3 Years Ago

 Where were YOU 3 years ago?

I was ...

John Doe: ... at work, trying to earn a living.

Mary Moe: ... still recovering from COVID.

Robin Retiree: ... home watching TV, barely believing what was going down.

Mike Pence: ... preparing to count the legally cast electoral votes for president.

Ron Johnson: ... trying to slip an envelope of fake Wisconsin electors to Pence.

Enrique Tarrio: ... leading my Proud Boys in an assault on the US Capitol.

Mike Fantone: ...  doing my duty.

Josh Hawley: ... running for my life.

Donald Trump: ... masterminding a plot to overthrow the US government.

Adequate Funding for Wisconsin's PUBLIC Schools

The following is my letter to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, asking them to take original jurisdiction in the case of Underwood v. Vos:

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Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a budget and policy analyst for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, we took great pride in the fact that Wisconsin was a leader not only in education but in funding education. Decades earlier, we had become the first state in the nation to embrace the idea that education, as a state responsibility (built right into our state constitution) meant that we needed to use the state’s progressive funding sources (the income tax and to a lesser extent the sales tax) to even out the disparities in locally taxable property wealth. So we (and by “we” I mean the forward-thinking Wisconsin State Legislature) instituted general equalization aid, distributed in inverse proportion to a school district’s local equalized valuation per pupil. Thus dirt-poor districts got lots of state aid and wealthy suburbs and resort areas with high-value properties got very little. (This sharing was based on the net cost per pupil, after categorical aids like transportation and handicapped aid, federal aid, and user fees had been subtracted from total costs.)

But that just addressed the issue of inter-district equity. It didn’t deal with overall insufficiency of funding. To address that, the Legislature kept increasing the share of net costs to be paid by state aid, eventually setting — and achieving! — a goal of covering two-thirds of elementary and secondary school costs. (An additional 8% was covered by federal aid and 5% by local fees and donations, leaving only 20% to land on the property-tax rolls.) That two-thirds figure was the standard that was maintained during most of my tenure at the DPI.

At the same time, everybody knew that Milwaukee Public Schools had urban problems worse than any other district in the state and needed special attention to them. But one form that such special attention took was an “experimental” voucher program to see if non-public schools could address some of the issues that the public schools were struggling with. We at the DPI opposed the idea, not merely due to the implications for separation of church and state but also for the very real educational concerns about resegregating Milwaukee schools, not merely on the basis of race but also on the bases of religion, behavior, and ability. We pointed out that private schools didn’t have the same mandate as public schools to serve everybody, and that they might well end up cherry-picking the brightest, best behaved, most able-bodied students, thereby impoverishing MPS even further, and not just monetarily.

The Legislature nonetheless gave vouchers their initial push down what has proved to be a long, long slippery slope to the point where now private schools are practically robber barons driving the public schools even deeper into being the educational facilities of last resort. Compounding the problem for the last 10-15 years have been twin sets of handcuffs placed on the schools by our most recent Legislatures: cost controls (or levy limits) to hamper adequate spending and steady erosion of the state’s share of school costs, driving more and more of them back onto inequitable local property taxes, which the legislators can just shrug off by saying “Hey, not my problem, talk to your mayor and city council!”

Well, state legislators, it is your problem. Not just a problem for you to solve but a problem of your own making. If you’d been treating public schools responsibly, it need never have come to this sorry state of affairs. You find the state treasury holding an $8 billion budget surplus, and it apparently never dawns on you that the public schools — which are a state responsibility, remember — have been starving for adequate funding for a good chunk of the 21st Century. And you think of half a dozen things to do with that money other than living up to the noble ideals that made Wisconsin a leader in education for most of its existence. It’s as if the Badgers were playing the Buckeyes, and you guys are rooting for the Buckeyes. 

It’s pathetic that we should ever have to take your intransigence and irresponsibility to court to get you to do the right thing, but that’s where we find ourselves in 2023. I sincerely hope that the Wisconsin Supreme Court issues a verdict, loud and clear, to stop robbing the open, accepting, public schools of Wisconsin to finance the discriminatory private ones. I mean really, I know many of you are in thrall to business interests, but it makes no more sense to shift state support for schools from public to private sources than it does to turn all of our highways into toll roads or all our drinking water into “buy it yourself at Walmart” propositions. Some things deserve to be public goods, and I’d put schools and libraries right up at the top of that list.

Sincerely, 

Richard S. Russell

7846 W. Oakbrook Cir., Madison  WI  53717-1609

608-219-7044 • RichardSRussell@tds.net

http://richardsrussell.livejournal.com/

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The 6 greatest bargains in America:

 1) sunshine

 2) fresh air

 3) clean water

 4) public libraries

 5) public schools

 6) US Postal Service 

Whose Side Are You On?

 

Judicial Impartiality

You’ve probably heard the commercials saying that a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice needs to be impartial, to follow the law and precedents, and to not have her or his mind made up before a case is actually heard. Those are admirable principles, and in fact that’s the way the court used to operate before its current right-wing cabal engineered the ouster of Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson in 2015. Regrettably, it’s been relentlessly partisan ever since.

The sick irony of those hypocritical commercials is that they’re on behalf of a candidate who’s the exact antithesis of those noble ideals, a situation which would be laffable if it weren’t so tragic. Daniel Kelly, a graduate of Christian Broadcasting University Law School, previously served on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but not because he was elected to the position. In 2016 he was appointed by then-Governor Scott Walker to fill a vacancy, but he was rejected by the voters when he ran for his own seat in 2020. Now he’s trying for a comeback, this time with backing not from the departed Walker but from tens of millions of dollars in out-of-state dark money. But both Walker and those mystery funders want him on the court for precisely the same reason: they know, in advance, exactly how he’s going to vote.

He’s a reliable rubber stamp for voter suppression, the super-rich, gerrymandering, and anything the gerrymandered Republican legislature wants and against judicial ethics codes, state-agency expertise, open government, religious neutrality, and the rights of workers and women.

After Donald Trump lost Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, a group of Republican conspirators put together a slate of fake electors to go to Washington DC and try to claim that Trump, rather than Joe Biden, won Wisconsin. This outrageous attempt to subvert the will of the people needed legal advice, and guess who they got it from. Yup, old reliably hyper-partisan Dan Kelly. His work on behalf of a slate of fake electors alone should disqualify him from ever again holding a position of public trust. Really, it would have made him the most disgraceful ex-justice in Wisconsin if his fellow election denier, also-defeated former justice Michael Gableman, hadn’t set the bar even lower by squandering millions of taxpayer dollars “investigating” non-existent electoral fraud at the behest of the gerrymandered legislature.

Come April 4, the last person any fan of judicial impartiality should be voting for is Dan Kelly.

Self-Interest

 Why do people vote against their own self-interest? Because they believe in a greater good.

Take me, for example. I’m an old white guy, now retired, a native-born, middle-class, middle American, straight, Anglo-Saxon, college-educated, law-abiding, tax-paying, monolingual gringo. The USA is optimized for people like me. I’ve spent my whole life working and voting against my own self-interest and am damn proud of it!

The Morning after The Change

 “Oh, Emily, I mean Hilda. Hi, how are you? Long time, no see. And this must be little James.”

“Ha ha, yeah, he was up until 2 AM this morning, now he’s Charles. But what brings you into the store so early today?”

“Bargain hunting. I know the clerks were up all night changing the prices and packaging, but they always miss a few, and I was looking for items where a pound still meant 16 ounces instead of 15. Say, we’ve got to get together for coffee sometime and catch up.”

“What a great idea. Are you free tomoro afternoon to come over to my place?”

“I sure am. But remind me of what the house number is. All the homes on your street look about the same.”

“Well, here’s a card. Now we’re on the odd-numbered side of the street, 1525, instead of the even-numbered side, when we’re 644 over the summer. You can see that I’ve got them both listed to make it easy to keep track of.”

“Oh, and I see that you managed to fix your phone number, too, so only one digit is different after The Change: 7248 instead of 7249. That’s clever. And it’s a really good idea to have the cards printed up.”

“Yes, I said at Bob’s funeral that I should’ve done it earlier, before I got all flustered during his heart attack and mistakenly called the ambulance to the 644 address two years ago.”

“Well, the cards are such a good idea that I think I’ll probably do it, too! So, what time tomoro?”

“How about 2:30, will that work for you?”

“Ideal! Say, isn’t it a good thing that we don’t have to keep switching TIMES back and forth during The Change as well?”

“Oh, Susan, you’re so funny! Time is just a part of nature. Even Congress wouldn’t be so stupid as to make us change THAT twice a year.”

Know Before You Vote