Author: jnweaver

Noted: The Environmental Law & Policy Center commissioned the study by researchers from several universities, including Daniel Vimont, director of the Nelson Institute Center For Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: With a Madison school board election coming up April 2, and with conversations around charters and vouchers affecting the last several school board races, we feel it’s important that voters be fully informed. So I spoke with Dr. John Witte, an expert on educational policy at the LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Witte has studied charter and voucher policies and their effects for more than 30 years.

The guest is Laura Albert, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering

Quoted: “The anonymous nature of even the sponsor of the bill is something that really does fly in the face of democratic accountability,” says UW-Madison political science professor David Canon. Introducing a Motion 999 at the end of the budget process has since become a common way for Wisconsin lawmakers to avoid public scrutiny. “It leads to laws getting passed that don’t have any kind of public vetting.”

Quoted: Howard Schweber, a constitutional law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, went a step further, saying Hagedorn’s past writings on this issue represent a “radical position and one far outside the mainstream.”

“These are fringe views even among conservatives,” Schweber said.

Quoted: The costs of implementing small classes are significant, said Beth Graue, professor of early childhood education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Class-size reduction is a huge investment. It costs a lot of money, requires a lot of space. In places that have done wholesale class-size reduction, like California, they had unintended consequences because of that, where they ended up having to emergency certify teachers to be able to cover all the classes, and those teachers weren’t well-educated to be able to take advantage of (small class sizes),” she said.

Noted: Van Deelen is the Beers-Bascom professor in Conservation and professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at UW-Madison. Much of his work relates to conservation of wildlife populations in the face of human influences.