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On Wednesday, members of the state Assembly will begin debating the first bill of this legislative session, a school accountability bill. But don’t be deceived by that description.
Like most Republican-written education bills, it doesn’t support the majority of schools that educate our kids—public schools—but, rather, seeks to increase the influence of those who want to privatize our public schools despite study upon study that show these private schools, at their best, do no better in educating our children than our public schools. Many do much worse.
The bill, backed by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Burlington), would grade all schools on an A to F report card; allow publicly funded voucher and charter schools to administer a number of standardized tests, instead of just the one currently offered; and create an unelected board that could close “failing” schools. The proposed Academic Review Board could shutter low-performing public schools and turn them into charters, or they could terminate a charter or halt taxpayer funds for a voucher school.
Will struggling schools improve as a result of these changes? That’s highly doubtful. What the bill will do is allow publicly funded private schools to confuse parents about their true performance levels. That’s because voucher and charter schools now have to administer the same performance test as public schools, and the Wisconsin Public Education Network argues that the folks who operate these private schools don’t want to have just one standardized test so parents could honestly compare these private schools to their public school peers. So, they want to change the tests to stop any apples-to-apples comparisons.
We also wonder about the benefits of adding a state panel to review schools. The state superintendent is a constitutional officer who oversees state schools. Although the superintendent would be on the panel and appoint six members of it, the governor and state legislators could make an additional six appointments. This gives the governor and legislators more influence over closing schools and, no doubt, will deliver more public schools into the hands of private voucher and charter operators and reward their former Republican legislator friends who are now voucher school lobbyists and who have been very generous to their compliant candidates in the last few elections.
This school accountability bill has nothing to do with raising student performance or making schools more transparent or accountable. Unfortunately, like so many of the policies coming out of this Legislature, they are designed and developed by the right-wing national groups that are heavily funded by the corporations that want to profit from taxpayer dollars.
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