Update: Vote in the new poll!
Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed 2013-15 budget is not a pretty one for South Milwaukee schools — and the district wants you to contact local legislators and other lawmakers to tell them about it.
From a memo posted on the school district website …
The Governor’s budget for 2013-15 is yet another reduction to K-12 public education, in a period where there is over $1.7 billion of new funds available to allocate in the state budget.
- The Governor is proposing that the available funds in the State budget be allocated to expand the number and cost of voucher and charter schools in Wisconsin – this money reduces the amount available to public schools.
- The Governor has allocated a 1% increase in state aid to K-12 education, but this is NOT ADDITIONAL FUNDS FOR SCHOOLS. This is only a property tax reduction. The Governor must allow school districts to increase the revenue limit. An increase in revenue limits enables schools to sustain programs whereas the state aid in the Governor’s budget is only going to provide property tax relief.
- Tell the legislators that public schools need a per pupil increase to the revenue limit.
The upshot? The South Milwaukee School District would face a more than $365,000 budget deficit if Walker’s budget passes. That would surely mean cuts for a district that has already dealt with more than its fair share.
Preliminary budget recommendations are expected on March 20. In the meantime, hopefully the state funding scenario will improve — although I certainly have my doubts.
It’s clear Gov. Walker and many Republicans have decided to place their bet with voucher schools … and not with public education. As the proud parent of two Rawson Elementary students, I think that’s wrong. Fix public education. Invest in it. Fund it properly. Don’t encourage its demise in favor of a voucher system that has yet to demonstrate results (and may never do so).
You can learn more about the district’s budget plight on this page on its website. As you do that, I think I’m going to call my legislators … and I encourage you to do the same.
South Milwaukee Blog 
Here we go again. Anything that gives parents a choice in using or not using a public school is wrong-headed and against public education. If our public schools – not necessarily all those in WI – are so great why are our rankings in the world continuing to drop? Why are our children so ignorant of our nation’s history? Why are our employers having such a hard time finding qualified workers?
Giving parents a choice, is NEVER wrong.
Let me be clear: I’m not advocating against choice — nor even for the end of voucher schools. But I am against increasing funding for these schools (and expanding the number of students and districts that can use them) when there really is no data that I know of demonstrating their effectiveness.
Enough with the theory about the so-called benefits of “education competition.” Show me the results!
And even if you are OK with voucher school expansion, I think it’s wrong to divert funds from public schools to pay for these alternatives. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — of course public schools will fail if you take funding from them and shift it to voucher schools and other priorities. Sadly, I think some people want just that to happen. Not me. Not for my kids.
Will fail? How about they pretty much are already! The education system worked much better before the government co-opted it, unionized it, and turned it into a social experiment undermining parents say in how and what their children are taught. If funding was the measure for how well schools perform why aren’t most public school kids outperforming non-public schooled kids by an extremely large margin? Do the studies that report similar results mention the number of public school kids that even make it all the way through high school? When the amount of administrative bureaucracy and the influence of the teacher’s unions is reduced – thank God for Act 10 – our public schools can get back to actually educating our children.
There are absolutely failing schools out there … but South Milwaukee’s are not among them. Far from it. The proposed budget, however, impacts all schools — including making it harder for the strong ones to continue to thrive.
For those schools that are failing, let’s make them better, not give up on them by cutting their funding and making it harder to improve. Now, I fully agree with you that funding is not a performance measure. But it sure helps.
I’m all for choice in schooling. But that choice should be made by parents. If they don’t want their kids to go to a public school, then they should have to pay for their kids to go to a private school. I went to a private school all the way up until 8th grade and my parents paid good money for me to go there. For high school they no longer wanted to pay the thousands of dollars every year for me to go there. Did I see a difference, yes I did, to me high school was easy because I had already covered a lot of the basic math and other things back before I even started high school. I still feel as though I received a good education in high school and there are teachers who care there (MPS-Bay View High School which also had a great construction program, that the private schools I looked at did not have) If parents want their kids to go to better schools then they should have to pay for that option, not the city or state, who is already providing free education. If they can’t afford private education, well then they shouldn’t have had the kids, or they’ll have to accept the education that’s given to them.
Why would you want to penalize a family that wants to have a choice but can’t afford it? We are ALL forced to pay the taxes that pay for the public schools whether we want to use them or not and whether we even have any kids. If you are not for vouchers/school choice then let those who want to opt out of paying the taxes for public schools so they could afford a choice? They HAVE TO accept what’s GIVEN to them? That sounds to me like a country that collapsed back in the late ’80s.
Schooling is neither easy nor cheap. I used to be much more for vouchers / school choice, but have changed my mind. The better students tend to come from more educated households and those homes tend to be the first to remove their children from public schools and put them into private schools because they can more afford the remainder of the tuition. The students that help the average performance rise are thus removed and the schools then rank lower. Removing or decreasing these incentives helps ‘correct’ this issue. I’m not saying that school choice is wholly bad, but it does negatively affect public schools and thatis bad.
If, as has been publicized recently, the voucher schools are doing no better than the regular public schools, what is the point in expanding the program? A greater number of under-performing schools surely cannot be the answer to the education problem. That sounds like the old “re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic” argument. Thus far, it seems as though the chief purpose of expanding voucher schools is to punish the public school systems. Financial punishment of districts, in the form of increasing voucher school funding, only serves to dilute the failure across a larger number of schools.
Act 10 already took away the power of the teachers to influence the work rules and other aspects of the educational process in their respective districts, in addition to bestowing financial savings on the school districts. Theoretically then, the districts should be free to implement the rules and programs that they have been waiting and wanting to enact, but for the teachers union. If the districts now have that freedom from teacher opposition, the districts should be given the opportunity to more effectively carry out their mission before decimating the budgets even further.
If the goal was to destroy the influence of the teachers union to allow the district to realize its potential, then give them a year or two to make that happen. If the goal was to destroy the influence of the teachers union and then destroy the notion of public schooling as we know it, then the current plan serves that purpose. All we are going to end up with, at this pace, is a greater number of our public schools being underfunded, and a bunch of voucher schools that perform no better.
We are diluting the educational pool even more than it already is.
I don’t think that giving parents more of a choice in where they can afford to educate their kids is diluting anything. Confiscatory taxes have taken that choice away from everyone but the more well off or those that sacrifice what others seem to need to have in order to live the lifestyle they want. Act 10 took nothing away from teachers – it gave back fiscal control to the taxpayers that were being ripped off by the union leaders. If school administrators can’t manage with the additional funds that they now have due to Act 10 then they are guilty of malfeasance. From what I have been able to determine it seems that the studies showing no better performance for voucher/charter schools have some kind of arcane formula that makes allowances for families’ financial, racial and geographic situation and not straight performance. No matter – how can more choice be a negative?
The purpose of public supported education like a lot of tax supported services is to provide a basic level of education for all, not necessarily the best possible. If you have the means, you can pay for a better education, just like you can pay for better food, clothing, housing, healthcare, transportation, entertainment, protection., etc. That’s not the government’s job.
I actually like Randy’s suggestion about allowing people to opt-out. Why should my single neighbor who doesn’t have any kids (never did) or my elderly father continue to pay?
The one other thing I fear is the decline of the voucher schools. First, they sign up, next they accept government money, then they find that a good proportion of their students (i.e., tuition) is government funded, finally they are addicted to the money and the government will come in an say that you now have to offer all these services since you are accepting government money…and in the end they need to cut whatever it was that made them better to support the special-interest mandates.
Allowing an opt-out would be a non-starter. The only people that would not opt out are people that have kids in school (likely because they would not be eligible to do so). This would leave only relatively few people to pay for the entire schooling system. In the high school, I estimate that around 1600 students are enrolled. Lets say that those 1600 students come from that many families. Same for the rest of the SM school system: 1200 middle school, 1200 total for the elementary schools. That makes 4000 families to support a system with 6 major buildings as well as staff. Using only teachers salaries of $50k and averaging 28 students per class, the cost per family would be roughly $1,800. That us simply untenable.
Also to add, an opt out system neglects the fact that people that may not have kids in the system once did and someone paid for them at one time. Also, I don’t know about you, but I want we’ll educated doctors, nurses and other young people taking care of me, I want scientists discovering the cure to cancer, I want politicians with character, I want artists and musicians that can take us away from the doldrums in society when I am old, don’t you?
Here is a good, even-handed article on the issue at hand:
http://urbanmilwaukee.com/2012/10/01/education-the-truth-about-voucher-schools/
I like comments #2 & 3 for the points that they bring up and should be addressed and looked into.
Choice for all, no matter your color, where you live or income.
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