Education equity

Education helps everyone improve their lives as well as the lives of their families, and having everyone at a basic level of education helps us as a society as a whole.

A call for equity and sustainable systems

Equity, the fairness with with which we treat one another, has finally become a hot topic. Sustainability, the pursuit of an environment healthy enough to ensure a livable planet for ourselves and for our children has, thankfully, become another. Together they pack a pretty explosive punch! Ignore them and we may find ourselves flat on our backs; the soul of our humanity bruised and battered by tooth and claw competition on a shriveling planet. Around the world, including here in Wisconsin, small family farmers are being forced off their land by grocery store-scale industrial agriculture. In the last fifteen years nearly half of Wisconsin's family ...

Joint Finance Committee designates funds to in-person schools

Republican members of the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) announced that they will use $68.6 million (10%) of federal funds designated for K-12 schools to reward schools offering in-person instruction. This money will be awarded to school districts based on the number of hours of in-person instruction provided during the 2020-2021 school year. This does not affect the $617.5 million of federal funding earmarked for schools based on the Title I formula.

Defending America from the U.S. Department of Defense

In his final year in office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had also been the 5-star general who led the allied forces against Nazi Germany in World War II, warned Americans against the dangers of maintaining an oversized military and the military-industrial complex itself. He knew this joining of industry and the military could easily grow out of control, could easily drain rather than protect the nation, could easily become a threat to the future of democracy. Here is a portion of a speech President Eisenhower gave to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April of 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket ...

The common foe; the common solution

We are done being divided by the elites. We are done being distracted into hating one another. This is both a challenge and a hope. My family, my wife and I, our children, their spouses, and our grandchildren over the age of 18, probably canceled one another’s presidential votes this past election. Some voted for Biden, some for Trump. These are all intelligent people, they all have formal education beyond high school, and they all have the same concerns. They want a better life and a brighter future for themselves and their families. When Bernie Sanders, who to my knowledge most of my family supported, lost in the primaries, the presidential ...

The time for Fair Maps is now

After the 2010 census, the Republican party that controlled the governorship, the state Senate and the Assembly hired a private law firm, Michael Best and Friedrich, to redraw with precision and in secret the legislative and congressional district maps to favor the party in control at that time. Keith Gaddie, a political science professor at Oklahoma University, was hired to engineer the district maps. Wisconsin taxpayers paid the law firm $431,000 to gerrymander the districts. A poll done by the Marquette University Law School (NPR, January 16-20, 2019) found: 72% of voters say they prefer redistricting of legislative and congressional districts ...