The Referenda
For the second time in six years, an upscale suburban school district in Wisconsin is asking residents for millions of dollars to keep the lights on. This is the story of how we got here, and what we can do about it.
Episodes
I originally intended to fit something like this into the previous episode, but it clearly is too big. But here I'm talking about why local control of schools matters for us as citizens, what the state ought to be doing to invest in the cultivation of civic virtue, what districts can be doing to facilitate good conversations about schools, and ultimately, our own obligations as citizens to participate in the good governance of our ...
So, I got mad, and I had to use the bleep button a few times.
Here, moving backward through time, is media coverage of the budget as it has developed:
Today's update. (July 1)
Budget negotiations reach an impasse (June 4)
JFC starts over from scratch (May 9)
Evers's budget proposal (Feb 26)
Links!
First, just put down your name and email here if you're interested in participating in the book group at all. I'll follow up with details. Here are the two books:
Manny Teodoro's Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government, and
Amanda Lewis and John Diamond's Despite the Best Intentions (2nd edition)
2030 Task Force links:
I kept trying to get my thoughts down to 3 minutes in order to deliver them at public comment on June 9th 2025, but I, um, overshot it a little.
LINKS!
Secondary School Ad Hoc Committee (including application)
A couple of colleagues from School Perceptions join me to talk about what we saw with the 89 school referendum questions on the ballot April 1st!
Here's the blog post breaking down referendum results, including graphs and everything.
Here's the info on Tosa's Secondary Ad Hoc Committee.
And here's a link to the School Perceptions podcast, for any school leaders out there!
In this episode:
- Meet Vlad Kogan
- Learn about quality measures that isolate school effects from out-of-school effects.
- Understand some of the factors that impede school board accountability.
- Hear a bit about Vlad's forthcoming book
Sara Lerand comes on the show to talk about the local referendum question on our ballots in April, which would change the way local school board elections run -- undoing a decision that Tosa originally made in 1994.
LINKS:
The text of the referendum question
Wauwatosa News-Times pre-election coverage from 1994
Wauwatosa News-Times post-election coverage from '94.
For Public Schools Week, here, I got a little worked up.
How are voters supposed to know whether a school district has been spending tax dollars responsibly? How are community members supposed to evaluate a district's claim that it needs a referendum?
This episode gives you some public resources to start with -- what's driving cost increases and where are they occurring? How have revenue sources changed in response? What has the district already done to limit costs?
LINKS:
1.) &q...
In this episode, I'm basically giving an academic paper on how our default approach to improving schools gets something wrong about how we inherit values and practices from the past and how we project them into the future.
Is it nerdy? Extremely. Enjoy!
School Board elections are coming up in April, and so I invited a national expert on district leadership to talk about what boards do, how they do and should work with district administrators, and how boards respond to community members, parents, and teachers.
LINKS:
My contact info, again
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