilities. Bottom line: we have a constitutional obligation to provide an education for every kid in this state, from Winter to West Salem.
Our friends and neighbors are stepping up to pass referenda at historic rates to keep the lights on in rural schools. It is an admirable, but unsustainable effort that leaves too many kids behind. Expanding vouchers while underfunding rural schools exacerbates the problem.
That said, we all know the current majorities and proposed U.S Education Secretary support voucher expansion, so here are some key principles for moving forward:
1. The state should adequately fund our public school system before expanding vouchers;
2. The state, rather than local school districts, should pay the full cost of the voucher program;
3. Accountability should apply equally to all publicly-funded schools, including voucher schools;
Finally, we should talk more about the great things Wisconsin schools are doing and less about vouchers. They suck the air out of the room and allowing them to dominate the
conversation is unhelpful.
Around 96 percent of publicly-funded students go to a school governed by a local school board. Regardless of whether legislators support or oppose vouchers, they need to support our public schools. That’s where our focus needs to be and what I will champion.
10. Describe your position on independent charter schools.
In general, charter schools work best when authorized by a locally-elected school board that understands their community’s needs, and is accountable to them.
As both State Superintendent and a member of the Board of Regents, I am concerned the new UW System chartering authority could become controversial and disruptive. New schools are best created locally, not from a distant tower overlooking the city.
11. Wisconsin teacher licensing has the reputation as being one of the most rigorous and respected systems in the country. Recently, proposals were made that would allow any individual with a bachelor’s degree or work experience in trades to obtain a teaching license. Do you support these proposals? Why or why not?
I do not support any proposal that would ignore pedagogical skills as a key component of any preparation program. Content knowledge is not enough. A prospective teacher must know “how” to teach as well as “what’ to teach.
12. Teachers report a significant increase in mandated meetings and “professional development” sessions that are often unrelated or not embedded to the reality of their daily work with children. What will you do as State Superintendent to provide teachers with the time needed to prepare lessons, collaborate with colleagues, evaluate student work, and reflect on their practices?
When I travel the state and talk to educators, I hear this sentiment a lot, but it’s quickly followed by an important caveat: When educators believe that the meeting, the professional development opportunity, the extra responsibility, or the new idea will truly make a difference for kids they serve, they become the first and best champion of it–always.
We absolutely must find ways to lighten the load for our teachers so that the work we do out of the classroom is meaningful, manageable and powerful for kids. My Every Teacher a Leader Initiative focuses on highlighting cultures that support teacher leadership, and this often means that a principal or a superintendent has created systems that value and honor the expertise teachers bring to an initiative. They involve teachers early in decisions rather than convening them after a decision is made to implement it.
I just heard from an educator in a school district that is receiving national attention for its dramatic academic improvement over the past five years. When asked what the recipe for success was, she said the superintendent convened a team of veteran educators on his first day, listened to what they needed, worked long and hard to meet those needs, andkept them involved the whole way. That’s it.
13. Do you support restoring the rights of public sector workers to collectively bargain over wages, hours and conditions of employment?
Yes.
I have been a champion for collective bargain and workers’ rights my entire career. I signed the recall petition over Act 10 – and I haven’t changed my mind about it.
14. Are you interested in receiving MTI Voters endorsement? If so, why?
MTI has been a great partner of mine over the years. I would be honored to continue that collaboration going forward. Additionally, I have five grand-kids Madison Public Schools, and I want to them to continue to be proud of the strong relationship I have with Madison educators.
15. Are you interested in receiving financial support for your campaign from MTl-Voters?
Yes, my opponents will be seeking funding from organizations that have very deep pockets and MTI full financial support is more important than ever.
16. Is there anything else you’d like MTI members to know about your candidacy and why you are seeking election to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction?
I hope our work together, mutual commitment, and shared values continue for another four years.
The 2017 candidates for Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent are Tony Evers [tonyforwisconsin@gmail.com;], Lowell Holtz and John Humphries [johnhumphriesncsp@gmail.com].
John Matthews, former longtime executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., called Evers a “hero” and said he deserves to be re-elected. He said Wisconsin “residents know of his advocacy for their children.”
“That said, I do worry that the far right and the corporations which want to privatize our public schools and make them for-profit private schools will spend millions in an attempt to defeat him,” Matthews said.
A spokeswoman for WEAC did not respond to a request for comment.
Pro-voucher group American Federation for Children’s political arm spent heavily on behalf of Republican candidates in legislative races this year.
An AFC official said the group has not made any decisions about the superintendent’s race, including whom to support and whether to spend money.
Evers declined to comment on the campaign.
“I have been focused on my budget and focused on several other issues that are important to the state and I haven’t paid attention to what any potential opponents are saying,” he said.
Wisconsin can slow a growing shortage of teachers if people stop bad-mouthing educators and pay them more, the state’s schools superintendent said Thursday.
Superintendent Tony Evers warned during his annual State of Education speech in the state Capitol rotunda that fewer young people are entering the teaching profession and districts are having a harder time filling high-demand positions in special, bilingual and technical education.
He offered almost no specifics on anything he spoke about, but he told the Wisconsin State Journal in an interview this week that he will propose to “level the playing field” among school districts by giving more money to schools in rural areas that have trouble matching salaries offered by wealthier districts.
But in a May 25 letter to Walker’s office, DPI’s chief legal counsel, Janet Jenkins, said Evers had no objection to DOJ withdrawing from a federal lawsuit over a transportation dispute with a private school in Hartford.
“I don’t think he objected to them withdrawing but objected to the manner with which they withdrew,” DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy said Friday when asked about the letter.
While Evers did not object to DOJ’s withdrawal, Jenkins did inform the governor’s office of the DOJ’s handling of the case — noting in a May 16 letter that DOJ told DPI it would no longer represent the agency in the case three days before the deadline to respond to the lawsuit’s complaint and that DOJ would not provide details to DPI about why representation was discontinued.
Three weeks from today, Wisconsin voters will decide who will oversee K-12 public education for the next four years. Incumbent state Superintendent Tony Evers faces a challenge from Republican state Rep. Don Pridemore.
Evers says he’s proud of his accomplishments over the past four years. He highlights the implementation of Common Core Standards. The national initiative sets benchmarks for students to meet in English, Language Arts and Math, to make sure they’re prepared for the workforce.
“We’re developing new assessment systems and accountability systems. We have a new reading screener we’ve implemented at kindergarten that’s been very good as far as providing information for classroom teachers to intervene early,” Evers says.
Evers says his biggest challenge has been competing with choice or voucher schools for state funding. Students in Milwaukee and Racine can attend private schools – taking with them, the tax money that would have gone to the public system. Evers opposes Gov. Walker’s plan to expand the voucher program to nine more school districts and increase funding for participating students.
“There’s a zero dollar increase for our public schools per pupil and then on the voucher side there’s a $1,400 per student increase for $73 million. To me that’s a concept that isn’t connected in any good way for our public schools,” Evers says.
Evers opponent, Republican Rep. Don Pridemore of Hartford supports the expansion of choice. He says there would not to be need for it, if public schools better prepared students. Pridemore says if he’s elected, he’ll work to expand the program statewide.
Last week, Senate Democrats lashed out at a Republican bill they said was intended to weaken the already enfeebled Office of the Secretary of State, currently held by Democrat Doug La Follette.
“It’s directed to take the one Democrat elected to statewide office and cut him out of the legislative process,” state Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, says of the legislation, which would remove the secretary of state’s ability to delay the publication of a bill for up to 10 days after passage, as La Follette did following the controversial passage of Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining bill two years ago.
Technically, Risser is correct. The secretary of state, which Gov. Tommy Thompson long ago relegated to obscurity, is the only statewide office held by Democrats.
But while the superintendent of public instruction is technically a nonpartisan position, current Superintendent Tony Evers, like his predecessors for the past 30 years, is supported by Democratic-affiliated groups and has been an outspoken opponent of many of Walker’s policies.
And unlike La Follette, Evers has a meaningful platform to influence one of the most important issues facing the state.
It’s noteworthy, then, that Evers does not seem to be a significant target for conservatives, even though his lone challenger in the April 2 election for another four-year term is a GOP member of the Assembly: Don Pridemore.
State Superintendent Tony Evers on Monday reintroduced a proposal from two years ago to increase state funding for public education and change the way the state finances its public schools as part of his 2013-’15 budget request.
The proposal calls for a 2.4% increase in state aid in the first year of the budget and a 5.5% increase in 2014-’15, which Evers said would put the state back on track to return to two-thirds’ state support for public school costs by 2017.
The Department of Public Instruction’s 2013-’15 budget proposal guarantees state funding of $3,000 per pupil and would result in every school district either getting more state money or the same money as before, but Republican legislators on Monday did not express confidence in the total package.
Luther Olsen, chair of the Senate Education Committee and a Republican from Ripon, said Evers’ “Fair Funding for our Future” plan just shifts money around between districts and doesn’t really award more money to schools.
Olsen did say he would like to increase districts’ revenue limit authority per student – or the combined amount they can raise in state general aid and local property taxes – by at least $200 per pupil starting in the first year of the next biennial budget.
Evers announced his 2013-’15 state public education budget request Monday at Irving Elementary School in West Allis.
Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie said the proposal will be reviewed in the context of the overall budget, but said education is one of Walker’s top budget priorities.
“The governor will work to build off of the work done with Superintendent Evers on school district accountability and Read to Lead as he creates the first version of the state budget, which will be introduced early next year,” Werwie said.
Evers also said he’ll run for re-election next year, adding that despite the funding cuts, he’s excited to continue pushing reform and accountability.
“In order for us to create a new middle class and to move our state forward in a positive way, our public schools need to be strong, and the reforms we’re implementing now are going a long way toward accomplishing that,” Evers said. “We’re in a great place as a state and we’ll keep plugging away.”
Various conservative education sources said no candidate has come forward to challenge Evers yet, but talks were ongoing with potential challengers. Nomination papers can be circulated Dec. 1 and are due back to the GAB Jan. 2.
Creating a new system of accountability for schools in Wisconsin could be a great help to parents and school districts and, thus, an important educational reform for the state. If the new system is fair and done right, it would provide plenty of clear information on which schools are achieving the right outcomes.
Ideally, it would measure schools not only on whether they have met certain standards but how much students and schools have improved over a certain time period. It also would measure all schools that receive public funding equally – public, charter and voucher – so that families would have the information they need to make good choices. That’s all important.
Gov. Scott Walker, state schools superintendent Tony Evers and others have signed on to create a new school accountability system and to seek approval from the U.S. Department of Education to allow the system to replace the decade-old, federally imposed one they say is broken. The feds should give that approval, and the state should move forward with this reform and others.
State Superintendent Tony Evers [SIS link] in a memo Monday urged the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee to restore funding for public schools and work collaboratively to improve the quality of all Milwaukee schools before considering any voucher expansion.
“To spend hundreds of millions to expand a 20-year-old program that has not improved overall student achievement, while defunding public education, is morally wrong,” Evers said in the memo.
Gov. Scott Walker has proposed eliminating the income limits on participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, eliminating the enrollment cap and has proposed opening up private schools throughout Milwaukee County to accept vouchers from Milwaukee students. Walker has spoken of expanding the voucher program to other urban areas in the state, such as Racine, Green Bay and Beloit.
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was created to improve academic performance among low-income students who had limited access to high-performing schools. Low-income students use taxpayer money to attend private schools, including religious schools. Each voucher is worth $6,442. The program now is limited to 22,500 students; 20,189 are in the program this year.
However, after 20 years and spending over $1 billion, academic performance data and the enrollment history of the school choice program point to several “concerning trends,” Evers said in his analysis of voucher student enrollment, achievement, and projected cost for long-term expansion.
Low-income students in Milwaukee Public Schools have higher academic achievement, particularly in math, than their counterparts in choice schools. Evers cited this year’s Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts exams and the legislatively mandated University of Arkansas study, which showed significant numbers of choice students performing below average on reading and math.
At a press conference in Racine, DPI Superintendent Tony Evers gave his harshest criticism of school vouchers yet. Well beyond the typical quibbles over test scores and graduation rates, Evers claimed that school vouchers were de facto “morally wrong.” It’s not every day that a State Superintendent of education accuses an education-reform program of being immoral. In doing so, Tony Evers may have bitten off more than he could chew.
Calling a school voucher program morally wrong inculpates more than just the program, it inculpates parents, teachers, organizations, lawmakers, and a majority of Americans that endorse it. In fact, one could reasonably argue that Evers’ statement makes himself morally culpable since Milwaukee’s voucher program operates out of the Department of Public Instruction of which he is the head. What does it say about the character of a man that knowingly administers an immoral program out of his own department?
In short, Evers’ argument goes something like this: voucher programs drain public schools of their financial resources; drained resources hurt children academically; hurting children academically is morally wrong; ergo, voucher programs are morally wrong.
JFC co-chair Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said in the last budget, cuts to K-12 education were offset by millions of stimulus dollars from the federal government.
“It was a luxury that was great at the time,” he said. “Now we don’t have that one-time money.”
While he admitted that the “tools” Gov. Walker provides may not offset funding cuts dollar-for-dollar, he said asking teachers to pay more for health insurance coverage and pension will help. Vos then asked Evers if he supports the mandate relief initiatives Walker proposed in his budget.
Evers said the mandates, which include repealing the requirement that schools schedule 180 days instruction but retains the required number of hours per school year, won’t generate much savings for school districts. He said the challenge schools face from reduced funding is much greater.
“It’s nibbling around the edges,” Evers said of the mandates. “I think we’re beyond that.”
Excerpts from Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers prepared remarks to the Joint Finance Committee:
“We know that resources are scarce. School districts around the state have demonstrated that they are willing to do their part, both in recent weeks in response to this state budget crisis and throughout the past 18 years under the constraints of revenue caps. While this difficult budget demands shared sacrifice, we need a budget that is fair, equitable, and does not undercut the quality of our children’s education,” Evers said.
“As you know, the Governor’s budget proposal, which increases state spending by 1.7 percent over the next two years, would cut $840 million in state school aids over the biennium – the largest cut to education in state history. While these cuts present unprecedented challenges, an even larger concern is the proposed 5.5 percent reduction to school district revenue limits, which dictate exactly how much money schools have available to spend. Depending on the school district, schools would have to reduce their spending between $480 and $1,100 per pupil. Statewide, the proposed revenue limit cuts will result in a $1.7 billion cut over the biennium, as compared to current law. These dramatic and unprecedented revenue limit cuts will be a crushing challenge to our public schools, especially by the second year of the budget.”
February 5, 2010
State Superintendent Tony Evers
Department of Public Instruction
125 S. Webster Street
PO Box 7841
Madison, WI 53707-7841
Dear Superintendent Evers:
I am contacting you regarding your Notice of Decision dated February 4, 2010 issued to the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) which would potentially eliminate the $175 million in federal funds received for services to low-income children through the Title I program. In your press statement, you indicated that you had a legal responsibility to the children of Milwaukee and that you were using the only tool allowed under state law to ensure these federal funds are used effectively to improve MPS. Not only I am deeply perplexed by the timing of this notice, but I’m equally concemed over the use of your authority to withhold federal dollars to “speed up change” in MPS. I find your efforts to be disingenuous.
“Education is all about continued improvement, and the status quo is not satisfactory,” Evers told the audience at a WisPolitics.com luncheon Tuesday at the Madison Club.
In addition to guiding local schools as they navigate state cuts and an influx of federal stimulus funding, Evers is promoting a single federal test and an overhaul of accountability and assessment standards for public education. Under the new system, which Evers said would be formed quickly over the next few months, the state will be able to consistently measure other educational categories aside from test scores.
The test score measurement mandates under the federal No Child Left Behind law drew criticism from Evers for their incomplete picture of education, but he said the federal standard has done educators “a tremendous favor” by showing disparities between performance of white and non-white students.
He also called for a national standard of testing and curriculum, which he said 46 states had backed. He said that Wisconsin isn’t able to truly compare its educational growth to other districts and states because 50 different tests are being administered annually. He also called the current system “economically irrational.”
“Public education, even though it’s a state responsibility, is a national endeavor, and we have to view it as such,” Evers said. “By doing this, we’re going to make our system more transparent.”
Perhaps nothing will test the new state accountability system as much as Milwaukee. Evers went to great lengths to discuss the “magic” that teachers work with many less fortunate students in the state’s largest school district, but recognized a graduation rate that, despite increasing to about 70 percent, lags well behind the state average.
Rose Fernandez regularly refers to herself as an outsider in the race to become the state’s next schools chief.
The implication is that her April 7 opponent, Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, is an insider who is unlikely to change what is happening with education in the state.
The outsider candidate who can change things and shake up the status quo has long been a popular thrust in political campaigns. President Barack Obama, although a U.S. senator at the time, used aspects of the tactic in his campaign last fall.
But some wonder whether it will have the same impact in what is likely to be a low-turnout election April 7.
“The advantage to the insider is being able to draw off of established, organizational support,” said Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The outsider’s goal is to try to become visible enough that people unhappy with the status quo can voice their outsider outrage.”
From her Web site address – www.changedpi.com – to frequently tying her opponent to the state’s largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, Fernandez appears to be trying to capitalize on one of her many differences with her opponent.
“There are perils with entrenchment,” said Fernandez, a former pediatric trauma nurse and past president of the Wisconsin Coalition for Virtual School Families. “With that there comes an inability to see the problems as they really are.”
But being an outsider also has some disadvantages, which Evers is trying to play up as well.
At a recent appearance before the Public Policy Forum, Evers puzzled about Fernandez’s stance against a provision in Gov. Jim Doyle’s bill that he said was supported by voucher school proponents while she expressed support for voucher schools.
Tony Evers today pledged to continue his long commitment to Wisconsin’s charter schools, which provide innovative educational strategies. Dr. Evers has played a major educational leadership role in making Wisconsin 6th in the nation, out of all 50 states, in both the number of charter schools and the number of students enrolled in charter schools.
“We are a national leader in charter schools and I will continue my work for strong charter schools in Wisconsin,” Evers said. “As State Superintendent, I will continue to promote our charter schools and the innovative, successful learning strategies they pursue as we work to increase achievement for all students no matter where they live.”
Evers, as Deputy State Superintendent, has been directly responsible for overseeing two successful competitive federal charter school grants that brought over $90 million to Wisconsin. From these successful applications, Evers has recommended the approval of over 700 separate planning, implementation, implementation renewal, and dissemination grants to charter schools around the state since 2001.
During the past eight years, the number of charter schools in Wisconsin has risen from 92 to 221 – an increase of almost 150%. The number of students enrolled in charter schools has increased from 12,000 students in 2001 to nearly 36,000 today.
Evers has also represented the Department of Public Instruction on State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster’s Charter School Advisory Council. The council was created to provide charter school representatives, parents, and others with the opportunity to discuss issues of mutual interest and provide recommendations to the State Superintendent.
There had been some speculation Burmaster was interested in running for governor if Gov. Jim Doyle didn’t seek re-election in 2010, but she said that type of campaign is not in her plans.
She would not elaborate on her future career endeavors except to say, “I’m an education leader and I want to continue to serve in that capacity.” She also said she will get back to working in community schools with students in a “hands-on” role.
This week there’s more. It turns out that the district is running a $3 million deficit in its food service program, which is double the $1.5 million gap it had last year. And the district’s response? They’ve got a plan to get back to even — by 2033.
Really? This is an organization that plans to take a decade to solve a $3 million problem? And can anybody realistically expect to solve a problem over ten years? You really think you can make accurate estimates over a period that long?
Even worse is the quote from school board President Nichelle Nichols, who said, “Those are dollars we don’t get to dream with.”
In a recent op-ed published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona articulated a series of criticisms about school choice in Wisconsin, opting instead to defend a failed status quo of one-size-fits-all education. His arguments lean heavily on national talking points commonly used by opponents of school choice, revealing a significant misunderstanding of the realities of Wisconsin’s education landscape, including both school choice options and public education.
Recent polling shows that 68% of Wisconsin voters support school choice, including 47% of Democrats and 69% of independents. Furthermore, the liberal-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear a legal challenge to the program, and Gov. Tony Evers agreed to direct more funds towards the program in the last state budget.
Here’s a closer look at the misconceptions in the Secretary’s column and why they warrant reconsideration. His first claim is that Wisconsin schools are underfunded. However, data from the Department of Education —under Cardona’s own administration—paints a different picture. Wisconsin’s spending on education is among the highest in its history. The reality is that we are spending more on education per student in Wisconsin today than we were in 2000—and have more than doubled education spending over the past fifty years after adjusting for inflation, and ranks among the top half of states in spending.
Please stop using 2010 as the magic year that all education spending must be compared to. 2010 is the highest level of spending in WI history. Advocates for more spending point you there for a reason. We are spending more today than at almost any other point.
Thursday Oct. 3, 5-8pm, Ironworks
Movie night, discussion and resource share with pizza, ice cream and activities for kids 3+.
In 1997, Wisconsin ranked 3rd in the US for literacy, and only 13 years later, we dropped to 30th, with proficiency for our Black youth ranking last. Today, the gap between white and Black students in Wisconsin is four grades wide — larger than any other state. Our students across race, age and income-levels are struggling learning to read.
Under the agreement, employees will also get an additional 2.06% increase to their base wages if voters in November approve the Madison Metropolitan School District’s $100 million operating referendum.
Last school year, the food and nutrition department used $1.5 million from the district’s general education fund to cover expenses. Another $2.9 million is set to be transferred this school year.
“Those are dollars that we now don’t get to dream with in many ways,” School Board President Nichelle Nichols said Monday night.
“And then the notion that, well, you have to be a certified teacher to be effective,” Miles said. “Yes, more likely than not you will be more effective than a teacher without a certification. Yes, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean in effect where non-certified teachers will be ineffective. We came in. We changed that concept.”
It is unclear at this time what subjects and grade levels uncertified teachers are covering. Waivers to hire uncertified teachers cannot be applied to special education, bilingual education, English as a Second Language or pre-kindergarten teaching roles, according to the Texas Education Agency. ABC 13 reported that uncertified teachers were hired into prohibited positions, including special education roles, last academic year.
The total increase would be 4.12% — the maximum base wage increase allowed by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. The limit is based on inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index.
The increase would require approval from Madison School Board members. Jones said the union hopes that step will happen soon. He said union members voted to support the proposal in August.
“Given the lack of sufficient funding from the state and the expiration of federal funds related to the pandemic, we need our community to support the referendum to retain highly qualified educators and support professionals,” Jones said. “Otherwise, we anticipate higher vacancies in future years when educators leave for more stable district situations.”
Last school year, 255 employees resigned from the district by May, according to figures presented to the School Board by Jennifer Trendel, the district’s executive director of human resources. That number is a 64% decrease from 711 resignations during the 2022-23 school year.
Asked to verify the base wage proposal between the union and district leaders, Folger said the district had no information that it was able to share at this time.
After months of negotiations, the Madison School District has tentatively agreed to a 2.06% pay increase for teachers and staff, with an additional 2.06% tacked on if a $100 million operating referendum passes in November.
The initial increase would be more than the wage freeze originally proposed by district officials in March, but it’s only half of the 4.12% wage increase Madison Teachers Inc. requested, MTI President Mike Jones said.
The district is asking voters to approve two referendums on the Nov. 5 ballot: A $507 million capital referendum to fund new and updated schools and a $100 million referendum to pay for the costs of operating the school district, including wages.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly recently took to defending her decision to lower the cut scores for the Wisconsin Forward Exam.
Lowering the cut scores will make it appear that a greater percentage of students are performing at higher levels. Underly offered this reason for the change: “They (the students) were appearing to be doing worse than they really were. And so, this will give us a better measure of where kids are.”
One can only imagine the psychometric gymnastics the data analysts at DPI went through to advise her on that soundbite. We’re used to gaslighting, spin, hyperbole and falsehoods from politicians, but with that statement, Superintendent Underly may have just set the new benchmark for nonsensical claims made by a politician.
Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the new cut scores are installed after the old cut scores were in place long enough, since 2012, to potentially yield valuable data and draw causal relationships between instruction, resource allocation and outcomes. So much for using assessments to help inform instruction, guide curricular programming and budgeting.
Lowering achievement standards does not serve the children, teachers or school districts of Wisconsin well in the short or long term.
Most Wisconsin students are poor readers. Each year, about three out of every five typically fail to score proficient in state reading tests.
But it’s not just students struggling. Wisconsin’s prospective teachers haven’t fared much better in exams they must pass to become a licensed educator.
In the most recent year of reported results, more than half of educators failed their first attempt on an exam that seeks to measure knowledge of reading instruction.
Like statewide student test scores, Wisconsin’s passage rates for these exams have steadily declined in the last eight years. A recent report by state authorities even raised alarm that a downward trend in these exams “is undoubtedly impacting the workforce.”
This fall, a new law called Act 20 is taking effect in Wisconsin with the goal of improving student literacy by making sure educators use evidence-based practices known as the science of reading.
The law is also focusing more attention on teachers transitioning from college to Act 20 changes in classrooms, said Andrea Ednie, associate dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
“It’s kind of an opportune time to really learn about how that transition works and what’s happening in the schools,” she said.
Donna Hejtmanek, a national reading advocate and former Wisconsin teacher, helped author the new literacy law. While others question the significance of Wisconsin’s passage rates on teacher exams, Hejtmanek said the results are reflecting a teacher knowledge problem.
Hejtmanek runs a Facebook group with over 200,000 members that serves as a space for conversations and training about teaching literacy. If more educators learned evidence-based reading practices in college, Hejtmanek said, Wisconsin would have fewer struggling students.
“We have kids struggling to read and teachers that don’t have the adequate skills to teach reading.”
“We have kids struggling to read and teachers that don’t have the adequate skills to teach reading,” Hejtmanek said. “They don’t understand how kids learn to read. They’re using ineffective practices of what they had learned in college because that’s what they were told.”
Teachers educated at UW-Madison have historically produced the state’s best passage rates on the reading instruction exam. Two years ago, 17% failed to pass on their first attempts. In the same year, by comparison, two-thirds of test-takers from UW-Whitewater, a top conferrer of education degrees in the state, failed to pass on their first attempts.
1 addition: Does Massachusetts truly have less trouble with the FORT?
1 comment: “Educator programs are required under the new [reading] law to show DPI that evidence-based instruction is part of their curriculums.” I cannot wait to see! Woo hoo!
As poverty rates rise, reading proficiency rates tend to fall.
Every state has a downward-sloping line like this. But it’s not fate. Districts, schools and students nationwide are outperforming what might be expected of them.
Unfortunately, illiteracy remains largely hidden and its impact on our society largely underappreciated. I agree that more needs to be done to support adult education.
But we should also ask ourselves how so many adults, who were once children, did not learn to read at elementary or middle school in Manitoba.
Without understanding these factors, we risk dumping more funds into ineffective approaches, programs and training, as well as contributing to the likely growing number of adults requiring literacy education.
There is currently a Manitoba Human Rights inquiry being conducted into reading instruction in Manitoba public schools.
Like similar investigations in Saskatchewan and Ontario, it will likely find schools do not use evidence-based approaches to teaching children to read.
Unfortunately, Manitoba Education has already indicated it does not accept the Ontario report, as outlined by Maggie Macintosh (Gaps in province’s literacy education probed, Feb. 23, 2023).
Somewhat comically, the Ontario report indicated bureaucrats would resist change.
Jim Silver cites that 192,000 Manitoba adults have literacy levels that are so low they are unable to participate in society. As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding!
It is all about the many thousands of people who theoretically may want to live here one day. Who knows, by the time they all get here, the city might have become considerably less appealing.
Gross property tax levies approved in 2023 by local taxing jurisdictions in Wisconsin increased by 4.6% statewide, which exceeded inflation and was the largest increase since 2007.
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Madison offers voters a $607,000,000 tax & spending increase on the November ballot…
And the district’s argument in favor of what seems like madness? Enrollments may turn around some day. But that’s unlikely for two reasons.
The first is that fertility rates are down and enrollment declines are an issue for districts all over the country. In addition, the COVID pandemic resulted in an increase in homeschooling, a switch to schools outside of public school systems, and a mysterious disappearance of some part of the school age population.
The second reason that enrollments are not likely to turn around has to do with the policies of this district. District officials point to Dane County’s rapid growth projections, but the county has been growing at a steady pace for decades and yet MMSD has been losing students for over a decade. The numbers did stabilize this year, but they did not go up and it’s foolish to base hundreds of millions of dollars of long-term investments on a single year’s data.
This raises a broader question and points to the reason that I’ll be voting against both this and the $100 million operating referendum, which will also be on the ballot. The district is losing market share because it is badly managed. Test scores are some of the worst in the state, absenteeism remains high, and the racial achievement gap hasn’t improved.
Parents are voting with their kids and taking them out of the district. And it’s not because the buildings aren’t nice enough. It’s because this school board obsesses over solving all of society’s problems rather than focusing on teaching kids how to read, write, do math, and behave in a way that respects their teachers and peers. If you want to do something to solve stubborn problems of racism in our society the best way to do that is with high-achieving Black students
Wisconsin’s top education official is defending changes this year to the statewide standardized test taken by students in grades 3-8. The overhaul of the Forward Exam lowers the cut scores between groups, and it changes the terminology used to describe student performance.
In her first interview since the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) enacted the changes, State Superintendent Jill Underly said the changes will provide a more accurate picture of how students fared on the test.
“They were appearing to be doing worse than they really were,” she said. “And so, this will give us a better measure of where kids are.”
However, Gov. Tony Evers, who enacted the previous standards in 2012 when he was state superintendent, told reporters Tuesday he did not support lowering statewide testing standards. Critics have said scale of the test has also been changed to such an extent, it’ll be nearly impossible to compare future results to previous trends.
The changes, which the DPI made in June, affect scoring on the English language, arts and math sections of the exam.
Despite spending far less per student than Minnesota, Mississippi has a better track record than Minnesota when it comes to helping its students of color grow academically. Mississippi’s overhaul of its reading pedagogy and its investment in training educators in the science of reading became a model other states are learning from. Mississippi lawmakers also passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) that retains third graders who cannot read on grade level. The state’s retention policy is not just “repeating the grade,” writes Todd Collins at the Fordham Institute.
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Yet, Wisconsin’s well funded DPI continues to reduce rigor….
This vision matters because students enrolled in well-funded public schools get a better shot at quality instruction and additional support—including tutoring and after-school programming. They get better access to nutrition assistance, mental health services, and learning environments that embrace who they are. It is this vision, when fully realized, that will allow every child in Wisconsin a chance at an education that expands their horizons regardless of race, place, or income.
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) September 3, 2024
SchoolChoice is broadly popular in Wisconsin and the nation, but that hasn’t stopped @SecCardona from penning an anti-choice screed in the Milwaukee JS. This op ed is full of misconceptions we’ll address below. 🧵
Why is @SecCardona attacking a program that has helped thousands of families send their kids to a school of their choice? The only people that are hurt by school choice are public school establishments! Who is @SecCardona really representing?
@SecCardona should look at where the money schools are receiving is going before calling it underfunded. Districts that need more help receive more money, but it doesn’t guarantee improved scores.
Nearly two years after construction began, the renovations of Madison’s four comprehensive high schools are complete.
Funded by a $317 million referendum approved by voters in 2020, the aging schools got major upgrades. Dated hallways and cramped classrooms were replaced with bright and airy spaces geared toward modern learning.
Extra natural light, expanded arts and science classrooms, and new workshops where students can get experience working in the skilled trades were among the other improvements at East, La Follette, West and Memorial high schools, which the district showed off in a public tour Friday.
Memorial High School now has a newly improved arts wing, auditorium, planetarium and commons space.
“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, tomorrow and long into the future.”
Has the actual achievement of students improved much, if at all? That’s a different question that can’t be answered yet.
Results from the state’s round of standardized tests — administered in the spring and known as the Forward tests for third- through eighth-graders and the ACT and PreACT Secure tests for high school students — have been distributed to school districts and schools and, in some places, to families. The overall results will not be made public until sometime this fall. But Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction leaders have released enough information to make clear that significant changes have been made in the accountability system.
The changes — especially in where the bars are set for categorizing students’ performance — will make it difficult, at best, to compare this year’s results to prior years for the large majority of students in Wisconsin, including large numbers of private school students who take part in one of the state’s four school voucher programs.
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“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, tomorrow and long into the future.”
Ike Knox and Barbara H-McK were the only two votes against putting the City of Madison’s $22 million property tax hike on the November 5 ballot. Here is Ald. Harrington-McKinney:
I am absolutely AGAINST, and will vote NO to any referendum that seeks to increase the levy or burden residents with additional property taxes. [To Mayor Satya] The primary reason for a NO vote on the referendum is that you have lost all credibility in being fiscally responsible in managing our money.
Echoing former mayor Paul Soglin (who always seems the equivalent of the UK’s shadow government), Ald. H-McK wonders why the City hasn’t lobbied Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, for some kind of assistance “years ago in preparation for this day.” The alder also indicts “lack of clarity” around funding the mayor’s pet project, bus rapid transit (BRT).
Portraying grant moniesfrom any governmental agency does not make it ‘free’ money. Capital assets require maintenance and repair (operating expenses) whether it’s a building, elevator, fire alarm/suppression system, bridge, road, bus, bus stop, bike path, etc. Any ‘net new’ asset drives maintenance as well as requiring funding (reserves) for future replacement.
A $200 million grant will eventually require funding sufficient capital reserves, which will be a net new obligation for City and taxpayers. When ridership is falling this is a huge risk, and obligation, to citizens. What is the ridership model for the next 5 years, what happens if ridership declines, what are mitigation plans if BRT is under water?
On Wednesday August 28, the Virginia Board of Education will hold a Special Session to consider the Statewide Comprehensive Support Plan. The Plan proposes the requirements that will be imposed on schools and districts when they do not meet the Board’s new rules for accreditation and accountability.
Context missing here is in VA, today, about 60% of Black 8th-graders are below basic on math on NAEP. Some NAEP levels contested, there is NO debate that below basic is not catastrophic for life outcomes. Those aren’t @GovernorVA’s #s, that’s federal. 1/x
Only about one-third of elementary school students in the U.S. are reading at grade level, according to the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. In response, many schools are rethinking how they teach kids to read.
In one New York City first grade classroom, Melissa Jones-Diaz goes letter by letter, teaching the specific rules that form the English language. For decades, most schools felt it was unnecessary to explicitly teach kids these rules, preferring to give students time with books on the belief they would most likely figure it out for themselves.
Now, specific, detailed instruction is taking over.
“It was a big shift in my teaching, in my understanding of how students learn to read,” Jones-Diaz said.
The Science of Reading isn’t so much a curriculum as a grassroots movement best known for arguing that phonics, or the relationship between letters and their sounds, is key to learning to read.
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Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
In my view we’re in late stage imperial decline. This is the “looting and grifting” stage, and it’s very rare for really talented people to want to go into government – they’re much more likely to be found in tech startups or maybe in academic labs or at hedge funds. There is no Kissinger or even Hermann Kahn or George Kennan in public service.
It’s not the structure of the US system, it has more to do with the vibes of this era. PRC is in a totally different phase – lots of kids there want to work hard to build their Nation and still believe in heroic ideals.
This follows the general pattern of imperial growth and decline:
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Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
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.”
Before the 2012 changes in cut scores, Wisconsin was regarded by some national education experts as having some of the lowest bars in the country for defining students as proficient or advanced. For example, the percentages of Wisconsin students who were categorized as proficient in reading and math, using the state’s definitions, were much higher than the percentages who were considered proficient using the definitions by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a widely followed program used in all 50 states.
NAEP is acknowledged by all sides to be a tough grader. To be labeled as “proficient” on NAEP tests requires a student to do much better than is true on the tests in many states. NAEP leaders say that labeling a student proficient on a NAEP test is not the same as labeling a student as being at grade level. NAEP is, in fact, considerably more stringent.
In Wisconsin in the early 2010s, there was advocacy to raise the bar on student success, with the goal of leading more students to graduate from high school ready for college or careers. The state superintendent of public instruction at the time, Tony Evers (who, of course, is governor now), “NAEPified” Wisconsin’s cut scores. This was in line with education trends across the country at the time.
The mayor said the referendum is “the only budgetary path in 2025 that protects our values as a community, while we work to address the chronic underfunding of local governments at the state level.”
“I’m glad the council agreed that putting that issue to the voters is the right thing to do,” Rhodes-Conway said.
The November election will be historic, marking the first time Madison voters will be asked to consider property tax referendums from both the Madison school district and the city. Madison school district leaders will ask voters to approve over $600 million through two referendums, estimating the measures would bump the average homeowners’ property taxes by over $1,000 in a few years.
If voters reject the city’s referendum in November, Rhodes-Conway forecasted the city would need to slash $6 million in services next year and the following year, and bigger cuts would follow later on. By 2030, she said the city would face a $63 million budget deficit, requiring more than $20 million in cuts to services on top of other measures, such as dipping into rainy day funds and hiking fees for certain government services.
“Nobody makes jumps of that size,” said an assessment director from a school system near Oklahoma City. The official asked not to be named because she does not want to “put a target” on her district.
To put the outsized gains in perspective, The 74 asked Andrew Ho, a leading testing expert at Harvard University, to review the results.
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“Last year, you needed to know more to get proficient,” said a source familiar with the work of a Technical Advisory Committee the state convened this summer to examine proficiency targets. But the source, who asked not to be named because of ongoing work with the state, said “this year, using the same items, you didn’t need to know as much and you’re still considered proficient.”
The Madison School District has big plans to update 10 of its aging schools using taxpayer dollars if voters approve a $507 million referendum in November.
But those plans don’t take into account the current decline in student enrollment, and there is no plan, for now at least, to close or consolidate any schools.
For one thing, district officials expect enrollment to bounce back as Dane County grows. For another, they say, the improvements can’t wait.
“That isn’t the motivation for this referenda and these facility changes right now,” School Board President Nichelle Nichols said of student enrollment trends. “It is literally based on just the age and condition of our buildings and wanting them to get updated.”
Student enrollment in the district dropped off during the COVID-19 pandemic from a high of around 27,000 to 25,547 in 2022. It’s now at 25,565 students.
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More on the fall tax & $pending increases referendum amidst declining enrollment.
In 1961, Ms. Colvin, a middle-aged, college-educated Syracuse homemaker and mother of two, was appalled to discover that the recent census had counted 11,055 residents of Onondaga County, N.Y., who could not read or write. She had no experience teaching, but felt passionately that she had to do something about it.
It was slow going at first. In 1967, the group, Literacy Volunteers, was chartered by New York State as a nonprofit with 77 tutors, 100 students and Ms. Colvin as its first president. In succeeding decades under her guidance, the organization won federal and private grants, created programs in many states, won national recognition and changed its name to Literacy Volunteers of America.
A year later, after consulting reading specialists and service agencies, she opened an office in her basement, began recruiting volunteers from churches to be tutors, wrote training manuals, and set up a small group to reach out to residents, many of them immigrants, to teach them basic English, offering pathways to jobs, education and rising standards of living.
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.
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.
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.”
“The way in which, you know, we think about learning and think about achievement is really and truly based on testing, which at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy,” Stacy Davis Gates said last week in a radio interview.
She also said teachers’ low pay is due to sexism: “This society has never wanted to pay women [their] worth, and as you know, our union is 80% female.”
Gates made the comments when asked by the black radio station WVON 1690 to respond to criticism about asking for pay raises despite low student achievement. The union wants a 9% annual raise and money for solar panels, abortions, and transgender drugs and surgeries as part of its contract negotiation.
Playing the race card makes sense from Gates’s point of view, since only “31% of elementary school students in Chicago Public Schools were proficient in reading,” according to Chalkbeat Chicago.
“In math, 19% of Chicago third through eighth graders were proficient,” based on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness test.
The school also would focus on building literacy and math skills through “boot camps” in the first year of enrollment. Beyond this bootcamp, students would get grade-level English instruction through the Odell High School Literacy Program, according to the proposal.
The district administered a survey and held a series of input meetings earlier this year, which indicated mixed opinions from the public on referendums for this fall. That was before the School Board voted to place the questions on the ballot, and before the district shared the exact dollar amounts of the proposals and the list of schools selected for updates.
The School Board and district have already begun requesting contract proposals from vendors, should the facilities referendum pass.
Those contracts are for architects and engineers, project managers and construction firms.
All contracts must be approved by the School Board.
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Commentary on Madison’s tax & $pending increase referendums
Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…
In schools, the podcast was a shot across the bow in a longstanding battle over the best way to teach young children to read. “A lot of teachers didn’t know about this research. It was very clear to them, when they started to learn about it, that it has huge implications,” says Hanford. “Teachers don’t actually need someone to connect the dots, many just needed someone to explain to them some basic things about how people learn to read, and then they said, ‘Oh, my God, why have I been doing it this other way?’”
Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have passed laws pertaining to teaching children to read according to the “science of reading” since 2019—and about 15, according to Hanford’s count, are directly in response to her reporting. In 2022, Lucy Calkins, creator of the Units of Study reading curriculum investigated in Sold a Story and used by nearly a quarter of all U.S. elementary schools, revised her curricula to include more phonics. Meanwhile, sales at Heinemann, one of the biggest publishers of reading curricula, including Fountas & Pinnell, declined 75 percent in 2023, according to APM Reports, as schools opt to invest in more evidence-aligned approaches.
We spoke with Hanford about the tectonic shifts created by Sold a Story, her take on the criticism of her work, and what she thinks lies ahead after the dust settles.
Holly Korbey: Your thesis that students are being taught to read using disproven methods hit a nerve—Sold a Story has been downloaded millions of times. What are some of the measurable, concrete outcomes in response to the podcast that you’ve been able to track?
Emily Hanford: The outcomes that mean the most to me are the thousands of emails and social media posts I got from teachers—overwhelmingly, these have been positive. Not positive like: ‘we’re so happy about this.’ It’s more like: ‘Oh, wow, this is really important stuff that I needed to know. Thank you for putting this out there.’ Those notes are often full of emotion, but many are also characterized with, ‘We can do this, I’m psyched. I want to learn more about this.’
At our last count, about 15 pieces of legislation had actually passed. I have mixed feelings about the legislation; obviously, it’s a way to show the impact of journalism, and I hear from teachers that legislative changes are needed, so there’s a role for policy here.
But one of the problems with policies is they have lots of different impacts. For example, they make it possible to galvanize a certain kind of resistance, they give critics something to shoot at. I don’t disagree with some of the points being made, like the criticism of bans on three-cueing. I think policies like the three-cueing bans give detractors an opening to say, ‘all of this science of reading stuff, we just need to move on.’ And I think that’s disingenuous at best.
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 $17,843 per pupil, which was 13.4% above the statewide average of $15,734 and ranked 120th among the 421 districts in Wisconsin.
Declining enrollment and the latest referendum will send those amounts higher for MPS starting in 2025. MPS also ranks relatively high in total revenue per student compared to other large districts nationally. The NCES data show MPS with 2020 revenues of $17,520 per student, 3.7% more than the average funding of $16,894 per student and 25th-highest among the 120 largest districts in the country. As noted earlier, however, there are reasons for higher funding levels given that the poverty rate for school-age children in Milwaukee is among the highest for these districts and is relatively high for districts in Wisconsin as well
Madison taxpayers have long spent far more than most other Districts in the US and around the globe, with a massive tax & $pending increase referendum planned for this fall.
Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)
Additional background on the Milwaukee Report (Madison’s business community has been dormant for decades on our challenged and well funded K-12 system).
In the 1990s, Milwaukee was widely seen as the epicenter of “education reform” in the country,earning both praise from proponents and scorn from detractors. In the face of poor studentoutcomes and societal trends such as increasing segregation and poverty, multiple interests hadconverged to establish the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the country’s first initiativeto offer publicly funded tuition vouchers for students to attend private schools. Independently operated public charter schools opened a few years later, further expanding the options available tofamilies.
Democratic State Representative Annette “Polly” Williams advocated for the choice programs as ameans of empowerment for low-income city residents, particularly aiming to increase Black families’control over their children’s education. Republican Governor Tommy Thompson publicly expressedhope of encouraging better quality by increasing competition between schools in Milwaukee,following the arguments of free market economists like Milton Friedman. The views of these andother elected officials – supported by a coalition of parent and community organizers, businessinterests, and private philanthropy – rested on the belief that students were not sufficiently orequitably served by the current education system, and that families would take more school optionsif given them.
Opponents, however, characterized the shift of students and funds away from Milwaukee PublicSchools (MPS) as privatization efforts that undermined the traditional public school system and itsobligations under the state constitution. They feared that the resulting dispersion of students wouldexacerbate inequality, fail to offer public accountability and transparency, and divert resources fromMPS, threatening its ability to provide an adequately and equitably resourced system of publicschools to its residents. The stakes were high for Milwaukee students, whose levels of poverty standout on both a statewide and national scale, as well as for the city’s wellbeing and for the state’sworkforce and economy.
The Forum took stock of the resulting educational landscape 20 years later in a 2014 series of reports: “What is the Milwaukee K-12 School System?” and “The K-12 School System in Milwaukee:How has it changed and how does it measure up to peers?” Our research provided a broad overviewof the types of schools operating in Milwaukee, admissions processes, academic quality, student demographics, and education funding. It further analyzed recent changes in the landscape andcompared them to the experiences of national peers.
In the fall of 2023, we took up these questions again, equipped with nearly a decade of additionaldata. We did so in the context of recovery from a global pandemic and a recently passed statebudget and related legislation that, among other provisions, provided K-12 funds and – separately –helped stabilize the finances of both the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. With localgovernment now on firmer ground, the time appeared ripe to return civic attention to the quality ofeducation in the city. Our specific research questions included the following:
● What does the educational ecosystem look like in Milwaukee right now?
● What trends were found in regard to enrollment, demographics, and finances across thedifferent sectors of schools in Milwaukee?
● What trends are identifiable in regard to outcomes for students on the whole in Milwaukee, using both local and national benchmarks?
Milwaukee Public Schools operated 143 schools in 2023 with a total of 59,899 students. That represented about half of the students served in the city. From 2006 to 2024, enrollment in MPS plummeted by one third.
Meanwhile, charter school enrollments more than doubled during that same time period from 7,323 in 2006 to 15,695 in 2024.
Enrollment in Milwaukee’s private choice schools increased nearly 90 percent since 2006 from 15,864 to 30,103 last school year, according to the report.
Besides parents moving their children from public to private schools, there are fewer children being born (abortion data).
I hate to see quotations printed uncritically when the report directly contradicts them.
Here is hoping the city focuses on solutions and not the same dull, unhelpful conversations…and soon. School starts for some students next week, everybody in 3 weeks!
A new @policyforum report paints a relatively fair picture of the education landscape in MKE. But articles like this zeroing in on the role of school choice are unfair (1/3)
After 30 years of reforms, report examines state of Milwaukee schools (jsonline.com)
“Residents in Madison are likely looking at a higher cost of living across the board, whether you’re a renter or an owner,” said Adam Nelson, who noted two other Madison School District referendums that voters will decide in November. “If you’re in the middle or lower-income bracket, if you’re cost-burdened in housing, this could be a harder pill to swallow.”
The School District’s two referendums would add $1,370 to the property tax bill of the average home by 2028.
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…
“how are you criticise the EU/Federal government” and the promotion of cancellation against those who go against the established narrative on issues such as the speed/scope/direction of Net Zero, stand up for women’s rights against the trans ideology or who critique the current model of immigration/integration.
The cosmopolitan liberals are on a hiding to nothing with all of these issues. And why? Because they as a political wing represent the status quo, and what we are seeing now is the beginning of the end for the dominant post 1945 social democratic settlement. 2020-21 I would argue, with the twin pillars of massive state control through the excuse of COVID and the cultural dominance of the BLM/Woke movement, was Western social democracy at its apex and the longer that model to hold the more it will corrode and wither into either a Robespierre-esque focus on equity, or else a degeneration into deep green anti growth nihilism, either of which will kill it as a force anyway. This is why Emmanuel Macron now seems out of his depth, why Trudeau keeps failing, and why the European Union continues to stagnate – they are the status quo establishment and they’ve run out of ideas.
So what then do I think will take its place. Well inevitably one wing of politics seeks to preserve the status quo and one wing seeks to overturn it and looking at the ideas floating around the populist/rightist/nationalist camp we can already see trends emerging. Now I will caveat that it will take a while for these to develop as intellectually there is no fertile “home” for this wing (being excluded from academia and more generally all sympathetic intellectual figures being shunned/condemned/cancelled but substack seems to be developing into a way “rightist” intellectuals can work and be paid to be intellectuals. And those intellectuals will not be drinking from a barren pool and when we look at the expected intellectual influencers it gets hard for classical liberals/libertarians to pretend they have no sympathy with this movement.
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Improving state capacity through slewing the deadwood of the bureaucratic state with a burn it down/drain the swamp mentality.
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Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…
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:
$70.6 million for Cherokee Heights Middle School
$89 million for Sennett Middle School
$84.2 million for Black Hawk Middle School and Gompers Elementary School
$90.8 million for Toki Middle School and Orchard Ridge Elementary School
$108.3 million for Sherman Middle School and Shabazz City High School
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…
Like hobo stew, the cost of living has many ingredients. Pumping increasingly worthless dollars into the economy is one of them. Democrats in Washington injected billions into America’s economic bloodstream in the name of Covid relief. Yet another casualty of the pandemic panic, along with closing schools and wearing masks on the bike path!
The National Bureau of Economic Research identifies the CARES Act and the National Rescue Plan as a prime contributor to inflationthat peaked at 9% in June 2022.
The federal government showered $350 billion on state and local governments. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, spent most of the $5.7 billion federal largesse at his sole discretion.
City will pay you to sue it
The City of Madison spent one-time money to paper overoperational expenses and to avoid hard decisions, such as deep sixing the $1.1 million Police Civilian* Oversight Board, which is now advertising for attorneys willing to be paid up to $15,000 for each anti-cop lawsuit they bring against the city. That’s right — the City of Madison will pay you to sue itself! ( * which the bid document misnames “Citizen” Oversight Board.)
But the school failed to ensure the teacher had the proper licensing to teach a portion of the students’ instruction.
The error meant Steffen’s son, Theodore, and his son’s six classmates would need to redo thousands of minutes of instruction to stay on track with other students.
“I don’t think the problem was on the employee,” Steffen said. “(The school district) hired her, they put her in the position for the job she was going to do, so it seems like a district issue to me.”
The Madison Metropolitan School District realized the problem when another parent filed a complaint with the state Department of Public Instruction, which credentials teachers, according to a district employee. The staff member requested anonymity because they were not authorized by the district to speak on the matter.
The Biden situation is a good example of why single-party states are dangerous — the incentives always favor party loyalty over truth. If it weren’t for the disastrous debate and upcoming elections, experts and insiders would still be insisting that Biden is “sharp as a tack”, and that all evidence to the contrary are “cheapfakes” and dangerous misinformation.
Our two-party system isn’t always great, but it’s far preferable to one in which a single party gains total control. I believe this is also a significant factor in the California/SF dysfunction. Without a viable opposition party, party leaders can get away with just about anything, and corruption and incompetence grows unchecked.
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Madison has had many uncontested elections in recent years….
An increasing part of library specialists’ and district administrators’ jobs has become dealing with requests. Records showed hundreds of internal emails related to scheduling reconsideration meetings and addressing parent concerns. Administrators oversee books across numerous buildings and are struggling with the balancing act of appeasing parent concerns while maintaining appropriate grade interest levels for thousands of other students.
Districts’ criteria took into account a book’s alignment with curriculum and state standards, the readability and appeal of texts to diverse students, the grade-level appropriateness, the significance and reputation of a book’s author, popular appeal and reviews from sites such as Scholastic and Common Sense Media.
State aid payments are influenced by factors like enrollment, district spending and local property values. Assistant Superintendent of Financial Services Bob Soldern told the Wisconsin State Journal via email the district had been planning to receive about $50 million in state support.
Nichols said she doesn’t think the additional money from the state dramatically changes the district’s financial situation.
“I don’t think for the long haul in terms of the future forecasting of our budget … there will be a huge shift,” she said.
Statewide, the general aid paid to school districts for 2024-25 totals $5.6 billion, according to DPI. Nearly 70% of districts are estimated to receive more general aid from the state, while about 30% are estimated to receive less. Eight districts are estimated to have no change in aid.
Dear Milwaukee media. Stop saying MPS is going to “lose” $81 million this year. Or that aid will be cut. It makes it seem like the district is a victim. Instead try: MPS received $81 million more than it should have because of incompetence and is now being held accountable.
Quinton Klabon, research director with the conservative Institute for Reforming Government, said solving the budget gap will be painful.
“No cut will be invisible, so every curriculum purchase, every contract, and every staffing decision must justify itself going forward,” Klabon said. “How MPS handles these summer months will determine whether students get the education and services they deserve. Rebuilding trust with parents begins now.”
State aid is the largest form of state support for Wisconsin public schools
DPI calculates general school aids through a formula that uses property values in the district, enrollment and district spending.
The current estimates are based on the 2023-25 biennial budget and pupil count and budget data reported by school districts to the DPI.
Due to previously reported delays in financial data reporting by Milwaukee Public Schools, the DPI anticipates greater than usual volatility in these estimates.
“Figures used in this estimate may change by a greater than usual amount for the certification of general school aids,” according to a DPI press release. “The department therefore encourages caution when utilizing this estimate.”
Statewide, estimated general school aids for 2024-25 total $5.58 billion, a 4.2 percent increase from 2023-24.
At $607 million, the Madison School District’s pair of referendums set for November will be the second-largest ask of voters by a school district in Wisconsin history.
It comes in behind Racine’s $1 billion referendum, which passed in 2020 by only five votes. The dollar amount Madison is requesting has been described as “unprecedented” in district history by the Wisconsin Policy Forum — not to mention the tax impacts homeowners would see if both questions were approved.
Madison property owners are being asked to fork over a lot of money.
The Madison School District, however, is not alone in its increasing reliance on referendums to fill operating budget holes and to pay for new construction. Other Wisconsin school districts, including Madison suburbs, also have put a number of big referendums on ballots in recent years.
While the dollar amounts are significantly less than what Madison schools are requesting this fall, Madison’s population — estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau at about 280,000 — is significantly greater as well.
It’s hard to make direct comparisons of the tax implications of various referendums, including those Madison is proposing, over the years. Inflation, property values, population changes, and the fact that operating referendums frequently ramp up over a period of time all have an impact.
But for context, here’s a look at the large school referendums Madison and other Dane County voters have approved in recent years.
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Madison, meanwhile excels in unopposed school board elections.
The window for hopefuls to submit their minimum 1,000 signatures to get on the ballot closed Monday afternoon with more than two dozen final-day submissions wrapping up the week-long process that kicked off the elections.
Chicago’s first-ever school board elections will feature 47 candidates vying for 10 seats, a number surpassing most expectations and including parents, former teachers and principals, nonprofit workers and a rapper.
The window for hopefuls to submit their minimum 1,000 signatures to get on the ballot closed Monday afternoon with more than two dozen final-day submissions wrapping up the week-long process that kicked off the elections.
Carmen Gioiosa beat the clock to file her paperwork in District 4 along the north lakefront, where six people are battling it out. The former high school Italian teacher and Chicago Public Schools central office administrator said she was still collecting signatures Monday morning.
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Madison, meanwhile excels in unopposed school board elections.
When Rya Mousavi saw a poster for Wisconsin’s first civics bee, she had an idea.
“My teacher just had a poster on the board and I talked to her about it. She kind of introduced me to the civics bee and I thought it was a good opportunity,” said Mousavi
An opportunity to improve her community. The civics bee is a competition hosted by the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce Foundation in which middle schoolers from across the state share ideas to improve their communities and answer civics questions.
Contestants are asked to pick a topic to write about. Mousavi focused on the flaws of the education system. She says school systems nationwide, including the Eau Claire Area School District, don’t meet the diverse needs of all students
“We’re really not able to make the most out of all the time, we have to learn and a lot of that is because of issues to the system. There’s a lot we can do to improve the system. I believe we have the resources,” Mousavi said.
Administrators are recommending Sennett Middle School and Cherokee Heights Middle School be replaced with new buildings. The same goes for several combined schools that share the same location: Shabazz City High and Sherman Middle; Black Hawk Middle and Gompers Elementary; Toki Middle and Orchard Ridge Elementary.
The district would also renovate Anana and Crestwood elementary schools, bringing the total cost of construction to $507 million.
It’s not clear exactly where the new schools would be located. New schools could be built on empty fields next door to some of the existing buildings, according to board materials.
Meanwhile, money from the operating referendum could be spent on things like staff salaries and educational programming. The district has not provided details on exactly what the $100 million will buy.
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In the preliminary budget, spending would total $581 million, about $10 million less than last school year. With COVID-19 pandemic relief aid winding down, the district is getting significantly less money from federal sources.
The district plans to add more than 100 full-time equivalent positions in 2025. Most of the additions will be at the classroom level, with more teachers and education assistant positions added back to schools.
If voters approve of the school district’s two measures, MMSD officials estimate an owner of an average-value home in Madison would see a $1,376 increase on their property tax bills by 2028. That could be on top of hundreds of dollars annually for a city property tax increase.
If the operating budget referendum fails, the district’s starting budget would still include 107 new full-time positions. It would also retain 111 positions previously funded by federal pandemic relief aid, the Policy Forum said.
The number of administrators would stay nearly the same, but the district would add more teachers, educational assistants and mental health support staff. Many of the teacher resources would go toward the 4-year-old kindergarten and kindergarten through first grade programs.
Total staff for the school district would be the equivalent of 4,192 full-time employees — the largest number of district staff since at least 2013, the Policy Forum said.
but probably won’t because — Forget it, Jake, it’s Madison WI!
School employees harassed police as they arrested an 18-year-old student criminal for carrying a loaded weapon inside La Follette high school, according to the most excellent report from Chris Rickert of the WI State Journal, made after an open records request.
One Kyshawn M. Bankston had a Glock 9 mm handgun, two magazines with rounds in them, a scale and an empty plastic bag that had contained marijuana, police say. The young scholar lunged for that gun as police moved to arrest him. (Their police report)
With the arrival of our latest K-12 Superintendent, I thought readers might have interest in recent calendar activity. On 4 June, 2024, I made a public records request of the taxpayer funded Madison School District:
“digital copy of Superintendent Joe Gothard’s calendar from his first meetings (April?) through 4 June, 2024.
In addition, I write to request the same for Nichelle Nichols, Board President from 1 January 2024 to 4 June, 2024.
Digital screenshots of these requests in png or jpg format are fine.”
