Category: State news

Quoted: “Teachers do not deliberately set out to make students feel bad about themselves. The problem this bill seems to identify, that Wisconsin’s teachers intentionally or otherwise want to make students feel bad, is simply not real,” said Jeremy Stoddard, a University of Wisconsin-Madison curriculum and instruction professor, at an August hearing in the state Capitol.

“What I fear is that if it becomes law, it will have a chilling effect inhibiting teachers from teaching a full account of history,” he said then.

Video: Barry Burden, director of the UW-Madison Elections Research Center, responds to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s statement about investigating the 2020 vote in the state.

Quoted: Jordan Ellenberg is a math professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When it comes to what constitutes a fair map, Ellenberg said many Wisconsinites might be asking the wrong questions.

“The very word ‘fair,’ there’s some question of philosophy and some question of ethics and some question of law,” Ellenberg said. “There is not really a good answer to what is fair, so then you may say, ‘Well, what are we even doing?’ Like, why am I here talking about it? Because there is a good answer to what is unfair. That’s a different question.”

Quoted: Barry Burden, the director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Ayyadurai’s claim can’t be taken seriously.

“His statements about Massachusetts seem completely implausible,” Burden said. “These sort of artificial multipliers and things that he latches onto seem completely detached from reality.”

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at Wednesday’s news conference that the partisan efforts would hurt the public perception of a well-run election.

“They are decreasing confidence in the election system, rather than increasing it, regardless of what they find,” Burden said. “The fact that questions and suspicions and allegations are being launched and there are multiple tracks of reviews happening simultaneously all coming in at different times with different conclusions is likely to undermine the trust that people have in the system.”

Quoted: “That’s a great thing in just the first month, I’m guessing that those numbers are going to improve,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economist and child tax credit expert. “The word’s getting out, so I expect it’ll even be better soon for people who really need it.”

The Urban Institute estimates 78 percent of eligible families will be receiving their tax credits by February, though Smeeding said he expects it will take even longer. He’s been working with several groups in Wisconsin to help connect harder-to-reach groups to the payments, especially immigrant families.

“All U.S.-born children who have Social Security numbers are eligible for the child tax payment, but (the families) are gun-shy because they fear public charge rules, they fear all sorts of things that took place under the last administration, and they need trusted people who they can work with,” he said.

Noted: David Egan-Robertson, a demographer in the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said one of the key points he would be looking at is changes in the state’s race and ethnicity data.

Much of the state’s growth in recent decades has been attributable to an increase in the Hispanic population, he said.

Quoted: “With Kind out of the picture, Republicans have a really good shot at winning that seat and having a bigger majority in (Wisconsin’s) congressional delegation,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.