Mike Nichols and Julie Grace take a look at the impacts of COVID-19 and teachers' unions on students



** Students bear brunt of COVID-19 inequality
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By JULIE GRACE | April 2021

Raul Vasquez just wants his kids back in the classroom. They are good students, and it pains him to see them lying in bed on their laptops for six hours a day for their classes.

Two of his children are high-schoolers in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). A third — a seventh-grader — is homeschooled, a decision he made last year when he suspected the shutdown due to COVID-19 would last longer than initially promised.

The Vasquez family’s situation is not unique. Some students finally began returning to their classrooms in the third week of April. But for more than a year, parents of the 62,600 students in Wisconsin’s largest school district, 82% of whom are economically disadvantaged, have faced tough decisions regarding their children’s education. Should they keep the kids in their current school? Send them to another school that provides better options? Allow them to attend in-person? Keep them at home for virtual learning?

“They just need to go back. It’s all gone on long enough,” Vasquez says. “If we as a community in Milwaukee cannot defend our kids, then that’s a big red flag.”

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** A pandemic tipping point
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By MIKE NICHOLS | April 2021

MPS just got a whole lot closer to the tipping point. The number of children in classrooms directly controlled by the Milwaukee Public Schools union-dominated School Board has plummeted to approximately 63,000 from almost 100,000 as recently as 1990.

Back then, if you had children in Milwaukee, MPS was your only option and business leaders and reformers concerned about generations of kids unable to read or write had no choice but to try, somehow, to reform MPS.

No longer.

Today, over 52,000 Milwaukee kids attend private schools that accept vouchers or taxpayer-funded scholarships, public charter schools not run by MPS staff or suburban public schools offering open enrollment or the old Chapter 220 integration program. Nearly all of those schools remained largely open during the COVID-19 pandemic, while MPS kids were told to stay home.

To read more of this article, click here ([link removed]) . Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.
These articles first appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of Diggings. Click here ([link removed]) to read the whole issue.
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