A former WELS Lutheran school teacher, State Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt (R-Fond du Lac), is the chair of the Assembly Committee on Education. Recently, he provided insights on the Legislature’s role in education in a profile featured in The Wheeler Report, an online news service that covers the Wisconsin state legislature. Wheeler also profiled the chairman of the state senate’s education committee, Sen. Luther Olsen (R- Ripon).
Glimpses into the minds of key leaders on education policy is helpful to gaining perspective about the issues and concerns that may be driving committee activities in the 2017 legislative session that begins in January, said WCRIS Executive Director Sharon Schmeling.
Both legislators are up for re-election in November. If their party retains control of the Assembly and Senate, their influence on education issues will continue, Schmeling noted.
Of the past legislative session, Thiesfeldt said his committee “created a lot of dialogue” on school accountability that tried to cover public, charter, choice and virtual schools.
“Obviously it didn’t ultimately pass into a law, but there were provisions that made their way into the budget. It spurred a lot of discussion on ‘can schools be held accountable’ realistically. When you have all these different kinds of schools…can you have an accountability system that encompasses all of them? No one else had tried that in the country that I am aware of. It is a big step,” Thiesfeldt told Wheeler.
Of vouchers, Thiesfeldt said, “They are not going to go away. One of the things I have tried to do as Chair of Education is to bring some peace. It doesn’t do the kids a bit of good for all these education entities to be squabbling over a piece of the pie. Vouchers are here and they are not going away. There is more acceptance in the public of that, and more acceptance in the public school arena as well.”
The state’s evolving funding system for education will have an impact on vouchers, he said.
“I like to call vouchers scholarships…There has been a call for the past several years to change the school funding in Wisconsin. While there are certainly suggestions on how that (funding formula) could be better, experts will tell you that Wisconsin’s formula is fair. There are other states that have gone with Education Savings Accounts. Superintendent Evers likes to say that Republicans are going to push until there is a voucher in every backpack. I like to call that a scholarship in every backpack. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The United States is behind other countries (in using vouchers). Other countries have been doing this for years. For over 100 years in the Netherlands parents are given an allotted amount of money for each child to spend on that child’s education. They go to whatever school they choose for that child. I think if Wisconsin could go back in time and start over in its choice program I suspect there would be strong consideration given to going to Education Savings Account and letting the parents make the choice of which school their child attends.”
For his part, Senator Olsen predicted that the future of K-12 education in Wisconsin is “going to be tough because one of the first things I see is that schools are going to have a hard time finding teachers. It used to be there were all kinds of applications for job openings. There was a difficulty in the past finding specialists, and now they can’t find them. I think schools are going to face a critical shortage, in our state and across the country, in teachers. One of our comprehensive colleges, that has a teacher training program, said their enrollment is down approximately 70%. Statewide enrollment in teaching programs is down about 25%. Schools are having problems finding teachers. If you don’t have a great pool of teachers, you wind up not having the quality that the state is used to. Education is facing what other industries have faced for a while now. It is hard to get qualified people in these positions. The baby boomers are retiring and need to be replaced. The next generation looks at teaching and aren’t interested. I think that is one of the big challenges.”
Olsen is on a committee for the National Conference of State Legislators, which will be issuing a paper this Fall on how other high academically performing countries handle teacher training and recruitment.
“One of the things they (other countries) do is have high standards to be a teacher. They pay teachers well, and they teach large class sizes. I am concerned that the road it looks like we are going down is low standards, low pay and low class sizes. In Germany, half of the students in teacher training programs don’t complete the program because it is so rigorous. I think we have some challenges in that way,” Olsen told Wheeler.
When it comes to the future of the school choice programs, Olsen said he has long been concerned about the availability of General Purpose Revenue (GPR) in the state budget to fund “two school systems: public and private. In this last budget, vouchers got totally shifted to the property taxpayers in the state. Statewide vouchers are all paid for by property taxes and there is no GPR that goes into it. Years ago people that sent their kids to private school paid for that type of education. This generation says ‘I pay taxes. I want to send my kids to those schools, and I want my tax money to go to educating my kids in a private school.’ Gov. Walker, when he ran for re-election, said he was going to keep property taxes down and expand school choice and he won.”
