Tommy Washbush / Freepik
A graduation cap with a tassle made of a lit fuse.
This is our last graduation from Madison East High School, my alma mater and the school all three of our children attended. During the time we’ve been part of the East community, we’ve experienced budget cuts, pandemic disruptions and a mounting exodus from Madison’s once highly regarded public schools, all of it taking a toll on student and teacher morale and kids’ sense of their own possibilities.
This year, as we gather with our neighbors in Maple Bluff for the annual graduation party at Beach Park, only two of 23 kids are East grads. The rest are almost all in private school.
I don’t begrudge parents who seek out the best school setting for their child. I know kids who switched schools to escape bullying or boredom, or to pursue curriculum that better matched their particular talents and needs. But there is something sad about the degree to which, as a community, we’ve scattered, withdrawing from the local public schools that used to bring us together.
Our daughters attended Lake View Elementary, Sherman Middle School and East, with a detour to Mexico for a year and a pandemic scramble that included a semester of grandparent homeschooling for our youngest and an intense wilderness expedition school for our middle daughter, trekking through Vermont from January ‘til June.
I’m grateful for the mix of opportunities my kids had that have shaped who they are today. I’m also worried that, as this year’s graduates celebrate their accomplishments and listen to speeches about the future, we are dramatically reshaping education, putting an end to the promise of free, high quality public schools for every kid, reducing opportunities for all but the most fortunate.
Between the dates that I and then my youngest daughter graduated from East High, Wisconsin launched the first school voucher experiment in the nation, and then expanded vouchers from 337 low-income students in Milwaukee to create a massive school choice program that enrolls almost 94,000 students across the state.
Both spending and enrollment in Wisconsin’s voucher programs have skyrocketed. We’ve set up a vicious cycle: As budget cuts drive more parents away from public schools, school voucher programs suck up more and more public school dollars, further reducing public school resources. Meanwhile, most Wisconsin families who make use of taxpayer-subsidized school vouchers have never had their kids in public schools.
For kids who do leave public school to attend often low-performing voucher schools, outcomes are shockingly bad. Across the nation, voucher students have suffered stunning academic decline, according to Michigan State University researcher Josh Cowen. Studies in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., show learning losses that surpassed those experienced by students in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or by children across the country from the COVID-19 pandemic, Cowen recently testified.
The devastating effect on other states’ budgets that moved to universal vouchers is also sobering. In Wisconsin, Republicans in the Legislature have discussed “decoupling” spending on school vouchers from the rest of education and moving it to the general fund. The result is that transparency will be lost. At the same time, the state will open the door to unlimited spending on vouchers, no matter how expensive the program becomes.
Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, wrote a paper on how dangerous that could be. “It could come up last-minute, on very short notice,” she told me.
The truth is we cannot afford to sustain two separate school systems, one public and one private.
Opportunities for middle class and low-income students are shrinking. The general excellence of our education system in Wisconsin and across the country is declining.
To what end? Among the many threatening proposals in the Republicans’ “big beautiful bill” — which seeks massive cuts to safety net programs, education and federal agencies to fund permanent tax cuts for the very rich — is a school voucher tax write-off scheme designed to turbocharge school privatization.
The Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 would give a 100% tax deduction on donations to nonprofits known as scholarship granting organizations, which give out private K-12 school vouchers. Since there is virtually no such thing as a 100% tax deduction for any other charity donation, financial advisors everywhere are sure to urge their clients to take advantage of the program.
All of this tax cutting and privatization is predicated on the theory that individuals, unhooked from public obligations, should be free to make their own choices and spend their money however they like. That’s been a cornerstone of Republican ideology for generations. But it’s never reached such an extreme. My hope is that the slash and burn politics of the second Trump administration will lead people to see that there’s a limit to how much we can cut before our entire society begins to come apart. That all of us, and most of all the people who’ve benefited from the 2017 tax cuts, can afford to pitch in to maintain a decent society, with good schools and a bright future for kids. If we can’t do that, it’s going to be hard to tell this year’s graduates that they should be optimistic about the world that awaits them.
Ruth Conniff is the editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner.
