Boots & Sabers

The blogging will continue until morale improves...

M
Tag: School Choice

Jay Z’s Company Pushes for School Choice

by | 0918, 22 Jun 2424 | , | 0 Comments

This is the way.

Philadelphia parents learned about school choice on Friday at a lunch provided by an unusual benefactor: Jay Z‘s entertainment company Roc Nation.

 

The A-lister is making his final push in a campaign to urge Pennsylvania lawmakers to spend millions on school vouchers ahead of the state’s budget deadline, June 30. The vouchers would entitle families to use public funds traditionally used for public schools toward private and parochial schools.

 

Jay Z’s New York-based entertainment company announced this month it was backing a $100 million private school choice program in Pennsylvania.

Desiree Perez, Roc Nation’s CEO, said the state’s public school system doesn’t work for some disadvantaged students, and their families deserve unfettered access to alternative options, including high-performing private schools.

 

“It’s an immediate need,” Perez said.

Educational freedom used to be an issue initiated and championed by the Black community. They have been muted in the last couple of decades as they adopted the anti-choice stances of the Leftists. It is good to see the Black community reasserting their power and influence on this important issue.

Choice and freedom spreading

by | 0849, 12 Mar 2424 | , , | 0 Comments

My column for the Washington County News is online and in print. Here’s a taste:

 

One of our nation’s structural supports that has provided the stability to make us the world’s oldest republic is our federalist structure. In a very geographically large and demographically diverse nation, the ability for each of the 50 states to shape public policy in accordance with the peculiarities of its citizenry is a strength — not a weakness.

 

Our federalist structure also permits each state to experiment with various policies and let other states see the effects. In recent years, we have seen states decriminalize drug use and soften police enforcement to disastrous effect. We should be thankful that such policies are tried on a state level and not implemented on all of us.

 

While we are increasingly losing our grip on federalism as power and authority concentrates in far away Washington, D.C., each of our United States continues to experiment with different policies. It is worth taking note of policies that are taking hold and becoming widespread. Two such policies are sweeping the nation and Wisconsin is not participating. Last week, Alabama became the twelfth state to pass universal school choice and six other states are considering it this year. Some 28 states and the District of Columbia already have some form of school choice according to Education Week. School choice was an innovation born in Milwaukee by a coalition of liberals and conservatives who wanted to give poor families a chance to get their kids into better schools — even if that better school was a private school. For several years, various income-based school choice programs spread throughout the nation before stalling under the withering assault of entrenched government school interests. The pandemic changed everything. Being affronted with the reality of just how bad our government schools had become, parents insisted on a better option and breathed new life into the school choice movement. While school choice comes in many forms, the common feature is that parents are provided some or all of the funding that would have been spent for their child in a government school to be spent on alternative educational options. The goal is to couple the funding to the child and not to the bureaucracy.

 

School choice has become a potent political force in states like Texas. Despite being dominated by Republicans, school choice failed to pass the Legislature last year when a cohort of House Republicans joined the Democrats to vote against it. In the primary election last week, six Republican incumbents were ousted outright and four more are headed for runoff elections — all on the power of the school choice issue. It is an issue that transcends party and motivates parents.

 

Despite being the birthplace of school choice, Wisconsin has lost its place in the vanguard of education reform.

 

Another movement that started in the mid-1990s was to reinstate Americans’ civil rights by allowing citizens to carry a concealed weapon. For 20 years, states steadily implemented concealed carry laws to allow qualified citizens to carry concealed. Wisconsin was a laggard in this regard as the 49th state to allow concealed carry. Illinois reluctantly followed suit many years later to make concealed carry in some form a universal American policy.

 

In the past ten years, many states have gone further to allow constitutional or permitless carry whereby virtually anyone who is legally allowed to possess a handgun may carry it concealed without a permit. According to the United States Concealed Carry Association, 29 states currently have permitless carry.

 

Here again, the pandemic, coupled with the riots of 2020-2022, sparked new urgency with this issue. Recognizing that law enforcement is largely unable, and sometimes unwilling, to prevent people from committing crimes or protecting innocents, Americans began taking personal responsibility for their physical safety. Women and people of color are two of the fastest-growing groups of gun owners.

 

There is no definitive source to know how many guns there are in private hands and who owns them. That is as it should be. A Pew Research study from last year estimates that there are about 222 million private guns owned by about 105 million Americans. Guns are, and always have been, part of our culture and our right to keep and bear arms was protected at the founding. While our nation has always done a decent job protecting our civil right to “keep” arms, states are now doing a better job of protecting our civil right to “bear” arms. What good is a right if you have to ask the government to exercise it?

OCS Joins Choice Program

by | 0734, 2 Feb 2424 | | 0 Comments

It’s been great to see the growth in choice in Washington County.

Washington County, WI – Ozaukee Christian School (OCS) 1214 Hwy. 33, West Bend, WI, has joined the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program for the 2024-2025 school year. Qualifying students are now able to attend OCS tuition free.

[…]

 

Families interested in applying to OCS through the WPCP are invited to a virtual Q&A session hosted by Impact Christian Schools on Tuesday, February 6 at 6:30 p.m. Attendees will have the chance to explore educational options, ask questions, review tuition details, and make informed decisions about their child’s education.

Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to School Choice

by | 0820, 15 Dec 2323 | , , | 4 Comments

Good news!

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to hear a lawsuit brought by Democrats seeking to end the state’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher program.

 

The lawsuit could be refiled in county circuit court, as both Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ administration and Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had argued. The Supreme Court rejected it without comment in an unsigned, unanimous order.

 

Democrats who brought the lawsuit asked the state Supreme Court to take the case directly, which would have resulted in a much faster final ruling than having the case start in lower courts.

School choice is only the first step

by | 0729, 4 Apr 2323 | , , | 1 Comment

Go out and vote today, but then come back and click through to read my column for the Washington County Daily News today. Here’s a piece.

With the April election behind us, we can turn our attention to some of the structural issues that underlie our nation’s decline. The number one reason that our nation is weaker than it was a generation ago — and yes, it is weaker — is because of the collapse of our education system.

 

Once the envy of the world, our education system has been debased by the destructive culture of low expectations.

 

Nationally, student performance has been declining for many years. There are spurts of exceptionalism, but even they are pulled down by the sticky morass of mediocrity that has become the celebrated standard of our government educational system.

 

The inevitable result of a dumbing down of our education system is that we end up with graduates who lack the basic knowledge and critical thinking skills to successfully navigate adulthood or effectively participate in their God-given right to self-governance. It is our collective moral failure that we have failed our kids this badly and for this long.

 

The pandemic did not create the problems in our government schools, but it did lay them bare for all to see. As the schools deprioritized education in the face of a virus that posed negligible risk to children, parents were confronted with what their kids were being taught as they scrambled to fill the void. What parents saw was appalling. As the government schools have scaled back on rigorous core subjects in the name of equality, they have allowed activists to step into the void to indoctrinate kids into the latest leftist fads. Our kids may not be able to do math in their heads or name the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights anymore, but they can easily spout off on the perils of climate change. The government schools of today are not the same as the ones we attended a generation ago.

 

[…]

 

As these reforms are underway, it is imperative that we do not stop there. School Choice is only about the funding mechanism.

 

We cannot rely on our government — its policy makers or its unelected bureaucrats — to provide a quality education for our kids. They have already demonstrated their incapacity to do so.

 

In some cases, it is not for lack of good intentions, but government bureaucracies are not structured to deliver exceptionalism to individuals. Government bureaucracies are designed to deliver mediocrity to the masses, and that is exactly what they have done delivering education.

 

Since we have relied on our government to provide mass education, most areas lack enough private schools to provide the diversity of educational options to absorb true universal school choice. It is going to take a generation to fix this capacity problem. We have to start now by supporting the expansion of existing private schools and the creation of new ones. We must also support our friends and neighbors who choose to homeschool. Finally, we must be unforgiving in purging bad schools and the people who run them when they fail. Our children deserve better than a 5-year improvement plan.

 

An activist court is a dangerous court

by | 1043, 25 Mar 2323 | , , , | 0 Comments

Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News last week:

The election on April 4 presents an unambiguous choice for voters about the future of Wisconsin. Daniel Kelly would keep the Wisconsin Supreme Court on its constitutionally humble and conservative path. Janet Protasiewicz has already trumpeted the kind of activism she would wage to turn the high court into a political weapon for leftist causes. As we have seen in other states, leftists do not have any qualms about muscling political victories through the courts when their ideas fail to win public support at the ballot box.

 

In recent weeks we have learned that Protasiewicz is not just the ardent activist who protested against Act 10 and giddily shares how she will tip the scales of justice when her “values” demand it. Not only have we learned that her long judicial record is one of callous disregard for victims of violent crime as she coddled felons. We also learned from Wisconsin Right Now’s reporting that she allegedly abused her first husband, who was over thirty years older than she, and that two witnesses have come forward who heard her regularly use racial slurs when she was a Milwaukee prosecutor.

 

The optimist in me hopes that some of Wisconsin’s leftists would feel the twang of guilt about voting for someone with such deep character flaws, but the realist in me understands that they are more interested in outcomes even if the vessel that delivers them is cracked. They will vote for Protasiewicz in droves. The rest of this column, therefore, is directed at conservatives who need to understand the gravity of the election and get off their duffs to vote.

 

The thing about judicial activists is that nothing is safe. Policies that were correctly adjudicated long ago by the court and considered settled will be resurfaced by activists to get a different outcome. Protasiewicz has already said that she considers Act 10 to be unconstitutional and Wisconsin’s electoral maps rigged, so expect those to be overturned by a Protasiewicz-led court. That will just be the start of an avalanche of legal activism to roll back important policies.

 

During Gov. Scott Walker’s administration, Wisconsin made giant strides to being Wisconsin closer to the Founders’ guarantees in the Second Amendment. The Legislature passed Wisconsin’s first concealed carry law to allow law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment protection to “keep and bear arms.” The Legislature further protected citizens by enacting the castle doctrine, a simple, but important, law that presumes that someone is under imminent threat if a thug forcibly enters their home, vehicle, or business.

 

As is their compulsion, leftists sued to overturn both concealed carry and castle doctrine policies when they lost the policy debate at the ballot box. Both policies were upheld by the courts. According to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, over 700,000 Wisconsinites have been issued concealed carry permits since 2011. If Protasiewicz is elected, we can expect those hundreds of thousands of licenses to be canceled. And no, it does not matter what the law or Constitution actually says. Judicial activists care not for the constraints of law. That is the point.

 

One thing that the pandemic reminded us is that in times of trouble, our government schools will choose institutional interests over the welfare of children every time. Given the decades of declining performance, increasing violence, and curricular malfeasance, this bureaucratic colonialism should have been obvious, but their collective response to the pandemic has crystalized their priorities.

 

Wisconsin’s school choice programs have been offering children an alternative path to getting a quality education and a successful future. When Gov. Tommy Thompson pioneered school choice in Milwaukee, the leftist institutional interests fought back in court. After a heated legal battle, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutionally permissible for religious schools to participate in the Milwaukee School Choice program. The U.S. Supreme Court later declined to hear a challenge to the law, thus ending the legal challenge. The vote on the Wisconsin Supreme Court was decided by a single vote. Had one justice ruled the other way, generations of Wisconsin’s children would still be trapped in failing schools and doomed to navigating life without a quality education.

 

Since that Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in 1998, the Legislature has steadily expanded Wisconsin’s school choice programs to benefit hundreds of thousands of children throughout the state. Should Protasiewicz be elected, expect those monied interests who want to build barbed-wire fences to keep our children in their failed institutions to relaunch their legal challenges to school choice knowing that a Protasiewicz-led court will rule in their favor. Janet Protasiewicz is telling anyone who will listen how she will vote on issues brought before the court and how she considers it her duty to put her finger on the scales of justice when the law says otherwise. Listen to her. In this, she is telling the truth.

The Education Reformation sweeps America

by | 0800, 4 Feb 2323 | , | 21 Comments

Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News earlier this week.

Frustrated by chronically poorly performing government schools and a well-heeled government education aristocracy that has an agenda far removed from the priorities of parents, education advocates have ignited an education reformation that is sweeping across America. Once a pioneer in education, Wisconsin looks like it will be watching from the sidelines due to unrequited loyalty to a failing bureaucracy.

 

The education reformation is manifesting in several forms that are being lumped into the moniker of “universal school choice.” While the mechanisms differ, the concept is the same. Reformers are decoupling education funding from the government education industrial complex and crafting programs that fund education for children irrespective of their race, creed, religion, socioeconomic background, or school of choice. They are programs that fund students and not systems.

 

Last year, Arizona became the first state to pass universal school choice. West Virginia got close, passing a broad plan that provides educational choice to about 93% of their children. Already this year, Iowa has passed universal school choice. The states of Florida, Texas, Utah, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Indiana are all advancing universal school choice and likely to pass some form by the end of 2023. Several other states are in earlier stages of considering universal school choice. It is conceivable that half of the United States will have universal school choice by 2025. Disastrously for Wisconsin’s children, our state is unlikely to be one of them. Gov. Tony Evers is a lifelong creature of the government education establishment and is vehemently loyal to defending the bureaucracy irrespective of its performance. He has demonstrated his willingness to veto any educational reform that threatens the entrenched power structure and is unlikely to shift his loyalty to children any time soon.

 

While the Republican majorities in the Legislature are strong, they lack the votes to overcome Evers’ vetoes without some legislative Democrats shifting their support to children. When Governor Tommy Thompson pioneered the original school choice program in Wisconsin, there was bipartisan support, and bipartisan opposition, for it. In today’s political landscape, it is unlikely that enough Democrats are willing to cross the yawning political divide to support kids.

 

The benefits of school choice have never been clearer. Dr. Will Flanders from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has released his fifth annual “Apples to Apples” research study which evaluates student outcomes across government, charter, and choice schools while controlling for student demographics. This statistical methodology controls for the fact that government, charter, and choice schools have dissimilar student demographics to provide a clear comparison of performance. Notably, this year’s study uses public data from the 2021-2022 school year report cards from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and is the first post-pandemic look at school performance.

 

The results are clear. According to the study, students in the Milwaukee Choice program are significantly more proficient in English Language Arts and math than their peers in government schools. Students in Milwaukee charter schools (still government schools that have been somewhat liberated from the crushing educational bureaucracy) also perform better than their government school peers, but only about half as much as their peers in choice schools.

 

In the statewide choice program, students in choice school also have better outcomes, but the benefit is not quite as pronounced as it is for kids in Milwaukee.

 

Tellingly, the data also bears out the well-known, if patently ignored, fact that spending has very little to do with performance in government or choice schools. This tells us two things. First, it tells us that once spending has reached a level that provides an adequate level of support for good teachers and a safe physical space, all of the additional spending is just waste. Wisconsin already funds education at a level where each additional dollar spent does not have any positive impact on student outcomes. That being the case, policymakers must ask themselves why they would force taxpayers to pay more when there is no measurable benefit to kids.

 

The second thing this data tells us is that it is the government school system that is retarding student performance. Choice schools operate with less money and produce better outcomes even after accounting for demographic differences in the student body. If the system is the problem, then why should taxpayers and parents be forced to continue to lavishly fund a failed system when demonstrably better systems exist?

 

I am well aware that such arguments rooted in data and genuine passion for educating children do not hold sway in the intellectually sclerotic mind of Governor Evers, but his term will eventually end and we cannot afford to lose another generation of kids to a failed government system.

The Education Reformation sweeps America

by | 1743, 31 Jan 2323 | , | 3 Comments

My column for Washington County Daily News is online and in print. Here’s a part:

 

While the Republican majorities in the Legislature are strong, they lack the votes to overcome Evers’ vetoes without some legislative Democrats shifting their support to children. When Governor Tommy Thompson pioneered the original school choice program in Wisconsin, there was bipartisan support, and bipartisan opposition, for it. In today’s political landscape, it is unlikely that enough Democrats are willing to cross the yawning political divide to support kids.

 

The benefits of school choice have never been clearer. Dr. Will Flanders from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has released his fifth annual “Apples to Apples” research study which evaluates student outcomes across government, charter, and choice schools while controlling for student demographics. This statistical methodology controls for the fact that government, charter, and choice schools have dissimilar student demographics to provide a clear comparison of performance. Notably, this year’s study uses public data from the 2021-2022 school year report cards from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and is the first post-pandemic look at school performance.

 

The results are clear. According to the study, students in the Milwaukee Choice program are significantly more proficient in English Language Arts and math than their peers in government schools. Students in Milwaukee charter schools (still government schools that have been somewhat liberated from the crushing educational bureaucracy) also perform better than their government school peers, but only about half as much as their peers in choice schools.

 

In the statewide choice program, students in choice school also have better outcomes, but the benefit is not quite as pronounced as it is for kids in Milwaukee.

 

Tellingly, the data also bears out the well-known, if patently ignored, fact that spending has very little to do with performance in government or choice schools. This tells us two things. First, it tells us that once spending has reached a level that provides an adequate level of support for good teachers and a safe physical space, all of the additional spending is just waste. Wisconsin already funds education at a level where each additional dollar spent does not have any positive impact on student outcomes. That being the case, policymakers must ask themselves why they would force taxpayers to pay more when there is no measurable benefit to kids.

 

The second thing this data tells us is that it is the government school system that is retarding student performance. Choice schools operate with less money and produce better outcomes even after accounting for demographic differences in the student body. If the system is the problem, then why should taxpayers and parents be forced to continue to lavishly fund a failed system when demonstrably better systems exist?

 

I am well aware that such arguments rooted in data and genuine passion for educating children do not hold sway in the intellectually sclerotic mind of Governor Evers, but his term will eventually end and we cannot afford to lose another generation of kids to a failed government system.

 

 

 

 

 

Power v. Education

by | 1744, 4 Mar 2222 | , | 0 Comments

Here is my full column that ran earlier in the week in the Washington County Daily News.

One of the most important issues on the ballot in April and November will be the education of our kids. This is as it should be because education is not only the key to a strong and prosperous nation, but also the single greatest gift than one generation can give to the next. The frustrations of parents have grown into a political movement that is being felt in polling booths all over the nation.

 

In what will hopefully eventually be seen in time as a positive outcome of the pandemic, parents were forced to take a hard look at what and how their kids were being taught. Many parents did not like what they saw. Instead of the axiomatic “three Rs,” they found the curriculum riddled with the latest leftist fads from climate change to gender ideology to critical race theory. As kids finally returned to school buildings, many parents were frustrated by the destructive, ridiculous, and contradictory covid mitigation policies. Many schools, including the West Bend School District, have seen an increase in violence and classroom disruptions as kids damaged by the isolation enforced during the pandemic return to complicated social situations. Through all of this, the anger and frustration of parents has been increasing because government schools have turned a deaf ear to their concerns. As parents have tried to use the political process to express their dissatisfaction and frustrations with school boards and government school officials, they have been increasingly rebuffed and ignored.

 

Democrat Representative Lee Snodgrass let the cat out of the bag by tweeting what many government school officials think when she wrote, “If parents want to “have a say” in their child’s education, they should home school or pay for private school tuition out of their family budget.” In other words, parents should just pay their taxes and shut up. Snodgrass’ tweet gave voice to the arrogant condescension that parents are feeling from too many government school officials.

 

Parents have an expectation and a right that their kids are educated in accordance with their values and priorities. When that is not happening, they get justifiably angry. The root of the problem is that government schools are not capable of accommodating the spectrum of values present in the out modern society. They are not designed that way. They are designed to regress to the mean.

 

Government schools are political organizations that are governed by people who are chosen through the electoral process. By design, the government schools represent the values of the majority of the voters. When there are broad shared values that are held by the vast majority of the community, this system works fine. But when there are a wide variety of values to be represented, an elected government can only really represent some assemblage that adds up to 51% of the electorate. This leaves a significant portion of the community marginalized, frustrated, and angry. We see this reflected in all of our elected governments right now from Washington to school boards.

 

While we do not have a fix for this political frustration for state or national government, we do have a fix with schools. School Choice is the answer for how we can focus on education while still honoring the broad array of values that parents want to be reinforced with their children in school.

 

School Choice is not a conservative issue. It used to be considered a liberal issue. Many of the early advocates for School Choice were liberals who were fighting to give families who were not being represented in the power structure a chance to choose a school that will serve them better. These marginalized subsets of the larger community were unable to exert enough political power to change the government schools. School Choice prevented their children from being pawns in a political power struggle.

 

That is what the School Choice debate is really about: power and entrenched power structures. The government school establishment, from the local school districts to the Department of Public Instruction to the teachers’ unions, is powerful. School Choice is a challenge to that power because it transfers power to parents. As Snodgrass so eloquently explained, parents who pay get a say. School Choice gives all parents the means to have a real say in how schools are run and what is taught.

 

School Choice changes the dynamic by forcing schools — government and private — to be responsive to the families they serve. The discussion can be about education instead of a struggle for power. If one family is unhappy about a school teaching CRT or having to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, they can have the means to choose a different school that more closely matches their priorities and values. One should not have to defeat their neighbors in a political battle for their school to educate their children in a way that supports their values.

School Choice Expands

by | 0726, 26 Feb 2222 | , | 2 Comments

There’s one grey man standing in the way of providing educational choice to children in Wisconsin. One. Grey. Man.

Last year alone, seven states established new school choice programs, and 15 expanded their existing programs, according to the advocacy group EdChoice. Several more states may soon follow. School choice takes a variety of forms, but it broadly refers to any system that allows parents to take tax dollars designated for the public education of their child and spend the funds on some other form of schooling.

 

The most well-known form of school choice is vouchers, which are direct payments sent to families to cover tuition at a private school or other nonpublic alternative. Other systems provide the money to parents through tax credits or deposits in what are known as Education Savings Accounts. There were roughly 600,000 students in the U.S. taking part in school choice programs in the 2020-21 school year, according to EdChoice. One recent analysis found that new laws passed last year could mean an additional 1.6 million students participating in school choice nationwide. Even with its remarkable expansion, school choice still represents a small sliver of the country’s K-12 education system — which includes an estimated 50 million students attending public schools.

 

While both Democrats and Republicans have promoted alternatives to traditional public schooling, school choice has become increasingly partisan in recent years. Former President Donald Trump called school choice “the civil rights statement of the year,” and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was a strong proponent. Last year’s expansion of school choice happened almost exclusively in Republican-controlled areas of the country.

Republicans launch ambitious educational reform agenda

by | 1020, 4 Feb 2222 | | 4 Comments

Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News earlier this week.

Wisconsin’s Republicans, led by Sen. Alberta Darling, will be introducing a series of education reform bills that will put more power in the hands of parents and families. While the bills have no chance of being signed into law by union-owned Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, they give a glimpse of the good things that could happen if the voters fire Evers in November.

 

The pandemic, and the government’s despicable reaction to it, has surfaced many latent faults in our society and in our government institutions. First and foremost is that we have learned that many of our government schools have not been focused on education for some time. Their priorities are employee goldbricking, leftist ideological training, and celebrating average performance at the expense of the exceptional — in that order. We have seen school officials shift from their pre-pandemic stance of pretending to listen to parents to outright disdain that parents would dare to question school officials’ actions.

 

The legislative Republicans will seek to change the power dynamic in our government schools by putting more power into the hands of parents and taxpayers at the expense of education bureaucrats. We will see more details of the education reform bills when they are introduced, but we can see the outlines. The most important reform to be proposed is to expand school choice statewide and remove the income requirements. Under Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin was a pioneer in school choice, and it has been a godsend for thousands of students to escape failing schools and get the education that they deserve. The concept is simple. Wisconsin’s taxpayers are joyfully obligated to pay for the education of all of Wisconsin’s kids, but parents are in the best position to choose the best school for their child, whether that school is run by the government or a private institution. Currently, there are three versions of school choice in Wisconsin, but all of them are restricted to low-income families and other limitations. The Republicans would seek to remove those limitations and make school choice available to every Wisconsin child. Doing so would reaffirm that Wisconsin is committed to education and not just to government institutions. The reform would make government schools more accountable and, more importantly, ensure that every family has the means to provide the education that is best for their child.

 

While the expansion of school choice is the most important reform proposal, the most contentious will likely be the proposal to break up Milwaukee Public Schools into several smaller districts. MPS is a failed school district that has resisted all attempts to improve it. Part of the issue is its sheer size. It has become a bureaucratic behemoth more concerned for its internal power structure than with the kids in far-flung neighborhoods. Resources are focused on plugging the holes of the sinking ship at the expense of raising the sails.

 

By breaking MPS into smaller districts, each district would have its own school board to be accountable to the people. Each smaller district would have its own budget so that resources could not be diverted away from their neighborhoods to buttress another school that is so far away that it might as well be in Hudson. The plan would return more control and accountability to local families. Small government is better government, and it is even more true with government schools.

 

Another proposed reform will be to establish a Parental Bill of Rights. Several states have enacted some version of a Parental Bill of Rights as a response to government school officials who continue to condescend to parents. A Parental Bill of Rights simply affirms some core rights that government school officials must respect or face legal consequences. Those rights include a parents’ right to guide their child’s health care, religious, and moral upbringing. These things used to be understood as part of our social construct, but aggressive leftist infiltration of our government schools make it necessary to codify them into law.

 

There are many additional reforms related to transparency and accountability, but all of them are designed to refocus our education system on what it is supposed to be about – educating children. Taxpayers spend billions of dollars every year on education with the simple expectation that everyone is focused on putting every dollar toward educating children. It is long past time for government to meet that expectation.

Republicans launch ambitious educational reform agenda

by | 1321, 1 Feb 2222 | , | 13 Comments

My column for the Washington County Daily News is online and in print. Here’s a part:

Wisconsin’s Republicans, led by Sen. Alberta Darling, will be introducing a series of education reform bills that will put more power in the hands of parents and families. While the bills have no chance of being signed into law by union-owned Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, they give a glimpse of the good things that could happen if the voters fire Evers in November.

 

The pandemic, and the government’s despicable reaction to it, has surfaced many latent faults in our society and in our government institutions. First and foremost is that we have learned that many of our government schools have not been focused on education for some time. Their priorities are employee goldbricking, leftist ideological training, and celebrating average performance at the expense of the exceptional — in that order. We have seen school officials shift from their pre-pandemic stance of pretending to listen to parents to outright disdain that parents would dare to question school officials’ actions.

 

The legislative Republicans will seek to change the power dynamic in our government schools by putting more power into the hands of parents and taxpayers at the expense of education bureaucrats. We will see more details of the education reform bills when they are introduced, but we can see the outlines. The most important reform to be proposed is to expand school choice statewide and remove the income requirements.

State Senator Introduces Bill to Allow More Choice

by | 1621, 26 Aug 2020 | | 38 Comments

Senator Kapenga is trying to allow more people to choose schools that will actually provide an education.

LRB-6422 is being introduced to provide parents with additional flexibility to address the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact it will have on students and families for the 2020-2021 school year. Under current law, students may open enroll to another district only if they apply during the spring prior to a fall semester. This bill allows parents to use the alternative open enrollment process to enroll their child in a different district if they believe their home district’s chosen instructional model is not in their child’s best interest.

It also gives parents the tools to make this decision without the threat of a veto from their home district. Finally, the bill removes the enrollment cap that currently limits how many students from a specific district can participate in the state choice programs and allows choice applications to be processed on a rolling basis throughout this coming school year.

Defund government schools

by | 0649, 25 Aug 2020 | , | 17 Comments

My column for the Washington County Daily News is online and in print. Here’s a part:

The problem we have in America is not in the collective support for education. We have proven time and time again that we, as a people, will dig deep into our pockets to support education. The problem we have is that we have put our trust in too many government schools that routinely fail in their duty to provide the education for which we are paying.

For decades, we have seen educational outcomes remain static or decline as the taxpayers continue to shovel more and more cash into the flames. We are spending more than ever on government schools and our kids are getting a worse education than their parents or their grandparents. Now as COVID has laid bare the priorities of the people who lead our government school systems, we see why. Providing in-person classroom teaching is proven to be the most effective method for educating most kids, but when push comes to shove, educating kids is less of a priority than servicing the political clout of government employees. 

[…]

One cannot claim to support education and then continue to support government schools that are refusing to provide a quality education. We must put our money where our hearts and mouths are and spend our money on people and schools that are striving to educate kids despite the obstacles. We should lavishly fund true educators and cut off those who would continue to collect a paycheck while cowering in their virtual basement.

Wisconsin was an innovator in creating school choice for families to choose better schools for their kids even when their economic circumstances would not allow it. School choice was a conscious acknowledgment that wealthier families have always had the choice to send their kids to better schools and the taxpayers should enable the same choice for all families. The politicians have shackled Wisconsin’s three school choice programs with income restrictions, onerous deadlines, and enrollment caps. The decision by some government school districts to intentionally provide a substandard education provides ample justification to unshackle our school choice programs and allow every family to make the choices that wealthier families are already making.

If we truly believe in the power and importance of education, then we must stop supporting government institutions that have long since demonstrated that they are incapable, and in recent revelations, unwilling to provide the education that our kids deserve. We must redirect our hard-earned and painfully taxed dollars to people and institutions who value education for kids as much as their parents do.

Billions for education. Not one cent for tribute.

Choice Works

by | 1221, 30 Jul 1919 | , | 14 Comments

The studies keep stacking up.

This study is a follow-on to the School Choice Demonstration Project that was commissioned by the state of Wisconsin in the mid 2000s. Researchers from the University of Arkansas tracked the progress of students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) along with a matched sample of students in traditional public schools. The matching method used here allows for the best measure of the true effect of an intervention outside of lotteries, which didn’t occur in Milwaukee.

There are two sets of results in the study, one for students that were in 9thgrade at baseline and one for students who were in 3rd through 8thgrade. Among 9th graders, effects were found on enrollment but not on graduation. Among 3rd through 8th graders, the study also found an effect on enrollment. They find that 50 percent of MPCP students in this group enrolled in college compared to 45 percent of Milwaukee Public Schools students. This difference was statistically significant.

The most compelling finding, however, is when the researchers examined college graduation. By April of 2019 when the data was collected, 11 percent of MPCP students in their sample had graduated from a four-year college, compared with 8 percent of students in the public school control group. In other words, MPCP students were 38 percent more likely to graduate from four-year colleges than their public school peers.

Last year’s version of this study found that students in the MPCP were more likely to enroll in college, but not to graduate. It appears that an additional year of data has had a dramatic effect on the findings.

There are a lot of factors that go into something like this – not least of which is that, by and large, the parents who use choice care about their kids’ education and are likely more involved. Parental involvement and support for education in the home are critical factors for student success.

But the other huge factor is the quality and nature of the education being provided. Not all schools provide a good education and not all education styles work for every student. Giving parents the ability to choose a god school that delivers education in a way that works for their kids is another critical factor for student success.

Fitzgerald Responds to Evers’ Proposed Assault on School Choice

by | 2043, 25 Feb 1919 | | 16 Comments

Yup. Evers’ budget is shaping up to be a liberal manifesto with little room for compromise.

[Madison, WI] — Following Governor Evers’ announcement that he plans to freeze voucher school enrollment for low-income students, Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald released the following statement:

“Governor Evers’ plans would do immense harm to the voucher program and create uncertainty for schools, students, and their families. The program has expanded educational opportunities throughout Wisconsin and helped children escape failing schools.

“For nearly ten years Governor Evers helped to implement the choice program as the head of the Department of Public Instruction. He has turned his back on the very families the policies he enacted sought to help. Why are some of the first targets of his budget minority families, low-income students, and parochial schools from around the state?

“Wisconsinites should have more choices when it comes to the education of their children, not fewer. Budget leaks of far-left proposals like these only make bipartisan compromise more difficult. Republicans in the Legislature have spent years helping build the voucher program. We will not support a budget that includes this proposal.”

Wisconsin Knows How to Provide Great Education

by | 1703, 21 Jan 1919 | | 4 Comments

Good stuff.

Dive Deeper: Wisconsin has a rich history of providing parents and families with education options that best serve their children.

  • Wisconsin is home to the nation’s oldest private voucher program in the country. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), created with bipartisan support in 1990, now provides education options to 28,000 students in Wisconsin’s largest city.
  • 60,000 students use Wisconsin’s open enrollment program, a form of school choice where students can enroll in another public school district.
  • 42,000 students attend public charter schools – which happen to be some of the highest performing schools in the state.
  • 10,000 students attend private schools in the Racine Parental Choice Program (3,000) and the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program (7,000), new and growing voucher programs.
  • 650 Wisconsin students use the Special Needs Scholarship Program, a program designed to provide low-income students with special needs with the option to attend a private school.

The Facts: School choice in Wisconsin has been the subject of a number of rigorous academic studies and research. Some important findings include:

Government Schools Use Kids for Political Activism

by | 0806, 14 Mar 1818 | , , | 13 Comments

Today we are going to see our government schools encourage and facilitate the use of our children to agitate in support of a political issue. It is an abhorrent abuse of power.

Students across the country and around the world are expected to take part in a National School Walkout today in a call on Congress to pass tighter gun control laws.

The ENOUGH National School Walkout will be held this morning — exactly one month after the mass shooting at a Florida high school that killed 17 people and sent shock waves across the nation.

Freedom of Choice

by | 0713, 20 Feb 1818 | , | 6 Comments

My column for the Washington County Daily News is online. I had actually planned to write this column before I noticed that it’s School Choice Week. Serendipitous, don’t you think? Here you go:

When children and philosophers think about government, they will often romanticize the philosopher king or benevolent dictator as the ideal form of government. The idea of a wise, thoughtful, kind, and generous ruler making decisions to correct the wickedness of ignorant people for the benefit of the entire society is a tempting and alluring story. But history has shown us that such fantasies are best left on the pages of storybooks and treatises. They have little relevance in the actual history of mankind.

When our founders began on their journey of self-governance, it was largely a reaction to the tyranny of monarchical rule. As the spark of the Reformation helped ignite the flames of the Enlightenment, people began to consider the notion that they were not only capable, but entitled, to rule themselves. Such thoughts traveled to America and made the yoke of a distant monarchy weigh heavy. Finally, our founders cast off that yoke and began the great American experiment of self-governance, which continues to this day.

Our founders were students of history and recognized that one of the critical footings of successful self-governance is education. Indeed, only an educated people governing themselves could can off the abuses of tyranny so often inflicted by the cruel on the ignorant. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Jarvis in 1820, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

In order to ensure that the people were educated enough to govern themselves, the founders viewed it as a duty of government to provide the people an education. Not deemed a responsibility of the federal government, our founders worked hard to enshrine the responsibility to provide an education into the state constitutions and local charters. It is an important ethos that has helped carry our nation into its third century of self-rule.

As a people, we have decided that it is critical for our republic to not only provide, but also to require that every citizen be educated. While rooted in the preservation of our liberty, compulsory universal education also has significant secondary consequences like raising the standard of living, enabling innovation and reducing poverty.

Whereas we all agree that it is in the best interests of our liberty and our general society to require and provide for universal education through our governments, there is less agreement about how that education should be delivered. At the root of the issue is that while we all generally agree that we should use our collective tax dollars to fund education, there is no rational basis for the government to own the means of delivering that education.

Education is one of the few areas of civil society where we insist that the government both fund and own the means of production for a public good. For example, in transportation, the government pays for infrastructure, but utilizes mostly private enterprises to complete the work. When it comes to welfare, we all generally agree that the government should pay for the indigent, but there are not government-owned grocery stores. In fact, there has been strong push back to President Donald Trump’s idea to provide packages of government groceries to welfare recipients instead of letting them choose their own groceries.

In the 21st century, the idea that the only way to provide a good education is for the government to own, manage and run the schools is as antiquated as the boys-only one-room school house. As our society speeds up, the rigidity and sluggishness of the public schools have struggled to keep pace. That fact, coupled with the frustration from some that some public schools have become centers of Neo-Marxist indoctrination instead of education, is part of what has led to a majority of states offering some form of school choice in the form of vouchers, education savings accounts and/or tax exemptions for private schools.

The heart of the school choice movement is the recognition that every child is precious and unique. Each child deserves the educational environment in which they can best thrive, and the child’s parents — not politicians — are the most informed, most interested and most invested in making decisions about their child’s education. For some parents, that choice may be a government-run school. For some it might be a religious school. For some it might be an online or private school. For some it might be homeschooling or an immersion school.

The point is that it is the parents who should decide and our societal obligation and commitment is to ensure that money, within reason, is not the sole determinant of educational choice. The rich already have all of these choices. School choice levels the field by ensuring that people of all economic means also have choices.

If an educated people is a free people, then we must free our education system to reach as many children as possible. Our founders were willing to tear down old societal structures to build a better future. Are we willing to do the same?

Florida to Consider Vouchers for Victims of Bullying

by | 1413, 12 Feb 1818 | | 11 Comments

This just seems like a bad idea.

A proposal being weighed in the Florida legislature would allow children who have been bullied to receive a state-funded voucher to attend private school.

The grants — called the “Hope Scholarships” — would allow children who say they have been bullied to be eligible for a voucher of $6,800 a year to go to private school, NBC News reported.

The scholarships would not be based on income.

Students whose parents tell administrators their children have been bullied or harassed would be eligible for the program.

The funding would come from car buyers who could volunteer $105 from their registration fee toward the program, according to NBC News.

First, the funding mechanism is all screwed up. There’s no way that it’s reliable or adjustable to demand.

Second, the requirements are wide open for fraud. Anyone can claim they were “bullied or harassed” and whose to say that they weren’t? In an age when we are defining an off color comment as “harassment,” virtually anyone could make a valid claim for the voucher.

I’ve been a big supporter of vouchers for a long time. But if it makes sense for the public to fund education for children irrespective of the delivery apparatus, then it makes sense. What doesn’t make sense if for the government to keep erecting weird hurdles that segregate the kids’ eligibility based on arbitrary factors.

Login | Register

Archives

Categories

Pin It on Pinterest