Strangling Education: State Legislation the Felon

The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) struggles to make budget cuts. Some taxpayers are assuming that if they, as students, could get a quality education twenty or forty years ago, then, with a little fine tuning, so can today's students.

The world and Wisconsin education has changed. Here are some of the differences from thirty years ago:

• The student body was 8% below the poverty line, not 40%.
• There was far less special education; current requirements under state and federal law to educate special ed students can make the cost three and four times the cost of other students.
• No computers and no need for the student body to be computer literate in the 1970's. No students left behind because there was no computer at home.
• Few homeless children; no legal mandate to find and educate them.
• Virtually all of the children had English as a primary language, and if they did not, they quickly gained a good command of it.
• Now we have a significant number of transfers from other school districts who can not perform academically appropriately for their age.

Much of the cause of this is the strangling legislation which is driving Wisconsin public schools down the disastrous path of California, after the Golden State enacted Proposition 13.

The schools need more money. Wisconsin businesses need  a productive and trained workforce. We are not only destroying children's futures, but we are destroying the future of our state. The strangulation of our economy is not under the cover of darkness; it is happening in broad daylight.