If Democrats had their way in the Joint Committee on Finance (JFC), they would have passed a budget last week that increased spending by more than $1.5 billion over Governor Scott Walker's proposed budget. Democratic members of JFC also voted to adopt the Governor's recommendation for increased bonding for the Building Commission. Read More »

Milwaukee students in voucher schools are more likely to graduate from high school, as well as more likely to attend a four-year college. That's according to one of the most revealing pieces of the review of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, and now it's been peer reviewed and published in the Policy Studies Journal. Read More »

There has been a lot of debate over the proposed voucher expansion in the 2013-2015 state budget. Unfortunately, much of it seems to have come from the same talking points memo. The majority of the opposition to school choice seems to boil down to the identical set of arguments that have been thrown around since the advent of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. In more than 20 years of experience, these tired arguments have lost some of their steam. Read More »

Wisconsin State Superintendent Tony Evers has recently criticized the idea, saying that the report cards are currently a pilot program and that these report cards aren't ready to be a piece of high stakes educational policy. However, that's not what Evers and the Department of Public Instruction said as these report cards were being developed to replace an ineffective No Child Left Behind (NCLB) system back in February of 2012. Read More »

This recommends that the state's non-instrumentality charter schools no longer exist going forward. It's a bold statement, and one that doesn't line up with the rest of the study's mission; to provide high quality education for low-income students. Milwaukee, which is home to all but one of the state's independent charter schools, has had great progress in these institutions. They commonly outscore public schools and instrumentality charters in both WKCE and School Report Card metrics while educating a high population of low-income students. Read More »

Recently, Step Up for Public Schools (SUPS) released a pamphlet titled "The Truth about Vouchers and Privately Run Charters." Unfortunately, a better title for their flier would have been "Half-Truths." SUPS raises several tired talking points about school choice in Wisconsin that have been repeatedly debated, disproven, and regurgitated over more than two decades of voucher discussion. Read More »

More than 42 percent of special needs students who apply for open enrollment to a different public school had their transfers rejected. That was almost 11 percent higher than for non-special needs students in 2012-2013. There were 5,525 applications for open enrollment transfers that came from special needs students. Of these, 2,327 - or 42.12 percent - were rejected. Read More »

Wisconsin's proficiency rates took a big hit in 2012-2013 thanks to more stringent standards on the WKCE. Fewer than half of the state's students met national benchmarks in mathematics - and that figure fell to just 36 percent when it came to reading. This is a significant difference from the grades that Wisconsin students turned in under the old standards, which suggested that nearly 80 percent of all pupils were proficient in reading in 2011-2012. Read More »

On Friday, April 19th, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau announced the UW-System has over a billion dollars in cash reserves. About $414 million of that comes from tuition revenues. Meanwhile the annual tuition increases at UW-Madison average 6.9 percent since 1990-91. At UW-Milwaukee, tuition increases average 6.4 percent since 1990-91. Read More »

High school dropouts adversely impact the state of Wisconsin each year--financially and socially. Dropouts' lower incomes, high unemployment rates, increased need for medical care, and higher propensity for incarceration create a virtual vortex that consumes Wisconsinites' tax dollars at a vicious rate. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on these high school dropouts every year. Read More »