Browsing: Reports

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.  

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.

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.

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.

Evidence from border counties indicates increased economic freedom encourages prosperity for Wisconsin residents.

Nine policy recommendations for Wisconsin schools to keep teaching talent by correcting the conditions that lead to teacher loss.

Facing a difficult market for hiring teaching talent, leaders of Wisconsin independent schools are developing useful strategies even as they look to the state for fundamental policy and financial reforms.

Wisconsin’s public school teachers are leaving their classrooms at higher rates than they have in more than 25 years. Here, we present their voices.

Good teachers are essential to school effectiveness and student achievement. What role does character formation play in keeping such educators in the classroom?

The School District of Beloit annually lost almost a quarter of its teachers on average during or right after the 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years — far higher than the loss rates for those years for both the adjacent School District of Beloit Turner and the state as a whole.

Starting in 2009-10, transfers between districts for Wisconsin teachers began to steadily climb. The average transfer rate from 2013-14 to 2019-20 of 4.4 percent was 3.6 times greater than the historical baseline.

Federal enforcement of cannabis laws in Wisconsin has been minimal in recent years, with only 67 individuals sentenced for federal marijuana crimes since 2017 and none at all in the Western District between 2020 and 2023.

Wisconsin residents report the increasing strain of trying to afford a home. These experiences are borne out by market data showing more Wisconsin residents priced out of homeownership.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has flatly stated that the most pressing challenge currently facing the state education system is teacher retention. Two different analyses conducted by the Badger Institute at a statewide level appear to contradict the DPI’s findings.

Wisconsin’s public schools are losing students faster than districts are downsizing their staff, analysis of data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction shows.

Waiving the work requirement led to an increase of 780 adults receiving FoodShare on average per county per month from 2012-2023 in Wisconsin.

How do other states without an income tax fund essential services? Under what circumstances would this be feasible in Wisconsin?

Adult-use legalization could increase the incidence of disorders associated with cannabis use, including psychosis and schizophrenia, cannabis use disorder, depression and hyperemesis, and numerous other conditions.