Viewpoints

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.

We need to change something. Instead of blowing the surplus on padding government, we can use it to help Wisconsinites preserve their own freedom and prosperity. The “Mandate for Madison” has lots of ideas from some of the best thinkers about Wisconsin, many of them costing nothing, but consider two giant proposals.

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.

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.

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.

The cops have had enough, says Kennedy, and the long lines that have stretched across generations in some families, grandfathers to fathers to sons who all were eager to serve and sacrifice – are being severed.

It’s campaign season, so the only numbers that seem to matter to the mainstream media are the ones in polls.