Category Archives: Local News

by | July 3, 2007 · 4:26 pm

School Name Study

School naming is very much on the radar in Madison. There is a new “study” on trends in naming schools. Too bad it is from Jay P. Greene and like most things associated with him (not all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day) , next to useless.

Greene is correct that what we name schools and how we arrive at those names is important. From there, he goes wrong. Greene identifies trends away from naming schools after people and presents them as seemingly both a cause and effect of a decline in civic values. Either way, acording to Greene the villian is the usual suspect: “progressive education.”

Leaving aside the irony of a proponent of charters and vouchers expressing concern about civic values, there are some big problems with Greene’s assertions (conclusions gives him too much credit). First, we all know that some names communicate more in the way of civic values than others, so the proxy metric is pretty lame. Beyond that, the progessive reforms Greene identifies happened about a century before the trends he identifies. Hell of a lag time. It is probably weakness of the study, but I was glad that Greene didn’t touch on another horrid trend: selling the naming rights to schools and facilities. I could go on, but why bother, I think I’ve already put more thought into this “study” than the author did.

Danny Rosenthal (the Quick and the Ed, hat tip to Sherman Dorn who has more to say) put in his a two cents and asked that we consider the educational possibilities of names such as “Roosevelt Amino Acids a2 + b2 i-before-e Hyperbole High School.”

Thomas J. Mertz

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Filed under AMPS, Best Practices, Local News, National News

by | July 2, 2007 · 8:55 pm

Lewy Olfson sets the record straight

From the Wisconsin State Journal

Olfson: Schools today have different objectives

by LEWY OLFSON
June 27, 2007

In a guest column headlined “What a difference 100 years makes,” Rick Berg makes a false assumption that an eighth grade test given in 1907 demonstrates that schools today are failing to achieve acceptable levels of learning in their pupils.

The world in 1907 was a very different place from the world today, and schools then had very different objectives from schools today. In 1907, American society needed a small number of highly educated workers and a huge number of unskilled laborers and farmers. Only a fraction of young people went to college.

The test referred to by Berg was designed to weed out those who were not considered suitable for higher education.

Berg doesn’t tell us how many eighth graders actually passed the difficult test he describes. He suggests that the difficult questions in that test were well within the capacity of most students. I seriously doubt that. Moreover, academic failure in 1907 was not a barrier to a young person’s ability to earn a living, nor did it carry any significant social stigma.

Today, graduation, not merely from the eighth grade but from high school, is all but essential if a young person is to achieve even a modest level of financial independence as an adult.

Schools today are attempting to meet the needs of our society as it exists in 2007, just as schools in 1907 were designed to meet the needs of society as it existed then.

Which brings me to my next bone of contention with Berg, his misunderstanding of the principles underlying government-supported mandatory public education. He proposes that the state should give parents vouchers which they would be free to use to buy education wherever they like.

In Berg’s world, schools would flourish or fail depending upon whether or not they offered programs that parents were happy with. But the each-school-has-its-own- system model simply does not reflect the underlying purpose of publicly funded education.

Publicly funded education rests on the premise that we, as a society, have a collective notion of the public good. We have a body of values that we want to inculcate in the next generation.

We have needs, as a society, that we want the next generation to fulfill. If taxpayers, even those of us who have never had children ourselves, are going to pay for the education of other people’s children, we want that education to be in the service of an ideal, an image of a future we can agree with and support.

In a democratic society, we the governed have agreed to finance a system of education for the good of society as a whole, but we don’t write that check without requiring accountability.

That is why we have elected school boards to establish policy and to oversee administration. The school board members are accountable to us, the taxpayers.

In Berg’s model, accountability is an issue between the individual school and its constituent parents. But that is not enough.

I do not intend to suggest that I think the Madison School District is completely successful. And the system can only benefit from the thoughtful suggestions of interested, serious people like Berg. But in this case, I believe his suggestions are misguided and ill-informed.

Olfson, now retired and living in Madison, was an education journalist for 25 years and is the author of a number of books for young people.

Thomas J. Mertz

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Filed under Accountability, AMPS, Best Practices, Gimme Some Truth, Local News, School Finance

by | July 2, 2007 · 8:51 pm

Juile Underwood on NCLB

From the Wisonsin State Journal:

Underwood: Federal schools measure is failing
Federal schools measure is failing
By JULIE UNDERWOOD
June 28, 2007

No one can argue against the idea of holding our public schools accountable for the quality of education provided for our children. No one can dispute that we must do more to ensure that all children receive an excellent education.

But the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) does little to help either of those goals. When it comes to providing the constructive feedback necessary to help schools improve, the mechanism prescribed by NCLB fails miserably.

This reporting mechanism, the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), creates misperceptions that our schools are “failing,” when AYP often has little to do with the quality of schools.

Further, use of the label “failing” demeans the very educators who have dedicated their professional lives to improving schools in the face of complex challenges, many of which are outside the realm of the public schools.

Locally, the recent AYP reports (Wisconsin State Journal, June 13) — which labeled all four of Madison’s public high schools as “failing” despite state data much to the contrary — served only to mislead the public. They join a long and growing list of examples of the inadequacy and punitive nature of this so-called measure.

Under NCLB, a school can be labeled as “failing” for a number of reasons, including many that have nothing to do with actual achievement — for example, simply because fewer than 95 percent of its students within a single demographic subgroup took the test. It’s no wonder that many schools across the nation rate highly on state measures, yet fail to make AYP.

Despite the name, AYP reports do not actually measure “progress.” To measure progress (and get a truer picture of how our schools are doing), we need to look at how the same students perform over time — where they started and where they finished.

The AYP from year to year compares different groups of students. It does not follow a child’s learning from the beginning to the end of the year.

By 2014, NCLB has legislated that 100 percent of the students — including those who have special needs, lack English proficiency, come from disadvantaged circumstances, etc. — must be proficient in reading, math, and science or their schools will receive the dreaded failing grade. How absurd!

By ratcheting up AYP targets for what constitutes “adequate” achievement to unattainable levels and then shaming any school that fails even in one area, NCLB has set the stage to flunk our entire system of public education.

Nothing would delight educators more than to see dramatic increases in student achievement, especially our students from disadvantaged groups. The education community ardently supports high expectations that challenge children to excel.

It is clear that AYP merely masquerades as accountability and adds nothing of value toward the goal of providing the best possible education for all children. Genuine school improvement requires legitimate and meaningful assessments that provide useful feedback for educators and produce a fair and accurate picture for parents, policymakers, and the general public.

Underwood is dean of the UW-Madison School of Education.

Thimas J. Mertz

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by | June 26, 2007 · 1:19 pm

Mayor Dave on the State Finance System

Mayor Dave Cieslewicz knows the primary source of Madison’s school budget woes. Published in Southern Exposure, the newsletter of the South Metropolitan Planning Council and elsewhere.

Thomas J. Mertz

School Funding System Needs Reform
By Mayor Dave Cieslewicz

“The worst choice, except for all of the others.”

This is what comes to my mind when reflecting upon the recent budget challenges that Madison school district leaders, parents and students have faced. After the recent, difficult debate over the issue of school consolidations and other painful budget measures, there can no longer be any doubt that the school funding system is broken beyond repair.

As the school district correctly notes, thanks to this broken system, they are trapped within a spiral of budget shortfalls and cuts to programming. Although they were able to avoid consolidating schools this year, they were nonetheless forced to reduce resources for special education, increase class sizes, and make a number of other cuts that threaten the quality of our public schools. This is a pattern that has been continuing, and worsening, for a number of years.

This is not to be critical of the school board or the administration. I know from experience how difficult these budget decisions can be, and am confident they are making the best decisions they can, given the hand they have been dealt by the state. There are no more easy choices or easy cuts to make. We are well beyond the point where platitudes such as “finding efficiencies” will make the budget balance.

Until we see reform at the state level, we will face these same decisions, and our community with go through the same difficulties, year after year. School district leaders know this, and embarked earlier this year on a campaign to build political support for ending the current, unfair system.

The City of Madison is answering that call, by making school funding reform a central part of our legislative agenda. For starters, the revenue caps must go. I am a strong believer in local government and local accountability. We in Madison are perfectly capable of making local budget decisions and choosing local leaders who reflect our values.

The next step is to create a new system that provides fair and adequate funding for our public schools. I am encouraged that every Madison-area legislator has signed on to a resolution calling for a new system to be in place by July 1, 2009.

The resolution specifies four key components of a new, fair system: it must provide funding based on the actual cost of education, not arbitrary per-pupil formulas; it must provide adequate resources to educate all of our children, regardless of their background; it must provide additional resources for special needs, such as non-English speaking students; and it must be based on a fairer tax base that moves us away from reliance upon the property tax.

These are all important goals. Until we achieve them, the turbulence our community experienced during this year’s school budget will not only happen again, it will get worse. And once again, we will be forced to make “the worst choice, except for all the other ones.”

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by | June 21, 2007 · 10:15 pm

BOE Contract Vote

Three Board of Education members voted against the MTI contract on Monday, June 18, 2007. My initial reaction was that it was a ‘free” vote, a vote without consequences. When elected officials know that there are sufficient votes to pass or defeat a measure they can use their votes to make a statement without taking responsibility for what would happen were they to prevail. This is what happened on Monday, those who voted against the contract knew that it would pass and that they would not be held responsible for the serious consequences that would ensue had they been in the majority. Upon reflection, I realized that in fact the vote has the consequences of exacerbating divisions among our teachers that are hard to justify based on their stated rationales for opposing the contract.

What would have happened if the minority had been the majority, had the contract been voted down after the union had already ratified it? Negotiations would have continued in some form, perhaps simply the preparation of final offers to submit to arbitration. At the Board meeting Superintendent stated that under those circumstances he would have requested the appointment of a new negotiating team. That certainly would have lengthened the process and meant the allocation of additional resources. Superintendent Rainwater and all of the Board members who spoke to the matter were in agreement that the contract was within the guidelines that the Board had given the negotiating team. This raises the possibility that voting down would have been considered a violation of the obligation to bargain in good faith. If that had happened, the union would have gained a big advantage in the continued negotiations. From the district point of view, none of these are good things.

Those who voted against the contract expressed their dissatisfaction with the fact that continuing the basic healthcare framework (WPS and GHC, with most of the cost differences paid by the district) limited the district’s ability to increase salaries. Further negotiations would not have changed this. The impasse agreement in place indicates that the negotiations had passed the deadline where they were required to submit the issues to binding arbitration. Anecdotally, arbitration is rarely desirable for school districts; the terms of the impasse agreement precluded “any modifications of Section VII-B of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, i.e Group Health Insurance.”

I doubt the minority voters would have voted against the contract if there had been any possibility that it would have been rejected; looking at where that would have left the district I am glad there was no possibility.

Those who voted against the contract had previously spoken against the impasse agreement, contending that the district had surrendered a “huge bargaining chip” in the battle to reduce health care costs. It has been explained before that very little was surrendered and that the district received concessions from MTI in return, but this message does not seem to have gotten through. In exchange for an agreement by MTI not to authorize job actions (including “work to contract, which would kill extracurriculars) the district agreed not to impose a Qualified Economic Offer and to remove health insurance and some other issues from potential arbitration (the impasse agreement also set a calendar and included some other conditions, but I don’t know whose interests these favored, perhaps both). A Qualified Economic Offer must maintain, “fringe benefits in effect 90 days before bargaining commenced” and “district percentage fringe contributions then in effect.” In other words, it is impossible for a QEO to change health care benefits in any way. The new contract contains some changes and in this way comes closer to satisfying the expressed desires of those who voted against it.

The two ways to win concessions on healthcare are via negotiations or arbitration. MMSD “gave away” the option of unconditional arbitration (and won some concessions via negotiations). Robert Butler of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (and MMSD bargaining team) cautions “careful consideration” before risking arbitration and identifies four conditions that should be present before a district contemplates this option: “excessive postemployment benefit costs, high health insurance premiums, declining enrollment and a small fund balance.” In comparison to districts around the state (the comparables that an arbitrator would use), MMSD clearly doesn’t meet two of these conditions (postemployment costs and declining enrollment) and is borderline on the others. Seeking healthcare concessions via arbitration does not look like a winning strategy. So much for the “huge bargaining chip.”

Those who voted against the contract gave four reasons that I recall. I’m unclear about the one that had to do with retirees. Another had to do with a quickly corrected misstatement in MTI’s summary of the terms. The healthcare benefit/salary ratio and the supposed effect of this on MMSD’s competitiveness in attracting and retaining quality teachers was the big one and this was linked to the last: concerns about the turnout at the union contract ratification vote. Although members of the minority averred of a desire to “interfere in internal union politics” it is hard to see these last three as anything else (and additionally a way to score points with anti-union voters in future elections).

Before turning to the effect of this attempted interference, I want to quickly address the realities of MMSD’s competitiveness. I’m second to none in my desire for well compensated teachers (salaries and benefits). Both the 1% salary increase and the 4% total package increase are less than I wish the district could provide, but the state finance system doesn’t allow that. The implication is that MMSD salaries are not competitive or will soon cease to be competitive. All evidence is that this is not true. The Wisconsin Association of School Boards collects salary data from districts. In 2006-7 out of 104 districts reporting, MMSD ranked 20th in BA starting salary; 10th in BA and 6 years; 7th in BA max; 39th in MA base; 33d in MA and 9 years; and 43d in MA max. MMSD recently had the highest starting salaries of any surrounding districts. National surveys show that Wisconsin salaries now lag behind those of other midwestern states and MMSD salaries (higher than the state average) seem to be at about the regional average. If MMSD does have difficulty attracting teachers (and I have yet to see any evidence that this is true), I would guess that it is because potential recruits recognize that the state finance system works against job security by forcing “last hired, first fired” cuts. I think that working toward state finance reform will be more effective in raising our teacher salaries than symbolic votes and unsupported assertions about salary competitiveness.

Various school board members have sought to undermine the solidarity of the union by focusing on the differential benefits of those who choose various health plans and have gone so far as saying that it is the “early and mid career” teachers they care about (presumably to the exclusion of our most experienced staff). Exacerbating these divisions is one consequence of their votes against the contract. The success of our schools depends on our teachers working together as teams. Pitting one group of teachers against another can destroy the collegiality of our teaching staff and harm the education of our children. I guess that a minority of the Board thought the benefits of their symbolic vote justified that risk (I am not clear what the supposed benefits are, maybe exacerbating these divisions, but that would be interfering in union politics and they said they weren’t doing that…it gets confusing).

There were also numerous references to the “low” turnout at the union ratification vote. One board member said the turnout was 1%, the number floating around now is about 100 union members voted the only news report I’ve seen put the number at “about 200” or a bit under 10%. Not a huge turnout but also in no way evidence that some silent majority of the union opposed the contract. We hear a lot about MTI’s supposed failure to represent the interests of the membership. If this were true, if dissatisfaction were widespread then it should have been easy to mobilize 200 teachers to vote against the contract. The voices of dissatisfaction point to short notice as a reason for their failure to mobilize. The MTI Bargaining Committee is elected by the membership and there is plenty of notice for those elections. The committee has 15 positions, with 5 up for election each year. This year and last only one of those seats was contested. The Lord helps those who help themselves, but apparently three school board members want to help those who can’t be bothered to help themselves. Maybe they should consider the union members as adults, fully capable of understanding and acting on their interests and not arrogantly seek to undermine the expressed will of the teachers via the established procedures of their legal agent instead of trying to impose what they think is best for others.

I can imagine circumstances where the best interests of the district require the consideration of going to arbitration in an attempt to gain a better contract than what the QEO requires. That is not what happened here (there is little hope of a better contract and no hope on the issues raised by the nay voters) and these circumstances do not exist in MMSD.

I’m tired of writing about health insurance, teacher contracts and the QEO. I’d much rather spend my time and energy on other things. However, as long as some insist on continuing to play political games by using this issue, I’m sure I will continue to put in my 2 cents.

Some are praising those who voted against contract. I hope that this post makes the following clear:

1. The stated goals of those voting against the contract could not be achieved via continued negotiations.

2. Voting down the contract would have weakened the district’s bargaining position and may have led to a ruling that the district had not met good faith criteria.

3. The members who voted against the contract did so knowing that they would lose and they would not be held responsible for the above.

4. Health care savings cannot be achieved by imposing a Qualified Economic Offer.

5. The possibility of arbitration without conditions that the impasse agreement took off the table offered little hope of achieving the stated goals of those who voted against the contract and opposed the impasse agreement.

6. All the evidence indicates that MMSD salaries at all levels, but especially at the lower levels, are competitive.

7. The vote against the contract and the accompanying statements undermine teacher collegiality and morale, to the detriment of our children.

8. Teachers who are dissatisfied with MTI’s bargaining goals and the contract have made little effort to change the former or block ratification of the latter.

There is nothing praiseworthy and much to condemn in what the minority did and their use of unsupportable claims to justify their actions.

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | June 17, 2007 · 8:50 pm

Quote of the Day (consider the source)

From this morning’s Wisconsin State Journal story on the Republican effort to reduce taxes in Wisconsin’s biennial budget (Paul Soglin has more).

Bill McCoshen, a lobbyist and former Commerce secretary under Gov. Tommy Thompson, said the [Republican controlled] Assembly could be forced into making it harder for the needy to qualify for Medicaid health coverage or not increasing state money to schools.

You’ve got to love the language: “forced.” Yep, the Republicans don’t want to reduce the level of school aid below the already inadequate formula or take healthcare away from the neediest, they are being “forced” to. Who is doing the forcing? McCoshen isn’t saying, but two answers suggest themselves. Either it is the Republican themselves, which brings to mind the image of Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles holding a gun to his own head and threatening to kill himself.

Or is it Republican lobbyists and strategists, like Bill McCoshen, and the donors they represent who are doing the “forcing”?

A closer look at McCoshen’s ties gives some clues as to why he might want to obscure the “forces” who value tax reductions more than providing essential state services. His current lobbying client list is here but at this point in the session it lacks the dollars and hours details. The list from the last session is much the same and includes links to that information. Previous sessions can be accessed here. Interestingly, the 2003 reports do not list McCoshen’s efforts on behalf of the Dairy Business Association to secure passage of Assembly Bill 466 and thereby further limit the taxing power of local entities, including school boards. Reduce state taxes, reduce local taxes, reduce them both, and don’t worry about the consequences for schools or those needing healthcare.

Also of interest in understanding how McCoshen does business and whose interests he looks after (hint, it isn’t the children of Wisconsin and those in need of healthcare) are the $46.5 million his firm was to “earn” lobbying for Dennis Troha’s failed, tainted casino bid, but that’s another story; this is about public school funding.

One McCoshen Client, is K12 Inc., a firm specializing in homeschooling and distance learning software (founded by William Bennett, who resigned after his “abort every black baby” to reduce crime remarks, but not before his use of influence to to gain profits from the company’s relationship to an Arkansas virtual charter school via a misapplied Education Department grant subsidizing homeschoolers were raised). In Wisconsin McCoshen, on K12’s behalf to the tune of over $160,000, sought an expansion of and easing of rules for virtual charter schools, while increasing state fiscal obligations.

Wal-Mart is on the list of McCoshen’s clients. See here for their contributions to education.

McCoshen’s firm also collected over $10,000 by consulting on the recent Janesville school referendum campaign. Small change in McCoshen’s world, but small change that depends on the continued existence of a state finance system that requires referenda to meet the needs of the state’s students.

What I see are new twists on the “starve the beast” game that the GOP has played for years. The idea is to deny the schools the money they need to do their job and then point out how they are failing to do their job in order to further defund them or eliminate public education altogether. The new twists involve deviating from the anti-tax stance when there are profits to be made, either via charter schools or by consulting with referenda campaigns.

May the force desert McCoshen and the Assembly Republicans.

(revised 6:13 PM, 6-15-07)

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | June 15, 2007 · 5:23 pm

Above the Line/Below the Line

A recent story be Doug Erickson in the Wisconsin State Journal covered MMSD’s implementation of a “new” approach to behavioral issues. No program is perfect and even the best programs can suffer from inconsistent application. I’ve heard mostly good things from staff and parents about Above the Line/Below the Line, so I hope that our community recognizes the limitations of what any approach can accomplish and gives this sufficient time before making it the focus of a “moral panic.”

A friend and colleague from the Equity Task Force, Jackie Woodruff, related her experiences in a message to the AMPS listserve. I think they should be part of the discussion and with her permission, I’m posting them here:

As a parent of twin second graders at Falk Elementary School I have been using Above the line, Below the Line for three years. It was our former Principal Jerry Tollefson that pushed to get the program used districtwide as our school has a high transient population and his staff was educating all students that transferred in to the school throughout the year. The fix it plan has received a very bad name in the past few weeks. The fix it plan is designed to have the children involved come up with a way to fix the problem, come up with a consequence and then the offending party has to come up with something positive they can do to the offended party to make amends. For my children in kindergarten they wrote pictures to explain their plan and then had the plan approved by the teacher. The whole point is that the children are learning a life lesson using conflict resolution skills to solve problems they encounter. It is a foundation to build on throughout their school experience as they grown and their understanding broadens. My children have used fix it plans with the children in the neighborhood to solve problems they encounter.

Give me five is a way of reminding the children what behaviors are acceptable and how one can act appropriately. Class discussions include identifying things that are above the line versus below the line. It is a way to open a discussion between the teacher and the students at whatever level they are at. The students learn responsibility with the ability to earn courage coupons for being caught doing something right by a grownup outside their classroom or doing a specific job within the classroom. The class combines their coupons and cash them in for things like a movie party to reward and celebrate the good behavior. The students reinforce and encourage each other to behave above the line for the good of all in the classroom. They are also quick to help each other solve problems and make amends after they students involved come up with a solution to their problem. Obviously not all problems can be solved with fix it plans. More severe behaviors of a violent nature need to be and are handled directly with the teacher and the support staff with parent involvement as in the past. The fix it plan is then made with the student, the teacher and the principal with some form of apology to the wronged party and some type of restitution to the offending student. This reinforces the life lesson of a consequence to an action. Nothing is perfect, but the more this policy is used and modified to be applied in the building, the more effective it becomes. As a parent, I am happy my children are being taught life skills to resolve day to day problems. To me learning life skills is a vital part of their education.

Jackie Woodruff

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | June 14, 2007 · 6:01 pm

MMSD, MTI Tentative Contract

Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Teachers Incorporated have reached a tentative agreement (The MMSD BOE must approve in open session on June 18th and MTI must ratify). The contract calls for only a 4.0% total package increase, slightly above the QEO required 3.8, but well below recent statewide trends and the most recent statewide average of 4.29%. If my calculations are correct the difference between the state average and the proposed contract amounts to almost $800,000 annually.

It should also be noted that the contract includes an increase in health care co-pays and movement in the direction of wellness and other preventative measures to reduce health care costs. Health care costs still take up the bulk of the package increase, but under the QEO that is the union membership’s prerogative.

All in all, I think that given the budget situation it is a good contract.

Maybe those who sought to make political hay out of the impasse agreement and have misrepresented the realities of the negotiations would like to comment now.

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | May 23, 2007 · 1:01 am

Everyone has a stake in the schools.

Mary Conroy: Make business pay fair share of taxes (excerpts), the Capital Times, May 22, 2007

Every year, Madison’s School Board gets a tsunami of suggestions on balancing the budget. And that’s as it should be: Everyone has a stake in the schools. It doesn’t matter if you have children, hire graduates or pay property taxes. It doesn’t even matter if you live in Madison.

Far-fetched? Not at all. Public schools are the building blocks of democracy. They are the foundation of our economy. They foster the curiosity that leads to discovery, the creativity that sparks new ideas, the social skills that build strong communities.

But our public schools are now in peril. Statewide, we’ve had one referendum after another. School districts have taken drastic measures, from slicing staff to slashing class offerings, from selling property to shutting schools. Citizens and school boards alike have initiated unusual ways to save money.

We need to take school budgets off the property tax rolls. Currently, our property taxes are so high that people on fixed incomes can’t afford to stay in their homes, even though they’ve already paid their mortgages. It’s not that older residents are against paying school taxes. Some of us on fixed incomes, including me, have never voted against a school referendum. But we may have to if Wisconsin legislators don’t act soon.

For quite some time, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce has pressured the legislature to lower the total tax burden on corporations. If corporations here paid taxes at the national average, we’d have almost $1 billion in extra funds, according to a recent analysis by Jack Norman, research director at the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future.

Consider these facts:

In 1977, homeowners paid 50 percent of all property taxes. Now they pay 70 percent, because businesses pay so much less.
Twenty years ago, the corporate income tax produced 10 percent of state revenue. Now it pays about half of that.
Most Wisconsin corporations pay no corporate income tax, according to the Department of Revenue.
The worst thing is that the state Legislature has enabled businesses to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. It exempts some businesses from sales taxes. It gives tax credits for research, development and investment in “development zones” (including some areas in which developers would build anyway). The Legislature also exempts manufacturing equipment and business computers from the property tax.

Even ATM machines qualify as computers for that exemption.

Who’s making up for what corporations are too cheap to pay? Lower- and middle-class residents are. As a result, they can’t afford to send their kids to college.

It’s not enough to ask state legislators to make corporations pay their fair share of taxes from now on. It’s time for corporations to pay more than the rest of us do. After all, they’ve been paying less than we have for far too long.

So write to your representatives. Tell them to stop being puppets of the business lobby. Ask them why you should meet your tax duty while corporate Wisconsin gets away with murder.

Mary Conroy is a Madison-based freelance writer.

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | May 18, 2007 · 3:55 am

School Board Names Commitee Chairs and Members for Upcoming Year

The Madison Metropolitan School Board named their standing committee chairs and members for the 2007 – 2008 school year. They are:

Communications Beth Moss, Chair Carol Carstensen, Member Lawrie Kobza, Member

Community Partnerships Maya Cole, Chair Lucy Mathiak, Member Johnny Winston, Jr., Member

Finance and Operations Lucy Mathiak, Chair Carol Carstensen, Member Maya Cole, Member

Human Resources Johnny Winston, Jr. Chair Lawrie Kobza, Member Beth Moss, Member

Long Range Planning Carol Carstensen, Chair Lucy Mathiak, Member Beth Moss, Member

Performance and Achievement Lawrie Kobza, Chair Maya Cole, Member Johnny Winston, Jr., Member

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