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Pathways, a public school, gets $9,200 per pupil from taxpayers, the funding Wisconsin offers to all charter schools. By contrast, the average district public school in Wisconsin spends about $15,300 per child, the latest “total education cost,” according to the Department of Public Instruction. Why the gap?

A spokesman for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson has told the Badger Institute it is “likely that Milwaukee police officers will have a renewed presence in some Milwaukee Public Schools in 2023.” Should Milwaukee Public Schools and the Milwaukee Police Department follow through, it would be the first time officers have been posted in schools since 2016. The School Board allowed officers to patrol around schools for four years after that but voted unanimously to prohibit that as well in June 2020 after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The public is unlikely to ever know how the state Department of Administration came to decide how to allocate and spend nearly $4 billion from three federal pandemic emergency spending bills.

Questioned by a sometimes frustrated Joint Legislative Audit Committee Tuesday at the Capitol, DOA leaders acknowledged that many of the decisions about how to allocate money to state agencies and local governments were made in phone conversations and emails with Gov. Tony Evers and his staff that were not documented.

Dogged by a huge backlog for occupational licenses and complaints by applicants and lawmakers, Wisconsin’s Department of Safety and Professional Services must submit to an audit of its operations.

An all-Republican majority of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted Tuesday to direct the Legislative Audit Bureau to examine an agency that fields between 5,000 and 10,000 calls every week. The LAB website projects the expected release of the audit in fall 2023. 

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu has introduced a plan to transition over four years to a flat 3.25% individual income tax from the current four-bracket structure with a top rate of 7.65%.

He discussed the plan in this office in the Capitol Wednesday with Badger Institute President Mike Nichols in this week’s edition of the Institute’s Free Exchange podcast.

A new poll found a surprising gap in voters’ understanding of how Wisconsin taxes compare to neighboring states, even as an unprecedented state revenue surplus makes tax reform a key issue in Madison.

The poll, of 480 registered voters in December, asked, “How do the taxes people pay in Wisconsin compare to the taxes people pay in neighboring states?”

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

There are numerous ways Wisconsin could move to a flat income tax while benefitting Wisconsinites across the income spectrum. The most obvious solution is to flatten the rate while increasing the standard deduction, as proposed by the Tax Foundation and the Badger Institute in the July 2022 report Tax Reform Options to Improve Wisconsin’s Competitiveness.

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.

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.

Flummoxed by a staggering amount of money and by guidelines for how to spend it, Wisconsin counties and cities are spending tens of millions of dollars of American Rescue Plan Act funds to try to administer American Rescue Plan Act funds.