How in good conscience, former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent Bill Andrekopoulos wonders, can the school district ask taxpayers for $252 million without considering closing a single school?

The district’s School Support Referendum website can tell you why district leaders say the money is needed and, generally, how and when the money would be used. The site also tells voters who are being asked on April 2 to support the referendum how much of a tax hit they will take, $367 on a home assessed at the $170,000 median price of a home in Milwaukee.

Everything in the pitch to taxpayers down to the penny is predicated on the status quo, as schools across the district are grossly under-enrolled and enrollment continues to sink, he says.

News comes of unexpected wrinkles in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s plan to prove its virtue with free rides for kids of Native American ancestry. 

A recent handwringing story in the leftist Wisconsin Examiner told of a first-year UW student from the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican reservation who, despite her ancestry, doesn’t qualify for the school’s Tribal Education Promise Program. 

That program’s quite a deal: scholarships and grants to cover the full cost of an undergraduate degree, or to cover all tuition and fees for a law or medical degree. 

And the unfortunate kid doesn’t get it because, while many of her ancestors were Native Americans, not enough of her Mohican and Menominee ancestry is from any one particular tribe to meet tribal rules for enrolled membership. So no debt-free degree deal for her, apparently.

The news of a $100 million investment in a new school on metro Milwaukee’s north side by St. Augustine Preparatory Academy, a school participating in Wisconsin’s pioneering school choice program, puts a number on a development predicted last summer. 

After the Ramirez Family Foundation bought the campus of the just-closed Cardinal Stritch University with the aim of building a new northern campus for the fast-growing choice school, Ramirez said the foundation couldn’t have justified investing for growth had the Legislature and governor not agreed to substantially increase the state’s per-pupil funding for school choice to a sustainable level, a historic legislative victory the Badger Institute helped achieve.

It’s one matter to track whether a city has grown and how fast. It’s another to ask whether it has grown in relation the state as a whole. Here, we’ve done so by tracking the share of the state’s population that lives in selected Wisconsin cities relative to the share that lived there in the 1960 census.

Places that are growing faster than the state include suburbs of major Wisconsin cities, perhaps due to the effects that the recent COVID-19 pandemic had on remote work options. Also outpacing the state’s overall growth have been some of the state’s major cities.

“I have to say I was surprised the Badger Institute highlighted the Millville article. The Institute is about “Free Markets, Opportunity, Prosperity” — NONE of which are exemplified in what is going on in Millville.

The population is growing. We need more housing. But entitled 50-60-70 year-olds who bought (or inherited) their properties in a different time and different economy implement policies that “maintain our local character” but have the impact of driving up land and housing prices. And then they complain when their kids can’t afford housing — be it rental or purchase...”

One reader, commenting directly on the story Plan to prop up Wisconsin newspapers sets off alarm bells, expressed:

The Badger Institute, formerly known as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), has long been at the forefront of the fight for school choice, right to work, welfare reform, tax restructuring, limited government, civil society and so much more. If you appreciate the Institute’s legacy and want to support free markets, opportunity and prosperity, please consider donating today. Your support will help the Institute continue to advocate for conservative principles now and in generations to come.

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