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Get the latest news and research from Badger Institute
- Three policy avenues to help public schools flourish
- Data center boom means good times for old-line manufacturing, 50 or 500 hires at a time
- Strong foundations, untapped potential: Wisconsin’s economy
- Want to help families, Wisconsin? Stop raising childcare costs
- Wisconsin’s childcare subsidies, regulations fail for families
- How a development tool can increase property taxes
- Wisconsin should stop treating data centers worse than other taxpaying industries
- Why are schools that put kids more than a year ahead even at issue?
Browsing: Media
If Wisconsin children receive poor instruction, attend chaotic schools, and learn through weak, incoherent curricula, then industry and civil society will struggle accordingly.
Much remains to make Wisconsin reach its full economic potential, including matching its strong inputs with stronger outputs.
With important reforms, Wisconsin can meet both the demands of ensuring safe and affordable childcare for Wisconsin families while controlling overall costs.
Tax increment financing can raise existing residents’ property tax bills, at least the way the tool is used in Wisconsin.
Overall spending by the federal and state governments on Medicaid has never once been reduced since Congress approved the program in 1965.
One recent July morning in a riverside woods west of Eau Claire, 13 high-schoolers took turns firing practice versions of PepperBalls at an old steel drum and un-abolishing the police.
Wisconsin is tied for first place among states when it comes to reconnecting unclaimed money with its rightful owners — though no state is particularly good at it.
More than 60 percent of Wisconsin circuit courts use text-message reminders to notify criminal defendants of upcoming court dates, but only a minority of counties send messages automatically.
Wisconsin is a better place because of Mark Schug’s scholarship, his advocacy, his teaching, and, above all, his kindness. His influence can be seen in the countless students, teachers, policymakers, and colleagues whose lives he touched.
A growing number of Wisconsin communities are choosing to act against considerable economic interest and sit out the data center revolution.
At a time when Medicaid fraud is making national news, Wisconsin ought to impose greater discipline on a program that now costs taxpayers $36.4 billion over the 2025-27 budget cycle.
While state law prohibits drivers from driving with a suspended license, it’s not a crime unless alcohol is involved.
Geography matters for what’s called “latency,” the small but often important amount of time it takes signals to travel from a user to whatever data center holds the information he’s using.
What Wisconsinites need to know about how the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program works.
The solution to problems left by grocery store closures in Milwaukee may include a civil-society option such as a food co-op, observers say.
Public school district leaders are thinking about what scholarships from private donations through a new federal tax credit program the will do for their students.
Wisconsin’ recent failures of accountability share a common feature: Power has increasingly shifted away from the Legislature and toward governors, agencies, courts and other institutions that operate further from direct democratic control.
“There’s never been a federal program that’s been as generous as this that the state didn’t opt in,” said Kooyenga.
Wisconsin can pursue practical, targeted reforms that improve accountability, strengthen academic standards and better align universities with the needs of students and taxpayers without dismantling the university system itself.
A Wisconsin law requiring schools to inform parents when their students are struggling with reading is going unenforced in far too many districts.

