They want their kids to learn & be safe!
Chris Rickert, the best journalist working MadTown, reports that the population here in Madison WI has mushroomed 31.3% in the last 20 years while enrollment in its public schools edged up an anemic 2.9%. Wassup with that?
data source: WI Institute Law & Liberty
Demographics play a role, he reports. All those high-rise apartments under construction bear witness that fewer households have kids. But also, families are voting with their feet — sending a net 13,005 students out of Madison’s public schools since 2005 through the state’s Open Enrollment program. They took with them about $90 million in state funding. Write off another $20.5 million from low-income parents using vouchers for eligible private schools.
Remember that next time Madison Metro School District (MMSD) asks for your checkbook. When Democrats whine about vouchers “taking money away from public schools!” they’re talking about conscientious parents fleeing a school system that pays more attention to equity than education. State money follows the student! (Corollary: government serves the individual, not the other way around!)
To Rickert’s Wisconsin State Journal account of enrollment, the Werkes compared academics and spending in central Dane County’s eight school districts. Our faceless bureaucrats used as their source numbers from the WI Institute of Law & Liberty — much more reliable than the DEI-jiggered numbers at the WI Dept of Public Instruction.
Madison’s public schools lag its 7 neighbors in almost every category. Almost 15% of MMSD students never graduate; nearly a third of students are chronically absent; district math and reading scores are among the state’s worst. As of the 2022 school year (before DPI cooked the books), fewer than half (41.4%) of Madison students were at grade level in reading & writing (although that is up from 38.0% in 2015). Math scored 36.3% — down from 2015.
Those sad results were compiled despite increasing spending an average of 6.3% annually over the last eight years on a near-static student enrollment. MMSD spends up to $3,000 more per student than its neighbors; partly to fund more administrators per student. To be fair, nearly half of MMSD students are listed as low income — well above the other seven districts.
Must we accept that hoary old excuse for failure? Of the eight districts reviewed here only Madison bans school resource police officers. Madison has one serious behavior problem for every 7.75 students — eight times worse than Waunakee. And, as the chart above shows, low-income does not correlate with more disciplinary incidents. We tried to muscle up Madison schools by enforcing attendance, imposing discipline (including suspending disrupters), and expecting performance. Our candidacy couldn’t get the WI State Journal’s endorsement!
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Who has the courage to demand academic results before spending another dime? Anyone? Because MMSD fears “disproportionality.”
2 responses to “Parents flee Madison schools for good reason”
As deplorable as those statistics are for Madison’s schools, what’s even more deplorable is that the next time MMSD comes begging (more like demanding, actually) for more millions of $$$, the jackasses in this city will oblige (by a wide margin). What’s that old saying about doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results?
TIL Elizabeth Wadas left Channel 15 at end of March.