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Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Wisconsin must follow the lead of Florida and Tennessee on how it funds schools
Two truths we should all agree on: Every Wisconsin child is worthy of an education that prepares them for a productive, thriving life. And Wisconsin's current school funding structures are failing to deliver the resources our students need, even as property taxes rise. The last state budget showed what's possible through bipartisan cooperation. State leaders significantly increased base funding for all students while targeting critical needs in early literacy and mental health. Gov. Tony Evers and Republican legislators listened, then acted. Students and schools across Wisconsin are better for it. Wisconsin needs more of this kid-first, pragmatic problem-solving - yet, the spirit of cooperation is fraying. Education once again took top billing across state budget hearings, but progress is grinding to a halt, just as federal uncertainty looms. Wisconsin stands at a crossroads. We cannot afford to backslide into the battles of the past. We must continue to build on the bipartisan progress all our students deserve and all our schools need. Letters: I've seen firsthand how wake-enhanced boating makes small Wisconsin lakes unsafe Moving forward will require courage and commitment from Wisconsin's leaders. We need three critical actions in the next state budget, pragmatic priorities that transcend traditional political divides and deliver real results for students: Protect last session's wins for all kids. Reject rollbacks of funding levels or policy agreements – and end the rhetoric that pits students and schools against each other. Wisconsin residents support both strong public schools and robust school choices — this isn't a binary decision. Its time to end divisive attacks and lawsuit threats once and for all. Let's affirm that all Wisconsin students deserve our investment, regardless of their choice of schools. Close gaps from the bottom up. Focus on our lowest-funded students: districts stuck low-revenue ceiling, and K-8 students in the state's Parental Choice programs (the state's lowest-funded at $10,237 per pupil). Last session's budget provides the blueprint – lifting the low-revenue ceiling from $11,000 closes gaps for both rural districts and schools of choice. Advocates on all sides can find agreement here - state lawmakers should follow their lead. Prioritize our most vulnerable students. Provide full-day 4K funding, and reform Wisconsin's antiquated approach to special education. Our youngest minds need nurturing, and we cannot lose sight of ensuring four year old students are funded for a full day's education. It's also time to ensure that services for students with disabilities in all schools are fairly funded - full stop. The problem isn't vouchers — fewer than 20 students receive the 90% reimbursement that's generated heated rhetoric. The real culprit is Wisconsin's reimbursement approach – funded at just 33% for public schools, and straining budgets to the breaking point. Nearly every other state has abandoned this model, and for good reason. Opinion: My wife and I saw firsthand how a simple trip can lead to a brush with disaster The imperative is clear: Students with disabilities deserve full access to the same choices as their peers, and all our state's schools need both a better – and, despite fiscal constraints, a better-funded – special education system. Demagoguing private schools serving special education students is a divisive distraction – let's instead focus on fixing the real issue. These three foundational strategies represent our best chance to ensure every Wisconsin child receives the education they deserve. They also illuminate a larger issue we must confront: Wisconsin's school funding is fundamentally flawed – and our patch-job fixes are failing. Wisconsin funds schools under a model hastily created as a stopgap two generations ago. It was designed to stabilize property taxes (a job it's now failing at) and to maintain district funding levels. Nothing about it addresses students' needs. By focusing solely on adult interests, it creates winners and losers, while hiding problems behind immense complexity. Every two years, state officials are thrown into the middle of a school funding food fight. Students, schools, and sectors battle it out amid heated rhetoric and incomprehensible jargon. The outcomes are erratic, unstable, and leave no one satisfied. No one wins this never-ending game — least of all, Wisconsin's kids. It's time to stop playing it. Wisconsin needs genuine reform that funds each child based on their individual needs. More than 30 states, from Florida and Tennessee to Colorado and D.C., have transitioned to this approach. Wisconsin should join their ranks. We cannot continue to duct-tape our way through this. We can't afford a system that funds institutions and fuels fights while failing our kids and schools. We must ensure every child receives fair funding – at any school they choose. Together, we can build on cross-partisan progress and chart a sustainable course forward for all Wisconsin students and schools. Born and raised in Milwaukee's Sherman Park neighborhood, and an alum of Milwaukee's public and private schools, Colleston Morgan Jr was appointed as Executive Director of City Forward Collective in 2023. Morgan has served as a high school social studies teacher and public school district administrator in New Orleans, as well as an executive with Teach for America. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Evers, GOP lawmakers must continue work on WI schools | Opinion
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Lawmakers should not give Oklahoma's private school subsidy program a blank check
(Photo by) Oklahoma lawmakers have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into creating a private school voucher program. But instead of calling the program what it really is, our legislators have attempted to obfuscate what they're doing when helping subsidize the private school education of wealthy families. While other states call a spade a spade, our lawmakers have decided to call their voucher-like initiative a Parental Choice 'Tax Credit' program. In reality, our state is following the path of states like Ohio, which spent almost $1 billion dollars in 2024, implementing subsidies for private, mostly religious, schools under the guise of expanded school choice. The Ohio voucher program has produced declines in student learning that would have once been seen as unthinkable. Oklahoma is now in danger of expanding the two most destructive parts of school choice through an effort to create the first publicly funded religious charter school in the country, and by attempting to remove the spending cap on our voucher-like program. The fight to open St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School now faces the scrutiny of the U.S. Supreme Court. As The New York Times reports, 'The widely watched case out of Oklahoma could transform the line between church and state in education.' In addition to defending the barriers between church and state, we should also ask what the effect would be on student learning when the state subsidizes instruction of math and other subjects in ways that are intertwined with religious teachings. But equally alarming is state Sen. Julie Daniels' push through Senate Bill 229 to remove the Parental Choice Tax Credit program's spending caps, further rewarding the wealthy. When private school tax credits were authorized in 2023, a $150 million cap was established for the first year. The cap was raised to $200 million in the second year and $250 million in the third year. As Oklahoma Watch's Ruby Topalian explained, private schools increased tuition, which reduced the benefits for low-income families. If we were to remove the spending cap, that would not be good news for the state's already lagging educational outcomes. Research has shown that vouchers, even those called tax credits, are even more chaotic when they follow national patterns. They encourage the creation of failing private schools. In other states, many more low-income students have been initially admitted and then pushed out of private schools, creating confusion for their families and increasing budget problems for public schools. Josh Cowen's The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers writes about how this funding has caused extreme disruption for public schools and first-time voucher and tax credit users who are not retained in private schools. Cowen writes that the think tanks who helped launch the 1950s origins of the pro-voucher movement weren't particularly concerned about school improvement. They used the movement as a weapon against school integration and to attempt to weaken labor unions. And today's voucher sponsors use them to push an anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda. Cowen acknowledged that 'a few tiny studies from the late 1990s and early 2000's showed small gains in test scores for voucher users, [but] since 2013 the record has been dismal. Over the last decade, the learning loss for the kids who used vouchers to leave public schools had test score drops in some states that were comparable to the academic losses suffered by New Orleans kids after Hurricane Katrina. In other states, those students' academic declines were about as large as what COVID-19 did to student learning. In Louisiana and Ohio, harmful voucher effects were almost twice as bad as the pandemic's academic impact. His research showed that vouchers mostly pay for the education of children already enrolled in private schools, and suck money from public schools. And, as Cowen documents, in Wisconsin, for instance, 40% of private schools have opened and closed since their voucher program grew. And, 'about 20 percent of kids left their voucher school every year and most went into a public school.' This indicates that new, smaller voucher and tax credit programs may not, at first, cause dramatic harm. But once they are scaled up, students who attend private schools for the first time suffer huge learning losses, and cause disruption in the public schools they left and were then pushed back into. Given the track record in other states, the last thing our state needs to do is lift the spending cap and give the program a blank check. We should be prioritizing shifting resources from subsidizing the affluent to funding public schools that serve every student who walks through the door regardless of socio-economic status. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
