Of all the challenges our schools face, the Legislature has decided, for now, to focus on just one: cursive writing.
You read that right.
Wisconsin is last in the nation when it comes to supporting special education. Our English Language Learners are struggling with an “alarming” achievement gap, often with no help at all.
We have a state education budget that, after a lot of wrangling between Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-led Legislature, only partially restores the nearly $1 billion in cuts made by Scott Walker, leaving 40 percent of school districts with less state aid this year than they got last year.
We have rural schools going to referendum, begging local voters to dig in their pockets and make up the gap. And we have voters in some districts, most recently Palmyra, saying no, and schools closing down as a result.
So what are state legislators talking about in the Assembly and Senate education committees? A bill to require that “each elementary school curriculum must include the objective that pupils be able to write legibly in cursive by the end of fifth grade.”
The Wisconsin Association of School Boards opposes the cursive-writing bill as an unfunded mandate and an incursion into individual school district’s rights to set their own curriculum.
But mostly, it’s just dumb.
What’s next? Butter-churning? Lessons on cutting kindling to the right size to stoke the wood stove?
I have nothing against good penmanship. I admire it. It’s pretty. I notice it on the very rare occasion I actually receive a real, handwritten letter.
But if there’s one thing kids don’t need to be prepared for the jobs of the future, it’s cursive writing class. The backward-looking cursive writing bill might improve the legibility of thank-you notes (that’s the only piece of actual handwritten mail I can think of that my kids still write), but it’s not going to go a long way toward the college and career readiness our district and others are always talking about.
Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), who introduced the cursive writing bill, was also co-chair of the bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding, which came up with recommendations last January based on hearings held all over the state. Those included increasing funding for English Language Learners and special ed, as well as school mental health services and helping rural districts struggling with low enrollment and high transportation costs.
A lot of those things were in Gov. Tony Evers’ original budget proposal. But the Republican legislative leadership threw the governor’s budget in the trash and handed back their own, stripped-down budget. Then the governor used his line-item veto to modestly increase public-school funding over the two years of the budget by vetoing the lower funding number for the first year.
None of that revived the specific, thoughtful proposals in the Blue Ribbon Commission report. For a little while it looked like those proposals might re-emerge, piecemeal, in standalone bills that came up in committee. But they didn’t make it to the floor in the fall session. And now we have a Senate Education Committee busy with its Little Rascals revival, making kids practice cursive “Os” in their copy books.
No wonder Wisconsin schools are falling behind.
The good news is, school districts in Dane County did very well on the recently released school report cards, which the state has been required to produce every year since 2011 — the same year Walker took his meat axe to state school funding.
Every school district in Dane County met or exceeded expectations. Madison schools improved their scores overall, with Madison East High School moving from two stars to an “exceeds expectations” four-star rating.
But overall, between the tough budget environment, the failure to address structural inequities, and the expansion of public funding for private school vouchers, which will be coming into Madison in a big way in the coming year, “Wisconsin is FAILING its students,” notes Grandparents for Madison Public Schools (GRUMPS). “It’s amazing that our teachers and support staff are doing as well as they are with our students,” the group noted in an email to its members. “Our students are succeeding despite the odds. We must fund our schools in a more equitable and adequate manner.”
On the same day DPI released the school report cards, the Wisconsin Public Education Network, a public-school advocacy group, released its own report cards, rating state legislators on their support for public schools.
The report cards assess lawmakers’ budget votes in each of five categories: the overall K-12 budget, special education, bilingual/bicultural needs, mental health and public funding for private schools.
“We need to connect the dots between student needs and legislative performance,” says Heather DuBois Bourenane of WPEN.
Start connecting those dots. But please do it with your calligraphy pen.
Ruth Conniff is editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner.
