CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – What is going on in our schools?
Standardized test scores came out last week. In Wisconsin, these are the best scores we’ve had since schools fully reopened after COVID.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The scores suck. Statewide, only 40-percent of our students read or do math at grade level. 60-percent do not. In Milwaukee, the school testing numbers are abysmal: 15-percent of kids read at grade level, 11-percent do math at grade level. These schools are funking, turning out graduates into the job market who can’t read basic instructions in the workplace and may not be competent to operate a cash register.
Taxpayers have a right to ask about our money being squandered. The state budget two years ago contained the largest increase in state history for K-through-12 funding. Governor Ever pilloried Republicans because they cut his record funding increase in half. In this year’s budget the governor used his line-item veto to hike per-pupil funding, and by striking out digits in the budget’s text, these increases will continue for 435 years. At what point do we realize that shoveling money into failing schools doesn’t boost academic performance?
What we have learned is that closing the schools, and shifting to an online-only model, is a colossal failure. There were kids that we simply couldn’t account for online… they disappeared. And when sitting in front of a computer screen, a teacher has no classroom control. The days lessons compete with whatever other computer tabs are open… like social media and tic toc videos. These students have lost education days, months, and years that they will never catch up from.
And now comes a lawsuit from democrat super-donor Kirk Bangstad of the Minocqua Brewing Company. He claims that Wisconsin’s school voucher program violates the state constitution. If he wins his case in front of the now-liberal state Supreme Court, he’ll force 50,000 students who now attend private school back to the failure factories that they’re trying to escape from.
At what point will taxpayers in Wisconsin say what’s happening in our schools isn’t acceptable?
Chris Conley
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