Vote today! Vote Yes for Schools!
Not much else to say, so some special election day musical selections.
Chis Stamey and Yo la Tengo, “Vote” (click to listen or download).
Chick Webb Orchestra with Ella Fitzgerald, “Vote for Mister Rhythm” (click to listen or download).
Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come” (click to listen or download).
Thomas J. Mertz
Filed under AMPS, Elections, Referenda, referendum, Take Action, Uncategorized
To be sent to The Capital Times, The Wisconsin State Journal, The Capital City Hues, The Madison Times and maybe more (I may do another edit before sending). Click on the links to send your own letter!
24,189 Reasons to Vote Yes
According to the official September census, the Madison Metropolitan School District serves 24,189 students. The individual and collective futures of these students are the best reasons to vote yes on the November 4 operating referendum.
We have an obligation to these students to give them the best opportunities to flourish and to be part making their world a better place than the one we are leaving them.
The world we are leaving our children is a mix of good and bad. We are a prosperous community in a prosperous nation, but there is great economic uncertainty and growing deficits and debts at all levels. We have wonderful traditions of self government, but these traditions have been corrupted and our representatives are often ineffective or inattentive. We have ideals of justice and equality that unite us, but are torn apart by divisions and inequality. We think of ourselves as a world leader for peace and freedom, but our devastating mistakes have made us an embattled pariah at a time when cooperation is essential.
We need to give the coming generations the tools they need to build on the good and correct the bad. We can do this in many ways, but strong public schools have to part of it.
Our community understands this; we value education and know the value of education. Under the broken state finance system, referenda are how we can act on this knowledge to support the quality schools we want and need.
Our schools are very good, but far from perfect. Fifteen years of trying to do more with less under a broken system have taken their toll. We can all find things with the schools that we don’t like or think need to be done better, or more, or less. The improvements we demand aren’t going to happen without the resources supplied by the referendum.
What will happen are more distracting struggles as the district tries to find the least harmful $13 million to $16 million worth of cuts over the next three years.
Dissatisfaction with particulars and desire for improvement aren’t reasons to vote no, they are reasons to vote yes. Just like we need to give those 24,189 students the tools to make the world better, we need to give our schools the resources they need to build on the good and correct the bad.
Vote yes for schools, vote yes for a better future, vote yes for the 24,189 children who are depending on your support.
Thomas J. Mertz
Franklin-Randall and JC Wright Parent
Chair, Progressive Dane Education Committee
Take care of the children
The children of the world
They’re our strongest hope for the future
The little bitty boys and girls
Make this land a better land
Than the world in which we live
And help each man be a better man
With the kindness that you give
I know we can make it (I know that we can)
I know darn well we can work it out
Oh yes we can, I know we can can
“Yes We Can Can,” by Allen Toussaint, as performed by Lee Dorsey (click to listen or download).
The name of this blog has been changed from Advocates For Madison Public Schools to Advocating on Madison Public Schools. Not much else will change.
When I participated in a focus group as part of the MMSD Superintendent selection process, the last question asked was something about “where would you like the district to be in five years?” My answer was that I would there to be a place for friendly critics; a place for people who support the schools but also work for change and improvement. For too long there has been a “with us or against us” attitude and no dissent or even differences of opinion are tolerated.
Often this was blamed on Art Rainwater, but the problem is wider and deeper and it is my impression that in some areas things have been getting steadily worse over the last year and one half.
It is too early to tell what influence Dan Nerad will have in this area.
I am no longer comfortable blogging as an “Advocate For,” because that smacks too much of the mindless polarized way of seeing things that I deplore. I’m more comfortable “Advocating on.”
Not much will change, just the name.
Oh, the header image will probably change again, this was a placeholder, a quick job.
Thomas J. Mertz
“We must not continue to welcome into Madison more at-risk populations from elsewhere because we will never have sufficient resources to provide for them.”
This attitude makes me sick.
We are a wealthy and prosperous city in what by any standard is a wealthy and prosperous nation. Maybe some can enjoy their wealth and prosperity while turning their back on the less fortunate or in Alder Phan-Remmele’s words, the “at risk.”
I believe that instead we should try to spread that prosperity to the less fortunate. I am proud that our city and our schools devote resources to the “at risk,” I think both should do more.
And Alder Phan-Remmele, without our attention the “at risk” aren’t going to disappear, they will continue to struggle in cycles of poverty and become more desperate. Many in Madison, some elsewhere, but in the nation and on the planet we share. With our attention, with the opportunities and support we can afford to provide some will cease to be at risk and will be productive and contributing and the cycle will be broken.
Unfortunately, less directly and for what appear to be better reasons, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz has voiced similar thoughts. The Mayor is correct that concentrations of poverty in housing and in schools are not good and that there are real benefits, educational and otherwise in affirmative policies of economic diversity (The Equity Task Force included this in their recommendations, but like many things the Equity Task Force offered, it was never discussed publicly by the Board of Education and has not been enacted).
But once again I say, that Madison is large enough, wealthy enough and diverse enough that we can achieve these benefits without hanging up the “not welcome” sign. I’ll also add that resources like SAGE and Title I money may not follow poor children to the suburbs (as they don’t in some Madison Schools), and that the loss of the services these provide may undercut the gains of increased economic diversity.
I also point again to the ideas of the Schools and the Common Good.
Thomas J. Mertz
Filed under AMPS, Best Practices, education, Equity, Local News, Quote of the Day, Uncategorized
1969 Chicago Cubs, “Pennant Fever” (click to listen or download)
Willie Sutton supposedly once replied to the question, “Why do you rob banks?” with the answer “Because that’s where the money is.”
In his protests against the broken state school finance system in his state, the Illinois State Senator, Rev. James Meeks has shown a similar shrewdness. The first week of school he led Chicago school children to the rich suburbs to register for school; he went where the money was and the reporters and cameras followed. Now he has planned a protest outside the first playoff game at Wrigley Field (and here). Good for him!
I’m sure tickets are going for thousands of dollars, I know that a beer costs $6.00 at Wrigley. While the “haves” and others enjoy their good fortunes of having the opportunity to enjoy October baseball, it is a good thing that they be reminded that many of our children don’t have decent educational opportunities.
For more information on school finance in Illinois, see this page (and links) from the Access Network. Like Wisconsin, they have a broken school finance system. Illinois is also home to a very creative school finance advocacy organization, A+ Illinois.
For our readers in the Milwaukee area, the first home Brewers’ playoff game is Saturday at 5:30 PM. Not to late to get a protest together.
And for any who care, I am a St. Louis Cardinals fan who spent a good deal of my youth and young adult years regularly attending games at Wrigley. This post-season, I’m rooting for (in order) the Brewers, the Cubs and the White Sox.
Thomas J. Mertz
Filed under "education finance", AMPS, Budget, education, finance, National News, School Finance, Take Action
John Hartford, “Dont leave your records in the sun” (click to listen or download)
Last week, Milwaukee Superintendent William Andrekopoulos strung together the words “State, “Finance,” “Schools,” “System,” and “Broken.” At AMPS, we’ve strung those words together in a variety of ways ourselves or quoted others using these words on more than one occasion.
It thought it might be fun to see who else has said this or similar things about school finance in Wisconsin, who else has given voice to the truth that in Wisconsin, the school finance system is broken.
Here we go, not comprehensive and in no particular order.
We need to do a better job of looking out for taxpayers, and we will. It means making work pay, by encouraging and fostering economic development that pays family-supporting wages and respects the environment. It means ensuring healthy communities, through public health programs and a new, more powerful and consumer-friendly, organization of how we buy prescription drugs and health insurance. It means fixing our broken system of school funding, and making an ironclad guarantee to every Wisconsin child that this state will give you a good start in life a quality education that enables you to succeed in tomorrow’s economy.
The school finance system is broken and needs to be fixed or the quality of public education will suffer significantly.
Cooperative Education Service Agency #3, “Can Wisconsin avoid an educational crisis?” 2007.
Everyone agrees that the school funding system is broken.
Wisconsin’s school-funding system is broken, it needs to be thrown out, and the Legislature needs to come up with a better plan…
First, it’s clear that the school funding system is broken at the state level. I encourage you to join me in calling upon Governor Doyle and our state legislators to fix this broken system that every year forces school boards around the state to cut budgets.
Wisconsin’s K-12 education funding system is definitely broken. After 15 years of living under revenue caps and a funding formula that leave school districts with an approximate 1% deficit every year, our schools are increasingly finding themselves having to cut programs and staff. This is especially true in our rural schools where declining enrollment is an issue.
The Oshkosh school system isn’t broken; the state funding formula is. I disagree that we have to “fix” our school system because of the budget problems the funding formula creates. Until the state changes the formula, we should ask through an annual referendum to exceed the state budget caps.
The current system of funding public education in Wisconsin is broken.
Milwaukee Board of School Directors President, Peter Blewett, 2008.
The school funding system is broken and it was created broken.
Professor Emeritus, Economics, University of Wisconsin-Platteville, John Simonson.
Partners in WAES believe that Wisconsin’s school-funding system is broken beyond repair and should be linked to the needs of children, giving each of them—no matter where he or she lives—the opportunity to meet rigorous academic goals.
School Funding is Broken
- Mandates, needs and costs continue to grow faster than allowed revenues.
- Annual service and program cuts of 1-2% over the last 14 years.
- Over 100 districts in Wisconsin have held referenda in the last year.
- After 14 years of cutting, essential services are in danger.
The system is broken. We’ll have to raise taxes.
We want to be clear that we are painfully aware of the broken system of funding public education in Wisconsin,
Wisconsin has conducted several studies on how we can fix the funding of our education system. Isn’t it time that the governor and Legislature start looking at those recommendations and consider other ideas instead of foolishly tinkering with the same old broken system?
The school finance system is broken and needs to be fixed or the quality of public education will suffer significantly.
Dean Isaacson, Platteville School District Administrator, 2008.
Wisconsin is extremely fortunate to have one of the best public education systems in the country. But our school funding system is badly broken, and we are headed in the wrong direction. School districts throughout the state are cutting programs and staff and closing schools. Children have returned to school this fall to find fewer academic choices and larger class sizes.
If we are going to jump-start our economy, we need to find a better way to provide schools with resources to meet the needs of children so we can be assured that we are turning out future workers who can help our state’s businesses thrive.
Dan Burkhalter, Executive Director of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, 2007.
The state school finance system is “broken.
Pete Etter, interim superintendent, Black Hawk School District, 2007.
To be continued.
Thomas J. Mertz
Lorette Velvette, “Broke the Circle” (click to listen or download)
Some updates on the hard and harmful choices Wisconsin’s broken system of funding schools is forcing on districts much like MMSD. It looks like raising class sizes and cutting teachers is popular this time around.
Beloit is facing a $3.5 million gap this year. This is in part due to lower than expected enrollments, but mostly due to the annual structural gaps that are built into our state’s school finance system. They will have 30 students in a a fifth grade class this year.
All the excitement about charters in Appleton didn’t prevent the need for $3.2 million in cuts this year. They’ve been able to keep 25-1 ratios in k-3, but 4-6 are up to 26-1 and grades 7-12 will rise to 27.5-1.
Green Bay just approved their annual budget, it includes $6.5 million in cuts. The district is saying the cuts were “reduced” to $4.1 million by stricter staffing guidelines that resulted in eliminating 35 FTE teaching positions. That looks like a harmful budget cut to me, but if they want to spin it that way and the people in Green Bay buy it, I guess it worked. The people in Madison would know better. 17.6 FTE support positions have also been cut. They will save about $500,000 by leasing instead of purchasing equipment (an idea Dan Nerad has indicated will be brought to Madison). $800,000 of programing was transferred to Fund 80. From the news report. I can’t figure out what else was cut or reallocated. It does note that the new 4 year-old kindergarten program is “off the books” and funded via the Fund Balance.
Of further relevance to those interested in the Madison November referendum is that in Appleton the projected tax impact on local homeowners will be 4.7% increase and in Green Bay it will go up 3.7%. The school mil rate and taxes on an individual home will go down this year in Madison. With a successful referendum, the projected mil rate will increase 1.1% the first year, and decrease significantly the following years.
Taxes and tax rates are going up along with cuts in Appleton and Green Bay.
Things are different in Madison. We have the opportunity to slow school budget cuts with no long range mil rate increase. This is because the economy in Madison is strong, life here is good and people want to move or stay here, so the property tax base keeps growing.
Quality schools are a big part of why Madison is strong and good and attractive. That’s the circle we want to keep intact; invest in education and it pays off in prosperity and happiness. Let’s not let the broken state school finance system break the circle in Madison.
Vote Yes for Schools! November 4.
Thomas J. Mertz
Filed under "education finance", AMPS, Best Practices, Budget, Elections, finance, Local News, Referenda, referendum, School Finance, Uncategorized
Madison SOS Teen Leaders at the State Capitol (note: SOS is not the group working on the school referendum, but another group working for good in different ways)
Among the items in the MMSD Philosophy of Education is this call for students to be given the tools to engage historical, political and social knowledge to create a “faith in our future:”
To develop faith in our future by understanding and appreciating the history and geography of our nation and our world and their social and political systems.
It doesn’t say anything about working to create that better future, but this story — by Tamara Madsen in the Capital Times on students working on behalf of the Novemember 4 school referendum — shows that at least some of our students have grasped the truth that they can and must take active roles in making their community and futures better.
Madison high school students get organized, push referendum
Officials at La Follette were forced to drop the Italian language program from the curriculum for the 2008-09 school year, and students had to scramble to restructure their class schedules.
Stroup said elimination of the courses put many seniors like her in a tough situation when thinking ahead to college.
“Their schedules are messed up now because colleges want you to have four years of the same foreign language, and they’ve had to switch to French and Spanish, and it’s thrown things off for them,” Stroup said.
She is part of a group of Madison Metropolitan School District students intent on bolstering community approval for the school referendum so deeper budget cuts won’t have to be made going forward. Leaders of the group hope to have some two dozen students getting out the word about voting “yes” on Nov. 4.
Voters will be asked if they want to let the school district exceed its revenue limits by $5 million during the 2009-10 school year, then by an additional $4 million in each of the following two years. After that, the higher limits would be permanent. The referendum would add $27.50 onto the tax rate of a $250,000 home in the first year, district officials say, but accounting changes would decrease taxes for homeowners in the second and third years.
The district faces an $8.1 million hole in the budget for the 2009-10 school year, $4.4 million for 2010-11 and $4.3 million for 2011-12.
Stroup, a senior and president of La Follette’s Student Athlete Advisory Council, was one of eight students from Madison’s five high schools who met with Superintendent Dan Nerad more than three weeks ago to learn more about the referendum.
Stroup said she came away with a greater understanding of many issues, including the fact that the money being asked for by the district will be used just to continue current programs.
Nerad has already laid out a plan for program and service cuts in the 2009-2010 budget if voters do not pass the referendum. Those include increasing class sizes at elementary and high schools, trimming services for at-risk students, reducing high school support staff, decreasing special education staffing and eliminating some maintenance projects.
Even if the referendum does pass, the $5 million the district would get the first year still would not cover the $8.1 million gap and would force some budget trimming.
“I really want people to understand that this referendum is just to get by; it’s just to help sustain,” Stroup said. “If the referendum doesn’t pass, there’s going to have to be a lot of cuts.
“People think these cuts are insignificant, but they can affect students greatly. The highlight of a student’s day could be going to chess club or forensics, but cutting one of these programs could devastate them.”
The meeting with Nerad was organized by Natalia Thompson, a West High School senior who runs Madison SOS (Speak Out, Sister!), a nonprofit group that seeks to engage high school girls in grassroots activism.
Although she’s not old enough to vote, Thompson, 17, was one of two West students who took time earlier this month to make a public appearance at a Madison School Board meeting to explain why she is in favor of the referendum.
When school started this month, Thompson was disappointed that the writing lab at West was closed due to staff cuts. A federal grant will lead to its reopening in the near future, but other programs are under pressure as well, like West’s Fine Arts Week. The annual event, which takes place in May and has art, drama and dance elements, will not include one-act performances this year because of staff cuts.
Getting the chance to sit down with Nerad and learn more about school finance issues influenced Thompson to act.
“I do really see this as sort of one of the biggest social justice and political issues facing my generation — access to affordable, quality education — and I am seeing through my work in the community how important the schools are,” Thompson said.
She will work with the pro-referendum group Community and Schools Together leading up to the election by writing campaign literature, opinion pieces for news outlets and handing out literature in neighborhoods. She hopes at least 20 to 30 students will join her.
In an effort to collect even more student support, she also created a Facebook page titled “High School Students for the Referendum” that has 60 members.
To do her part, Stroup plans on handing out campaign literature and working on a short speech to give during announcements at La Follette.
Thompson said she’s been pleased with student responses to assist in getting the word out.
“With every student I’ve talked to about it, as soon as I explain what this is — what’s going on, why we need students to get involved — there’s no question it’s something they want to support,” Thompson said. “We’ve been faced with budget cuts since we’ve been in kindergarten.”
Since a state-imposed revenue formula was implemented in 1993 to control property taxes, the school district’s overall budgets have continued to rise due to annual increases in salaries and fixed costs like transportation, but it has had to cut $60 million worth of programs, staffing and services.
District officials are planning sessions at the five area high schools to offer information on the referendum, though they cannot collaborate directly with any advocacy efforts.
Nerad, though, said he will continue to cultivate lines of communication with students by becoming actively involved in the Student Senate and scheduling lunches at schools to establish dialogue.
“I believe we have a mission-based responsibility to ensure that we’re developing in students the skills of civic responsibility, and how to engage around important civic and social issues,” Nerad said. “I believe that part of my role and our role is that we have to model that by ensuring students do have a voice on issues that affect them.”
He said student engagement has always been one of his priorities in his job as superintendent, and he’s been pleased to see students’ interest in the referendum issue. “I think it’s very heartening to see, and it’s less about them and more about students that will follow them.”
tmadsen@madison.com
On a personal note, I’ve had the pleasure of working a little with Natalia and others and I want to tell them what a pleasure it has been and how much their contributions are valued.
Thomas J. Mertz
Joan Jett, “You dont know what you got (till it’s gone)” (click to listen or download)
The big news from Milwaukee this week was the 6-3 vote to explore dissolving the school district This is news so big that even the New York Times covered it. It is only the first step in what might turn out to be a long process (Alan Borsuk at the Journal-Sentinal has a good Q&A on the details), a similar process is ongoing in Wausaukee.
How did it come to this.?
Milwaukee Superintendent William Andrekopoulos began the meeting where the vote was taken by repeating the sentence: “The state finance system to fund Milwaukee Public Schools is broken.”
This is true.
The broader statement, ““The state finance system is broken,” is also true.
Legally, politically, demographically and in many other ways the Milwaukee schools are different than the rest of the state, but we all share the same basic, broken system of funding education. This broken system wrecks havoc on different districts in different ways, but in both the long and short term, it isn’t working as well as it should for any district or any of the students.
If you want to know more about the unique issues Milwaukee faces, I’d start with Supt. Andrekopoulos 2006 testimony before the Special Joint Committee to Review the School Aid Formula and the accompanying documents (scroll down to Oct. 5; if you want to learn about the damage being done elsewhere, check the other testimony). Some developments since then have also contributed to the situation. Most of these have been covered very well on Gretchen Schuldt’s Blogging MPS.
Shudlt is a financial analyst with MPS, so she knows her stuff. Her latest post is a memo from School Board President Peter Blewett complaining/explaining that the vote was not by the Board per se, but by all nine members of the Board meeting as the Strategic Planning Committee. Perhaps a distinction without difference, but given how convoluted Board rules can be, it could have significance.
I am going to quote an earlier post in full, because it is short and really captures the no-win situation Milwaukee faces:
The ugly outlook
The ugly fiscal outlook for MPS was made quite clear in a report the School Board’s Strategic Planning and Budget Committee got last night.
Here it is in a nutshell.
If the School Board, in adopting a final FY09 budget next month, doesn’t make any cuts to the budget it gave preliminary approval to in the spring, the required tax levy would be 14.9% higher than the levy for the FY08 budget.
If it adopts the budget total proposed by the administration, before the Board amended it, the levy would increase 11.3%; holding spending at FY08 levels would require a 9.1% levy increase.
It’s amazing what a $20 million state aid cut will do, isn’t it?
A property tax freeze would force the School Board to cut $37.5 million from the spring-approved budget, while holding the district’s levy increase to the southeastern Wisconsin average of 6.9% would require a $20.2 million cut.
You can see the chart the committee received here.
What’s a district to do? Any suggestions?
Of course there is glee , but no real answers in the right-wing blogsphere. Texas Hold’Em Blogger, Nick at Badger Blogger and others have their predictable rants about “educrats,” teachers unions, mismanagement and “trimming the fat.” The best any can come up with is Owen at Boots and Sabers‘ unsupported statement that “dissolving it outright, or breaking it into several smaller districts, would make a real difference.” Of course Owen knows this because…well, just because.
The Joan Jett song at the top is there as a reminder that despite all the faults and missteps, MPS does many things well and if it were gone these things would be lost. The recent comparison of MPS student achievement and voucher school student achievement demonstrated that Milwaukee schools does as well or better than the only alternative anyone has come up with.
Unfortunately, Governor Doyle has added fuel to the fire being stoked by the anti crowd. He wants a “complete evaluation” of the situation “wants to know whether MPS is making the best use of the money it has.” Investigation is in order, but this kind of language isn’t helpful. First, no organization as large as MPS (or the State of Wisconsin, or AIG, or…) ever always “makes the best use of” their resources. There are always mistakes and there is always waste. Every effort can and must (and has) been made to improve, but the “best use” standard is false and unachievable, kind of like all students proficient under NCLB. Second, Doyle is well aware of the statewide problems caused by a broken school finance system and the particulars of how these have played out in Milwaukee. Being no fool, he knows that these — not local mismanagement in Milwaukee or Wausaukee — are the primary problem. Thus far he has lacked the political courage to act on this knowledge. There is much hope in some quarters that the election results in November will change this.
A teacher blogger at School Board Watch has the right idea about how this might happen:
I want every school board member to get to Madison weekly and tell the real stories of MPS and our kids. I want the Milwaukee newspapers to ask teachers what we need, and then tell those stories; and even more than that, I want the MJS to get behind a better way of funding schools…
I want the citizens of this state to listen to Libby Burmaster when she says that Wisconsin schools have reached their limit.…because the reality is that MPS is suffering, but so are Florence, River Falls, Sparta, Kimberly, and Hazel Green. And I want everyone to know that we are teaching the greatest proportion of kids in the state who have needs beyond what most of us can imagine or understand.
Next to last word goes to another Milwaukee educator/blogger and a favorite with the AMPS team, Jay Bullock of Folkbum’s Rambles. He does a fine job reviewing the particulars of the funding situation and ends with a very pessimistic thought,
More likely, it will simply increase the rate at which the parents who can keep bailing on MPS. Those departing students leaves a harder-to-teach population behind, compounding every one of our most expensive problems exponentially.
This is the “starve the beast,” “going out of business,” death spiral that is the dream of the provocateurs of privatization. We can’t let that happen. We need to remember the common good and work for it.
The Milwaukee voucher program has hurt the schools financially and already put the district in the targeting sites of the antis. We have to stand up for Milwaukee and all the other threatened districts before the death spiral is out of control, before it is too late.
Give our schools a system of allocating resources that works, give those that are struggling some time and then see what happens. These things have to happen in that order, to judge so harshly the products of a broken finance system is senseless.
Thomas J. Mertz
Elsewhere, I’ve touched on the history of public education and the important idea of the “Common,” as in the Common School and the Common Good. My whole thinking about public education is that our schools are where we express our vision of a good society and try to create that society. In doing this we come together, finding common ground, defining the common good while preparing our children to contribute to a society where the common good is paramount.
This is by definition a secular project; church and state are separate. The creation of public schools was in part designed to secularize the notion of a common good. But religious groups and thinking are an important part of our society and those visions remain relevant. Earlier I posted some excerpts from the United Church of Christ on public education. Today I’m posting some thoughts from a recent document in the Catholic Social Action tradition, a tradition that has shaped who I am. These come from, A Platform for the Common Good, drafted and ratified by a coalition of Catholic organizations. One of the authors, Robert Beezat, will be speaking at Edgewood College on September 25.
Under the heading of “Promote the General Welfare” there are calls to action on a number of topics, including education. This is what the platform has to say.
Government Action Needed:
On Education
- Increase education funding and distribute resources equitably, with special attention to schools in low-income neighborhoods
- Pay teachers fair and adequate wages and institute programs to encourage teacher retention
- Provide more arts, music and other cultural enrichment courses
- Ensure that special education students have the resources and trained teachers they need
- Ensure that education includes life skills and vocational training to prepare students for jobs
- Provide free universal preschool/Head Start
- Fund educational mandates.
Individual/ Community Action Needed:
- As parents, be involved in our children’s education
- Hold regional school boards accountable.
Other education related planks appear elsewhere, under the headings “Establish Justice” and “Ensure Domestic Tranquility.”
- Work to lessen income disparities and to reform tax policies that favor the wealthy and corporate interests.
- Acknowledge that discrimination, including racism and sexism, continues to impact public systems and encourage public employees and others to engage in anti-discrimination training
- End discrimination in all institutional forms.Support and promote programs that promote a fair distribution of resources and serve vulnerable populations
- Support and promote programs and activities that address prejudice and discrimination
- Write letters to the editor and op-eds to encourage anti-racism education and better relationships within our communities
- Fund after-school programs, jobs for youth, and continuing education (GED, ESL) for adults
Many, many good and important ideas about how to work toward the common good. These ideas should be at the heart of the Church’s work, but often get lost.
Thomas J. Mertz
Fund a Classroom Project in Madison
AMPS 