Browsing: Education

Nancy’s hope is that more schools in Wisconsin would be a blessing to kids like hers. And many schools would . . . if they received the same amount of funding that public schools receive per student. If you struggle to see the sense in setting a student’s worth based on the school they attend, you’re not alone. Education freedom is about funding students, not systems, structures or institutions.

“It’s becoming more and more important that we raise up generations of young people who know what’s right and wrong, who know what’s truth and what’s false,” said Festerling.

“If we don’t do that, they’re going to go off to these wolves who will eat them alive. And so I’m just so thrilled that school choice is giving guys who have a book called the Bible, that can preach the truth and the gospel, and if parents like that and want that, they’ll subscribe to it and send their kids.”

Parents are hungry for schools where opportunity abounds — where kids are taught to lead lives of purpose for the good of their families, their communities and their futures.

Yet, it’s difficult to create that opportunity when Wisconsin students are so inequitably funded. Students attending choice schools are funded at 60% the value of their public-school counterparts, meaning schools must spend time and energy raising funds in order to provide the quality education that every child deserves.

The landscape of childcare in Wisconsin faces a problem: Evidence suggests that an overemphasis on quality regulation likely has driven some providers out of the market, resulting in fewer low-income children served by Wisconsin Shares, the state’s subsidized childcare program, and less overall parental choice and higher costs, without measurable improvements in outcomes.

My hope for 2023 is that every legislator in Madison will talk to somebody in their district who lost their small business or their job, and ask why.

Shouldn’t be hard to find them.

Between March of 2020 and March of 2021 — the last period of time for which I could find data — 17,364 Wisconsin establishments opened and 13,698 closed, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Almost all of those were small businesses.

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. The school board ignores that and listens to activists, who think cops are bullies.

On Dec. 14, the Badger Institute submitted the following comments to Gov. Tony Evers’ statewide listening session tour on the 2023-25 executive budget.

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.

Schoolahoop | School Finder Schoolahoop is an online tool designed to be fast, helpful and free to all families seeking…

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.