This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/badger-institute-urges-no-vote-on-mps-referendum/

Institute launching social media campaign opposing request for $252 million 

The Milwaukee Public Schools district is badly mismanaged, has already received enormous sums of money from both a prior referendum and federal coffers, has fostered an unsafe environment in many of its schools, has demonstrated little ability to teach children how to read and write and, perhaps most importantly, does not appear to consider itself accountable to taxpayers or legislators.

For all those reasons — and because the property tax hike the district seeks would harm business growth and drive away residents — the Badger Institute today is launching an extensive social media and email campaign urging Milwaukeeans to vote “no” on the April 2 referendum.

The district argues that state funding is not matching inflation and that it requires additional funding to pay teacher and staff salaries, maintain buildings, purchase updated textbooks and materials, and keep pace with new technologies. District leaders argue in promotional materials that “the only way to continue programming at current levels is to raise additional revenue.”

They want another $252 million per year.

A tax increase of that size would be counterproductive, hurt the city and erode both the existing tax base and school district tax revenue in the future. Taxpayers would pay an additional:

• $216 per year on a house assessed at $100,000.
• $367 on a home assessed at $170,000, the median price in Milwaukee.
• $864 per year on a house assessed at $400,000.

Milwaukee’s population already has decreased from more than 741,000 in 1960 to just 577,000 in 2020 — a 22% decline. There are many reasons for the decrease, but ever-higher property taxes will only accelerate the downward trend.

As the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce has pointed out, the city already overburdens its residents in comparison to other similar places. In a 2023 study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Milwaukee ranked sixth highest in its property tax rate among the 50 largest cities in the United States. Among nine major peer cities in the Midwest, Milwaukee ranked second highest on residential taxes on a $150,000 home, second highest on taxes for a $600,000 apartment building, sixth highest on commercial property of $1 million value, and sixth highest on industrial property of $1 million.

Those, unfortunately, are far from the only reasons to vote no.

• Mismanagement: MPS enrollment is down about 40% in the past two decades — a slow, largely predictable decrease that recent leaders didn’t do enough to plan for or even react to. According to the Milwaukee Public Schools’ own figures filed with the Department of Public Instruction, 21 of the district’s schools had enrollments last school year that were less than half the building’s capacity. Forty-three of its school buildings are less than two-thirds used.
• Failure to keep students safe:  The MPS Board banned police officers from schools in 2016. It was a big mistake. There are typically more than 600 calls to police each semester just from the 34 high schools controlled by the district. In an effort to help the good kids who just want to learn and don’t feel safe, state legislators gave the city and county permission to increase sales taxes as part of a deal that included putting 25 police officers back in crime-ridden schools. The city and the school district were supposed to share the cost.

Gov. Evers signed the deal on June 20, 2023, almost nine months ago. The sales tax hikes went into effect on January 1, 2024, over two months ago.  There are still no cops in schools.

• The truth about revenue: District officials say that state funding is inadequate because it has not kept pace with inflation — an overly simplistic, misleading claim supporters echo over and over.

MPS has numerous sources of revenue.  In the state’s most recent figures, about 58% of the district’s revenue came from state aid, about 23% from property taxes, about 16% from federal grants and about 3% from other  sources such as fees and gifts.

The district has asked for — and has been given — large pots of money in recent years. Voters approved an $87 million referendum in 2020. The federal government sent $772 million in COVID “emergency” funds.

In sum, the district’s spending, which takes into account all sources of revenue, has roughly kept pace with inflation with the exception of a drop made possible by savings tied to Act 10.

• Failure of basic mission to teach kids to read and do math: It is true that MPS has enormous challenges that most districts in the state do not face, including high levels of poverty. The children who attend its schools do not have the advantages of their peers in Elm Grove or Mequon. But there’s ample reason to believe the district, particularly in recent years, has failed in its most basic mission.

Among students who were tested in various grades for both elementary and high school, only 17% were at least proficient in reading and only 11% were at least proficient in math. Perhaps part of the reason is that MPS makes it hard on the ambitious kids who just want a safe classroom where they can go to learn.

It’s no real surprise that many stay away. Many — if not most — students counted as enrolled in the Milwaukee Public Schools miss at least three weeks of class throughout the year. In some schools, nearly all kids are chronically absent — that is, absent on more than 10% of possible attendance days.

You can’t just blame it on the parents or on the kids themselves.

During the 2021-22 school year, the last year for which the Department of Public Instruction provides publicly available data for schools in the state and a year that most MPS classes were back in-person, the chronic absenteeism rate in the MPS district was 58%, according to the district’s DPI Report Card.

Chronic absenteeism is far worse in MPS than it is in Wisconsin on the whole. It also rose more on a percentage basis in the last year available, 2021-22, in MPS than in the state as a whole.

Common sense says a big part of the problem was how the district and its union handled the pandemic. MPS, unlike many districts, did not offer in-person classes for long stretches of time. The district closed its schools and then moved online in the spring of 2020, remained online for much of the 2020-21 school year, and returned to in-person learning for the most part in April 2021. Some schools returned to virtual learning at times after that because as few as three cases could close an entire school.  It will take decades to determine the impact on kids who are struggling, but when you haven’t been taught how to read, it’s got to be tough to keep showing up.

The people who run MPS have very difficult jobs. They also repeatedly prove they do not think they need to be accountable to the public, to parents, to taxpayers or to legislators. They go their own way and damn the consequences.

One of those consequences should be a resounding “no” vote on their request for more money.

The children in MPS deserve better. The city deserves better. There is no realistic argument that more money is the solution. To the extent a big influx of cash allows further complacency, it is more likely to hurt.

We urge voters to fill in the oval next to “no” on April 2. Taxpayers can’t afford it, and neither can the children who, luckily, increasingly have other options.

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