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What We’re Reading: Confidence in public schools down

July 19, 2022

Periodically School Choice Wisconsin provides you with news on happenings and trends in school choice and education in general. Among the most interesting news of late is a Gallup poll saying Americans’ confidence in U.S. public schools remains low, with 28% saying they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the institution. That figure is down from 41% in 2020. “Americans’ confidence in public schools increased early in the coronavirus pandemic as people rallied around professions that were severely disrupted by the economic shutdown, but that subsided a year ago and confidence has returned to its…

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PreACT Secure test replacing Aspire in Wisconsin schools

July 15, 2022

Parents and teachers may want to note that choice and public schools across Wisconsin will see a change in test-taking next school year, as the state is moving from the ACT Aspire test to the PreACT Secure. Both tests, given in grades 9 and 10, are meant to predict how students will perform on the college-readiness ACT test, which students take in grade 11. The vendor that supplies the test, Iowa-based ACT, has sunsetted the ACT Aspire, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. The 2021­–22 school year was the last for Aspire in Wisconsin schools. Among differences between…

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Arizona goes big on school choice

June 30, 2022

Big choice news out of Arizona this week. The state legislature has passed and Gov. Doug Ducey is expected to sign a bill that will allow all the state’s students to take education funding to a school of their families’ choice. The bill will give all K-12 students in the state access to tax-funded ESAs—Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Parents can use the accounts for tuition and other educational costs. Read more here. Congratulations to the more than 1.1 million students in Arizona and their families who can now take advantage of school choice. Educational Freedom Your Child, Your Choice — School…

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Bridge week? School Choice Wisconsin questions scheduling practice

June 23, 2022

Recently we ran into a headline that piqued our interest here at School Choice Wisconsin: The four high schools in the Madison Metropolitan School District, the second-biggest district in the state, have enacted a concept called bridge week. Students who’ve earned Cs or higher were not required to come to school on June 7 or 8 as the schools planned to focus on kids who’ve logged Ds and Fs on those days, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. The kids with higher grades were not to be marked absent. Final exams, which would have been an end-of-year focus, were scrapped more…

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Choice schools tackle pandemic-related learning loss

June 23, 2022

School Choice Wisconsin set out to see what some of our choice schools did last year and will do going forward to combat the disruptions and learning loss that followed the pandemic lockdowns. See what we found. Recent headlines, such as this story in The New York Times and this piece in The Atlantic, cite a pandemic-related learning loss that is more serious than many had realized. The loss was worse for schools that stayed closed longer in response to the pandemic, according to a study from Harvard’s Center for Education Policy. “Remote learning was a failure,” wrote The New…

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Will SCOTUS ruling in Carson v. Makin affect Wisconsin? 

June 23, 2022

Tuesday’s ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in the Carson v. Makin case, a big win for school choice, may have implications for religious choice schools here in Wisconsin. In its ruling, the court struck down a law in the state of Maine that excluded schools providing religious instruction from a voucher program that allowed parents in areas with no public school to send their kids to private schools. “Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the court’s opinion on the case. He was joined by…

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2022 Spring Newsletter

March 31, 2022

Click to view or download PDF version   Download the 2022 Spring Newsletter  

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Department of Public Instruction Authority – Executive Summary

August 23, 2021

Wisconsin Private School Choice Programs and Special Needs Scholarship Program – Department of Public Instruction Authority – Executive Summary

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Department of Public Instruction Authority

August 23, 2021

Wisconsin Private School Choice Programs and Special Needs Scholarship Program – Department of Public Instruction Authority

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School Choice Wisconsin President Jim Bender To Step Down End of 2020

November 18, 2020

Contacts: Susan Mitchell, 414.232.4324 Jim Bender, 920.222.5427 Brookfield, WI –  School Choice Wisconsin (SCW) President Jim Bender will step down at the end of the year to form his own business, Bender Consulting, LLC.  SCW will begin immediately to recruit a new president, SCW board chair Susan Mitchell said. “Jim has led SCW through a decade of major growth in programs, participating schools, and students,” Mitchell said.  “Thanks to his leadership, the number of programs has quadrupled, participating schools have tripled, and the number of students served has doubled,” she said. The pandemic has shown parents the value of the…

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