Legislature Misguided On Education

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By Dennis Sphatt
Omro High School music teacher

What the Republican leadership in Madison is doing with the education of our public school students is criminal.

Now, they want to take more of your tax dollars that could help our public schools and expand the choice program in Milwaukee as was stated in the news recently. More public tax money shifted to private and parochial schools means less for the great public schools in this state. They were all on the bandwagon to have a property tax "freeze" because the homeowner was paying too much. Homeowners wouldn't have to pay too much if they didn't give all kinds of corporate tax breaks to businesses around this state. So their choice is to keep using our property taxes that you and I pay and give more of it to private and parochial schools. In the meantime, the share of property taxes that businesses paid went from 18% down to 4.5 % from 1970 to 200,1 and the portion that you and I pay went from 51% to 68% in the same time period.

And please don't go on this soapbox of everyone needs to "tighten their belts". Public schools have been tightening their belts until we can hardly breathe. We have been limited by the revenue caps as well as the QEO thrust upon us back in 1993 by Thompson and his cronies. It seems to me that the Republicans do not care too much about our public schools or the job we as teachers are trying to do with less funding and resources. They would prefer to give more of it away to private schools.

Along this line also are more state and federal mandates, which come to us without adequate funding. But the staff who serve your public schools as well as the school board members elected have a difficult time as it is coming up with ways to serve our students properly without cutting programs, classes, and other opportunities that make our schools great. We have been pushed and pushed until we are about to fall off the cliff. Is that what they really want?

It seems to me that from Washington on down, the trickle-down effect is to see how much money they can cut from public education and give it to private and parochial schools. Let's see how we can develop more failing public schools through the fallacies and myths of the No Child Left Behind act. Then we can give more of our tax dollars away to choice schools. We'll show those public schools who's in charge here!!

The talk among some of my colleagues in this profession isn't so much how many more years can we put in, but when can we retire and get out…..not because we don't enjoy our jobs or the students and staff we work with, but because of the politicians playing roulette with our profession and our students.

And you know, most of the time, when you gamble, you lose. There already is talk currently of a teacher shortage in the coming years when many of us who are toward the end of our careers decide to retire. The Republicans took away our right to bargain a fair contract with the QEO. They now want to limit our right to bargain insurance. I thought their party was for less government and more local control. I guess I was mistaken.

It seems something is going very wrong with the education of the students in our public schools and the way the legislature is treating school employees…and it's starting to look like it's coming from the Republican Party.

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Posted October 24, 2003