Wisconsin K-12 "reform" heads back to the drawing board

The big news yesterday in Wisconsin was the public hearing (that gave little time for the public to be heard) for the Assembly's education deform reform proposal, and it ended up turning into a massive farce, with the bill having to be pulled back for of fiscal information and likely having the proposed Academic Review Board be unconstitutional. I'll forward you to Andy at the Wisconsin Soapbox for a thorough rundown of yesterday's events.

I watched some of the testimony yesterday, and the bottom line kept coming back to this, which was summed up by Journal-Sentinel education writer Erin Richards, and comes as no surprise to anyone who has spent five minutes in a low-income classroom or community.

Convoluted #AB1 hearing keeps coming back to: There's no magic bullet or magic law to guarantee low-performing schools get better.

— Erin Richards (@emrichards) January 14, 2015

And until you start investing in low-income communities, and start giving pathways to success for both adults and school-aged children, you won't change academic achievement. And our GOP Legislature and Governor don't seem the least bit interested in that. In fact, the 262-driven Wisconsin GOP seems to want poor neighborhoods to stay second-class, so their mediocre selves can stay above someone.

Krugman notes some things aren't considered so dynamic

Economist Paul Krugman has a great blog post out today that not only discusses the one-sidedness of dynamic scoring (i.e., making the Congressional Budget Office literally change the laws of math to argue tax cuts have bigger effects than they do), but also noting that some scoring is apparently more dynamic than others. I’ll also include the links that Professor Krugman is referencing, so you can check those out.

A good piece in yesterday’s [New York Times] Upshot reports on a recent study of the effects of Medicaid for children; it shows that children who received the aid were not just healthier but more productive as adults, and as a result paid more taxes. So Medicaid for kids may largely if not completely pay for itself. It’s a good guess that the Affordable Care Act, by expanding Medicaid and in general by ensuring that more families have adequate health care, will similarly generate significant extra growth and revenue in the long run. Do you think the GOP will be interested in revising down estimates of the cost of Obamacare to reflect these effects?

And what about the damage to potential output caused by cutting spending in a depressed economy? The evidence that austerity reduces output and raises unemployment is overwhelming — and there’s now pretty good evidence that sustained high unemployment inflicts long-term damage on the economy’s potential. So will CBO now be instructed to include these effects in its estimates?

The point is that we’re not just looking at a possible mandate for using voodoo in budget estimates, we’re talking about selective voodoo, which incorporates some supposed dynamic effects while ignoring others for which there is if anything stronger evidence. Tax cuts for the rich: good! Spending that makes ordinary workers more productive? Bad!

But when did right-wingers ever care about what the real-world effects of policies were anyway? Their M-O is all about creating an alternate reality where you can argue that Obamacare hasn’t significantly reduced the uninsured rate (even though it has) and where the US budget deficit hasn’t shrunk by 2/3 in the last 5 years (even though it has).

The oligarchs and their GOP puppets know better than the BS they try to peddle, but they count on your ignorance to keep their Big Lies going. Always remember that.

Illinois fiscal hole illustrates future of Fitzwalkerstan

Apparently we are not the only state that’s got exploding fiscal troubles to deal with in the next few months. Our neighbors to the south have perennial budgets problems, but Illinois is looking at a fiscal squeeze that is likely to become much worse starting on July 1 .

Illinois’ new governor, Bruce Rauner, will begin tackling perhaps the biggest fiscal mess in the nation, and the worst his state has seen in decades, when he is sworn in Monday.

The Land of Lincoln is buckling under a chronic structural budget deficit and the lowest credit ratings and worst-funded pension system among the 50 states.

Pension payments are projected to jump to nearly $7.6 billion in fiscal 2016 from $6.8 billion this fiscal year. And outgoing Democrat Governor Pat Quinn's budget office recently estimated Illinois' pile of unpaid bills will climb to $9.8 billion at the end of fiscal 2016, from $4 billion this year.

"In the modern era ... the state has never been in this poor of financial condition," said Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a Chicago-based government finance watchdog group.

So how did the already-big hole that the FIBs were in get even larger? One of the biggest reasons Illinois’ structural budget deficit was already large was due to the state’s past choices to underfund its pensions in favor of tax cuts and spending in other areas. In later years, those pensions had to be paid for with current-year expenses, and the state almost never raised taxes or reduced other expenses, choosing to delay payments of bills and borrow the money instead. This cycle has continued for decades, and they’ve never seemed to be able to break their way out of it.

Former Governor Pat Quinn finally tried to slow down the spiral by putting in a temporary income tax increase from 3% from 5% in January 2011, and an increase in the corporate income tax, which raised the amount of money coming in, due to an act known as TABSA. As a result, Illinois essentially had a balanced budget in Fiscal Year 2014, and is on track for a relatively minor imbalance of $322 million this fiscal year (less than 1% of all expenses).

However, Quinn and the Dem-run Illinois Legislature reversed those moves in front of the 2014 elections, essentially cutting taxes starting this year, and now the budget hole is exploding again.

This paper from the Chicago-based Center for Tax and Budget Accountability (CTBA) is a good primer on why these 2015 income tax cuts and future mandatory spending means a massive fiscal crunch for the Land of Lincoln starting this summer. We’ll start with the income tax cuts first.

Under TABSA, the personal income tax rate will automatically decline from 5 percent to 3.75 percent, and the corporate income tax rate will automatically drop from 7 percent to 5.25 percent, on January 1, 2015. While those reduced income tax rates resulted in a significant FY2014-FY2015 revenue loss, its impact was somewhat mitigated, because the reduced income tax rates only pertain for six months of FY2015. Things will be worse in FY2016, because those reduced income tax rates will be in effect for the full fiscal year.

Indeed, the recurring revenue loss caused by the phase down of the temporary income tax increases under TABSA will be quite significant. According to the non-partisan Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability (COGFA), recurring General Fund revenue in FY2015 will be some $2 billion less than it was in the immediately preceding fiscal year, FY2014. In FY2016, however, when the full effect of the reduced income tax rates will be felt, General Fund revenue is projected to be nearly $3 billion less than in FY2015.

The state of Illinois also borrowed $650 million from other state funds to balance its books for this fiscal year, much like how the Wisconsin GOP and Gov Walker are using one-time transfers of hundreds of millions of dollars of General Fund revenue to balance the Transportation Fund’s budget, the difference is that the FIBs are planning to pay back the transferred funds. Illinois will not have that luxury of borrowing from other funds for FY 2016 (or at least is not assumed to do so).

Those two issues explain $3.64 billion of Illinois’ shortfall on the revenue side for FY 2016, but they also have problems on the spending side, particularly involving the pension situation. Gov Quinn and the Legislature tried to cut payments to pensioners to slow down the expenses going into the fund, and recently got a big stiff arm from the courts (the court basically said “a deal is a deal”), which means that money has to go out for the foreseeable future.

In an effort to reduce the debt owed to the pension systems, the General Assembly passed and Governor Quinn signed into law Public Act (PA) 98-599 in December of 2013. That law implemented sweeping changes to Illinois’ state-funded public retirement systems. At its core, PA 98-599 cut pension benefits for current employees and retirees, and those benefit cuts were meant to reduce the state’s required annual contributions to the pension systems, thereby lessening Hard [mandatory] Costs. FY2016 was supposed to be the first fiscal year during which the state’s total pension contribution would be reduced by PA 98-599. However, on November 21, 2014, Sangamon County Circuit Court Judge John Belz ruled that PA 98-599 was unconstitutional, and put a permanentstay on the law’s implementation. While the state will appeal Judge Belz’s ruling to the Illinois Supreme Court, the benefit cuts designed to reduce the state’s pension contributions cannot be implemented for the duration of the stay. Because of Judge Belz’s ruling, the state’s contributions to the pension systems for FY2016 will have to be calculated in accordance with the pension funding laws and benefit levels that existed prior to the passage of PA 98-599.

Moreover, the three largest state pension systems recently reduced their investment rate assumptions. This means the pension systems now project that their assets will generate a lesser return over time than what was previously anticipated. This in turn will cause the annual pension contributions required of the state to increase from what was initially scheduled, to make up for the difference between the higher returns previously projected for the pension systems’ assets, and the new lower growth projection.

As a result of the stay on PA 98-599’s implementation and the reduced investment rate assumptions, the state’s FY2016 General Fund contribution to the pension systems will be some $630 million —or 10 percent — more than in FY2015, rather than declining from year-to-year as previously anticipated.

The underfunding and borrowing for Illinois' pensions fund is a major difference between them and Wisconsin. Wisconsin's pension fund has been fully funded for years, and adjusts payments to retirees in case the markets don't grow as much as needed. You may remember that Gov Walker ordered a study of the Wisconsin Retirement System in 2011, and the report came back in 2012 saying that not only was Wisconsin's pension fund 100% funded, but that you'd have to be crazy to mess with the way it is funded. This got Walker to quickly back off any scheme to funnel money away from the WRS in the short term, but that doesn't mean he might not try in the future.

But I digress- in Illinois, when you combine the need to pay off more debt for all funds in FY 2016, along with the added required pension contributions and having to pay back the $650 million that was borrowed from other funds in this fiscal year, and you now have a one-year increase in mandatory [Hard] costs of $1.93 billion. Add in the revenue shortfall, and here's what you get for the Illinois budget deficit for Fiscal Year 2015-16, (which is on top of the $6.48 billion in unpaid/underpaid bills that they had as of July 1, 2014).

Illinois budget issues, FY 2016
Budget deficit, FY 2015 $322 million
Revenue reduction, FY 2016 $3.64 billion
Mandatory spending increases FY 2016 $1.93 billion
BUDGET DEFICIT, FY 2016 $5.90 BILLION

These problems show why Illinois is the prime example of how continually relying on one-time gimmicks of borrowing and underfunding of mandatory payments leads to long-term budget disaster. And now the combination of 2015's tax cuts with increased required spending is making a this year’s 1% deficit explode into a 15.66% deficit for next year.

What’s instructive to note as a Wisconsinite is that this is the same path our state is under with Gov Walker and the WisGOP Legislature. We have also cut taxes in the last couple of years, and the lower revenue is a big culprit in the $2 billion + budget deficit we are facing today. We have also expanded our spending on road projects and raided other funds to do so as a short-term fix. And do not doubt that skipping pension contributions and expanding borrowing further is something the Walker Administration is considering as a means to “balance” this upcoming budget, much as Quinn and other Illinois elected officials did for decades, always hoping to kick the can down the road into another time when it could be fixed with less pain.

What’s funny (or pathetic, depending on how you choose to view it) is that we can expect Gov Walker to drop some line in tomorrow’s State of the State address about “Well, we’re not Illinois.” In fact, the elected officials in charge of things in Wisconsin have acted very similar to FIBs in the last four years, and not just due to the increase in corruption and machine politics. Walker/WisGOP fiscal madness has us well on the road to having our state government and budget be just as screwed up as Illinois’ is today, but unlike our neighbors to the south, with the WisGOP crew, that’s likely a feature of their policies and not just a bad side effect.

A wild Sunday in these parts

That was a wild range of emotions to watch that Packer game, but it was still amazing to see the Pack pull it out over South America's team (with officiating karma coming back to bite the Boys, which kind of makes it even cooler). And then as a former Indianapolis resident, I saw the Colts defense dominate Peyton Manning to upset the Broncos. Seemed like a great Sunday from a sports element.

And then Bucky can't stop Rutgers (NEW JERSEY U? REALLY?) and gets massively upset. That'll blunt the buzz of the day (well, that and time after having a couple of Brother Theloniouses and other top-notch beers consumed out of nerves).

So now it's time to watch some of the Golden Globes, which frankly is more legit and fun to watch than the Oscars, and I just saw one my favorite scenes get referenced with "Fargo"'s big win for mini-series. Given the temps of the last week and the greedhead direction of this state, this scene seems even more timely than it usually is, especially when you hear certain people accept the corruption and our exploding budget deficits because they got a few dollars shaved off their property taxes for this year.

Puncturing right-wing bubble BS on Obama's record

I got a comment on an older post where I pointed out the absurdity of Scott Walker's administration trying to take credit for Wisconsin job growth while conveniently leaving out the (bigger) job gains the rest of the nation is seeing from the Obama Recovery (bizarrely, the original post is from August 2013). This person disagreed with my assessment of it being the "Obama Recovery", so I'll address these questions and concerns in this post. Naturally, this rightie chose to remain Anonymous, like most bubble-boys do, because having the guts to put your name behind a claim means we can check your track record and see how right (or likely wrong) you have been over time. But let's go over the claims by one by one.

"The Obama recovery? WTF?
You mean the Republican Recovery, which started after they took control of Congress in 2010 and ended the failed runaway deficit spending of the Democrats by enacting the Budget Control Act of 2011 and creating the Oil Shale Boom."

Uhh, I wouldn't be talking much about the "oil shale boom": these days, with oil crashing like it is, and it's equally silly to claim that any change in policy has happened in the last 4 years that led to this (as far as I know, there's been no new policy at all). But we certainly can check the claim of "runaway deficit spending of the Democrats" with the actual numbers from the CBO. These numbers come from Page 156 and 157, giving historical data on the federal budget, and we'll start with fiscal year 2007, which is when the economy began to stall out. We'll start by going through Fiscal Year 2011, which started on October 1, 2010, so it will include all of the "out-of-control spending" when Dems controlled Congress.

Nominal federal spending, FY 2007-2011
2007- $2.729 trillion
2008- $2.983 trillion (+9.3%)

Obama becomes president
2009- $3.518 trillion (TARP, stimulus passed during here +17.9%)
2010- $3.457 trillion (-1.7%)
2011- $3.603 trillion (+4.2%)

Given that a sizable amount of FY 2009 is the result of policies passed while George Bush was still president, and because of the increase in stabilizers and other actions that were taken as a result of Bush's Great Recession, I don't know how you charge a lot of that increase to Obama. You see that total spending in the final Dem-controlled budget in FY 2011 is barely any different than the amount in FY 2009 (up a total of 2.4%, less than the cumulative rate of inflation for those two years).

Now let's see what's happened with spending in the last 4 fiscal years (including the current FY 2015).

Nominal federal spending, FY 2012-2015
2012- $3.537 trillion (-1.8%)
2013- $3.454 trillion (-2.3%)
2014- $3.504 trillion (+1.4%)
2015- $3.750 trillion (proj.) (+7.0%)

Looks like the first two years continued the austerity that we saw in the previous two years, but government spending has increased in the last two fiscal years, with a big increase scheduled for this fiscal year. Interestingly, job growth from October 2013 to the present day has been the best in the last 15 years, which sorta shoots down the theory that GOP budget-cutting is what's causing the Obama jobs recovery, doesn't it?

In fact, the decrease in the deficit in recent years is more a function of higher revenues resulting from more people working than any cut in spending.

Federal revenues as % of GDP
2007- 17.9%
2008- 17.1%
2009- 14.6%
2010- 14.6%
2011- 15.0%
2012- 15.2%
2013- 16.7%
2014- 17.5%
2015- 18.3% (proj.)

Yes, spending as a percentage of GDP went higher in FY 2009, from 20.2% to 24.4% (that'll happen when the economy goes into free-fall), but it had declined to 23.4% by FY 2011, and continued to drop over the next 3 years, ending up at 20.3% in 2014- no different than we were 6 years prior to that. Revenues finally recovered past 2008 levels as well, and while spending is projected to expand to 20.9% of GDP for 2015, there will be an even larger jump in revenues, up by 0.8% to 18.3% of GDP. This should be somewhat obvious, but people working and paying taxes tend to do the most damage when it comes to reducing a deficit- a whole lot more than cutting spending and services, and inhibiting economic growth in the process.

And now for Mr, Rightie's other claim.

"Obama & the Dems get credit for 3 years of 10% unemployment and sinking Social Security into the red 5 years ahead of schedule by not collecting 1/2 of the Payroll taxes for two years in the single worst economic policy of the 21st century.

3 years of 10% unemployment? One look at the BLS historical figures (which were just updated yesterday) shows that we had exactly ONE MONTH of 10.0% unemployment, in October 2009. Unemployment had already dropped to 9.2% by January 2011, and the spending cutbacks of 2011-2012 didn't speed that drop too much, as unemployment was still at 8.0% when Obama was sworn in for his second term in January 2013. In the two years since (when Dems cut into GOP majorities in the House and expanded their advantage in the Senate), the unemployment rate has gone down by 2.4%, back to pre-financial crisis levels. Don't think you can credit GOP "budget-cutters" for that one, kid.

Now if this guy didn't like the cut in Social Security tax rates by about from 2011-13, then WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL! No, it wasn't by half as this guy implies- it was more like 1/6, since they cut employee-only rates by 1/3 (the 6.2% total stood for employers through this time), but I also believe Social Security should be shored up as a priority. In fact, I think the cap on earnings that Social Security are taxed should be raised if not entirely abolished, to guarantee those earned benefits for the next generation, particularly in a time of fewer pensions from a person's job.

Reducing the Social Security tax rate wasn't what I would have done in late 2010, but it didn't bankrupt the system by any stretch (it still is projected to pay full benefits for the next 18 years with no changes). And reducing that date of the end of full benefits by 4 years (not 5) is far from the worst economic policy of the 21st Century. That "honor" goes to Bush's tax cuts, especially the second ones in 2003 that reduced capital gains and dividends, stretching inequality and encouraging Wall Street gambling that helped lead to the 2008 crash and the huge deficits that resulted.

Lastly, "Obama = failure."

Far from it, basement boy. In fact, if Obama was Republican, you'd be wanting to put him on Mount Rushmore for pulling the nation out of the Great Recession, having a booming stock market, and reducing the deficit. ADMIT IT. Obama's presidency has succeeded in a much larger way at fiscal conservatism than Reagan ever has.

You can argue whether the president did the right thing or not (and I'm not a fan of a few things this guy has done, particularly his friendliness to Wall Street and free traders), but the argument better be based on reality. This guy's argument was not, much like the arguments of most right-wingers, now that I think of it.

Big job gains, not-so-big wage gains

Today featured another US jobs report, and it had some good news and some bad news.

Good news
The jobs report shows 252,000 more jobs, and November and December revised up. The preliminary final numbers show that the U.S. gained 2.95 million jobs last year, the largest gain in total jobs in a year since 1999, and the largest private sector job gain since 1997. So apparently the first full year of the Obamacare exchanges weren’t exactly a job-killer, now were they?

The unemployment rate also fell, down from 5.8% to 5.6%. There were a few benchmark revisions for the 2014 year in this report as well, but there was no major difference in the overall rates that were throughout the year (3 months were down 0.1% from previously-published figures, and then the numbers promptly snapped back). It still shows that unemployment has dropped from 7.9% nationwide at the end of 2012 to 5.6% today, a level that we haven’t seen in this country since June 2008.

Not-so-good news
There are a couple of warning lights in this report that show things aren’t as spectacular as the top-lines would indicate. The drop in the unemployment rate, while welcome, also is a reflection of 273,000 people (on a seasonally-adjusted basis) dropping out of the labor force, which means the employment-population ratio of the country stayed at 59.2%, and hasn’t changed since September. Maybe some of that is due to a large number of Boomers retiring and living off of their rising stocks, but it’d be nice to see that figure break 60% at some point (it hasn’t been there since February 2009).

A bigger concern comes from the part of the report that deals with wages.

In December, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls decreased by 5 cents to $24.57, following an increase of 6 cents in November. Over the year, average hourly earnings have risen by 1.7 percent. In December, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees decreased by 6 cents to $20.68.

That 1.7% hourly earning raise is a nominal increase, which basically translates to 0% when adjusted for inflation. Maybe there was a larger-than-normal amount of seasonal hiring for the holidays (food service and drinking places were up 43,600 jobs), but that’s the reversion to a bad trend of stagnant wages in the face of strong hiring. Now maybe the numerous states that had minimum wage increases starting with the New Year can bump this figure up for January, but it shows that the average worker is still not seeing a dividend from his/her increased productivity and the higher profits and stock prices that the CEOs have been benefitting from.

School accountability...but some are more accountable than others

Andy at the Wisconsin Soapbox needs to be your go-to blogger when it comes to these education deform reform bills that will go through the State Legislature. Here's what he has to say about AB1, which going to get a hearing at the Assembly Education Committee next Wednesday. Here's what he has to say about the Academic Review Board, which would be the people who determine proper sanctions and "remedies" for schools that are graded with a "D" or "F" for too many years (including a REQUIREMENT that public schools deemed to be failing will have to be run by a charter operator). He starts with the State Superintendent of Public Schools, and the five spots on the board that Tony Evers would be able to select. One is a representative of the UW System, and the rest include

- One person from a true public school.
- One person who stands to see their sector benefit from closing public schools.
- One person who stands to see their sector benefit from closing public schools and vouchers expanding.
- One person who may or may not understand the educational landscape of every corner of Wisconsin.

■One at-large member and one technical college representative nominated by Gov. Scott Walker.

- One person who politically has donated a ton of money to the Governor or allies. (Can't we just say Jim Bender, John Guard, Jeff Fitzgerald, Scott Jensen, et al. should just be this person?

- One person who may or may not understand the educational landscape of every corner of Wisconsin. (And honestly, he could find a conservative technical college board member and put them on the committee if he really wanted to)

Oh but wait folks, just wait until you see who the legislature is prescribed to put on this board:

■One nominee from Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) and Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling (D-La Crosse).

Vos and Fitzgerald would be able to choose whomever they want. Barca would need to choose a charter school principal and Shilling a public school teacher.
Are you flipping joking me?

So, the majority party, in this case Republicans, could put whomever they wanted on, but the minority doesn't have that [luxury] at all? They have to have it scripted for them? Oh, and again, one of those people stands to gain everything for their sector of education by being a charter school principal?

They. Don't. Care. They don't care about how things look, they don't care about the educational outcomes of kids who are hard to educate, they don't care. THEY. DON'T. CARE.

In addition to the stacking of the Academic Review Board, Andy also mentions that the schools are graded only on items such as attendance and graduation rates (as Andy points out, apparently it's his fault that more than half of his high school class skipped school this week?), as well as high-stakes reading and math tests. Socioeconomic status seems to be a minor factor at best in evaluation, and interestingly, science and social studies tests aren't part of the grades for schools either. Hmmm, I wonder why right-wingers don't want their religious voucher schools to be measured in that?

Again, read Andy's long rundown of the bill, there's a lot to digest there.

There are two passages in the bill that I want to quickly talk about (and you can read all 30+ pages of the bill if you want). The first involves the fact that different types of tests can be taken by differnt schools.

6. Within 30 days after the effective date of this subdivision .... [LRB inserts date], request from the research center a list of alternative tests determined by the research center to be acceptable for statistical comparison with examinations adopted or approved under s. 118.30 (1). The review board shall evaluate and approve 3 of the tests, and shall provide the list of approved tests to the department.

So you're not doing a straight apples-to-apples comparison since the tests could be different, and scored very differently. Such a system seems rife for the type of sketchiness and corner-cutting that we've seen in school cheating scandals around America (remember what alegedly happened in Atlanta?)

The second way this isn't set up to be a fair system comes from this part, which explains that ways the data is compiled and compared.

(a) Beginning with data collected from the 2015-16 school year for a public school other than a charter school established under s. 118.40 (2r), and with data collected from the 2016-17 school year for a private school participating in a parental choice program and a charter school established under s. 118.40 (2r), except as provided in sub. (5) (c), annually grade the performance of each school using the grading system under sub. (2) (c) and issue a review report for the school that is clear and easily understandable. Except with regard to pupil achievement and attendance and high school graduation status, the department shall base the grade issued for each school year on data derived from the preceding school year.

(b) Collect and disseminate the best practices from schools, except that the department may not collect information for this purpose from a private school participating in a parental choice program without the private school's consent.

(c) On the review report for a private school participating in a parental choice program, specify the percentage of pupils attending the private school under a parental choice program and comply with one of the following:

1. For a private school that submits achievement data only for those pupils attending the private school under the parental choice program, identify the grade derived from data about those pupils as a choice pupil grade.

2. Notwithstanding sub. (5) (b), for a private school that submits achievement data under sub. (4) (a) or (e) for those pupils attending the private school under the parental choice program and for all other pupils attending the private school, identify the grade derived from data about pupils attending the school under a parental choice program as a choice pupil grade. The department shall also identify a 2nd grade, derived from data about all pupils attending the private school including pupils attending the private school under the parental choice program, as the private school grade. The department may use only the choice pupil grade identified under this subdivision in determining when a sanction may be imposed under this section.

So explain to me why voucher schools don't have to share their secrets like public schools would, and why does the data on public schools start next year but the vouchers don't have to report anything till the following year? This seems likely to set up a situation where the public schools get sanctioned first, and the voucher schools don't have to reveal how they're doing in comparison. If this is truly about improving education through open competition, then why have two sets of rules.

So yes, no matter how this is dressed up as a "school accountability" bill, it's really designed to funnel more money and power to the voucher schools and charter operators that gave big bucks to WisGOP politicians this election cycle. Let me repeat Andy's statement from the Soapbox, and you should commit these thoughts to memory when it comes to the approach of these deformers "reformers" of Wisconsin's K-12 education system .

They. Don't. Care. They don't care about how things look, they don't care about the educational outcomes of kids who are hard to educate, they don't care. THEY. DON'T. CARE.