Browsing: Education

An ongoing series of articles and videos featuring the stories of Wisconsin parents seeking the best education options for their kids.

Wisconsin children can receive dramatically different education funding depending on where their parents chose to send them to school.

What made it possible for Jaime’s family and for 90% of St. Thomas’ students is Wisconsin’s parental choice program, which lets some families direct their children’s state education aid to a school they choose.

Lawmakers who want every Wisconsin student to get the best education possible should make sure all students have the same value in the eyes of the law. The location where one receives a publicly funded education should not determine the amount of funding available.

Robin Vos, fresh off a victory that seals his role as Speaker of the Assembly and now coming on 30 years in local and state politics, threw out a couple olive branches at Gov. Tony Evers Thursday that cynics might say are just the post-election niceties that invariably morph into barbs and stiff-arms in the Capitol hallways.

Chershanta Smith can’t imagine her daughter, Gabrielle, attending school anywhere other than St. Marcus Lutheran School in Milwaukee’s Brewer’s Hill neighborhood. And that’s not only because she believes her daughter is receiving an excellent education at St. Marcus through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, but because the school’s community has embraced and supported her entire family.

At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Wishkub Kinepoway faced two family crises with some crying, prayer and a lot of determination. A member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and a Shawano County transplant to Milwaukee, Kinepoway knew she needed to make a change for her children. She also knew that change wouldn’t come without school choice.

Do the state education bureaucrats, the schools of education, the consultants, the unions and the central offices know the one right way to teach math? That big test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, found that not once in the past two decades have Wisconsin’s public schools managed to make more than 41% of 8th-graders proficient in math.

Right after scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, came out, Wisconsin’s chief public school regulator, state Superintendent Jill Underly, issued a press release headlined, “Wisconsin elementary school students buck national trends in ‘National Report Card’ release.”

This is not true: Wisconsin’s scores fell by every measure since the last time children took the test, in 2019, just as scores fell for every other state.

Milwaukee, mired in serious, often violent crime unlike anywhere else in Wisconsin, doesn’t have enough cops. That is the irrefutable takeaway from two chapters in the Crime section of this book.

One of the few things that all Americans agree on about education is that it must improve. How, specifically? There we differ.

Newsmakers Host Lisa Pugh sits down with Wisconsin Association of School Boards Director of Government Relations Dan Rossmiller and Badger Institute consultant and member of the Wisconsin Coalition for Education Freedom, Jim Bender, for a discussion on the state of schools.

Raising children, as can be fully appreciated only after you’ve done it, takes place in real time. They eat, sleep and grow whether you’re ready or not. So as parents supply children with the most crucial material treasure they ever will receive — a stable, loving home — many rely on some outside help in caring for their children while earning a living.

Chershanta Smith can’t imagine her daughter, Gabrielle, attending school anywhere other than St. Marcus Lutheran School in Milwaukee’s Brewer’s Hill neighborhood. And that’s not only because she believes her daughter is receiving an excellent education at St. Marcus through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, but because the school’s community has embraced and supported her entire family.

At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Wishkub Kinepoway faced two family crises with some crying, some praying and a lot of determination. A member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and a Shawano County transplant, Kinepoway knew she needed to make a change for her children. She also knew that change wouldn’t come without school choice.

The Badger Institute has been a champion of school choice since our inception as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute in the late 1980s.

Reducing Milwaukeeans’ suffering from crime starts young, and research suggests a means. Between the time these words are written and your reading them, the odds are better than even that someone will be murdered in Milwaukee.

Elita Williams is grateful for the opportunity to select the best schools for her kids.

A Milwaukee mom’s take on why more parents need educational choice.

Students in Milwaukee’s public high schools who want a better life and know that school is their only way up are being battered, assaulted and exposed to gunfire or other reckless conduct on a daily basis.