Governor Scott Walker signed a biennial state budget Sunday
afternoon that accelerates his quest to destroy the public sector in Wisconsin.
Within 24 hours, Walker will formally announce his candidacy for president to
take his right-wing agenda nationwide.
The Wisconsin budget accelerates Walker’s four-year attack
on the public sector, in particular the public schools. Among its measures are
an expansion of a voucher program that provides taxpayer funding of private
schools and cuts of $250 million to the state’s nationally renowned public
university system.
Walker has the most far-reaching budget veto powers of any
governor, and some people had hoped that he might ameliorate some of the more
draconian measures of his budget, which was approved by the Republican
controlled legislature last week. But Walker by and large let the 1,500-page
budget intact, using his line-by-line veto powers to make minor tweaks.
There is one common theme to Walker’s budget: underfunding
public institutions, expanding the privatization of government functions,
restricting environmental protections, and decimating workers’ rights. Among
its many provisions:
• Mandatory drug testing for those seeking unemployment
insurance and public assistance services;
• A repeal of “prevailing wage law” requirements for local
government projects, and elimination of a state mandate that factory and retail
workers get at least one day off per week.
• Removing the term ”‘living wage” from state statues, referring
only to a minimum wage, which in Wisconsin is $7.25 per hour.
• Decreases subsidies for recycling,
• Eliminates dozens of scientists’ position at the
Department of Natural Resources, opens up thousands of acres in state forests
to commercial timber cutting, restricts local zoning along lake shorelines and
raises user fees at state parks.
Walker’s most damaging and telling attack on the public
sector involves education.
The University of Wisconsin took a massive $250 million
budget cut. In addition, tenure is no longer protected by state law but instead
will be determined by the University’s Board of Regents, most of whom are
gubernatorial appointees.
K-12 public schools were particularly decimated. Shortly
before the budget’s signing, Wisconsin State Superintendent of Schools Tony
Evers publicly requested that Walker veto more than 20 education measures that
would undermine the state’s public schools. Walker refused.
Instead, the budget continues Walker’s agenda of undermining
public education.
A majority of public school districts in Wisconsin will
receive less funding this year, and no school district’s state funding will
keep up to inflation. At the same time, the budget expands taxpayer support of
private voucher schools, which are overwhelmingly religious schools and which
are subject to minimal public oversight. (For instance, voucher schools do not
have to follow the state’s law prohibiting discrimination against students on
the basis of sex, sexual orientation, marital or pregnancy status. Nor are they
subject to the state’s open meetings and records requirements.)
The budget also creates a new and complicated “special needs voucher” law that was
opposed by all special education advocacy groups because of its detrimental
effect on special education protections.
The budget also increases the number of authorizers of
privately run charter schools that are not subject to the oversight of publicly
elected local school boards.
In previous years, all publicly funded schools in Wisconsin
— traditional public schools, voucher schools, charter schools — were required
to take the same standardized tests, in order to have some semblance of
comparing student achievement. The budget eliminates that requirement.
In Milwaukee, the state’s largest district and home to
predominantly African-American and Latino students, the budget includes a
“takeover” plan that increases privatization and decreases oversight by the
elected school board of the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).
The plan empowers the Milwaukee County Executive to
appoint a “commissioner” who will have parallel power with the MPS school
board. The commissioner can privatize up to three of the city’s schools the
first two years, and up five every year thereafter.
Perhaps most indicative of Walker’s perspective is the
budget’s elimination of the Chapter 220 urban-metropolitan schools
desegregation program. At a time when racism and racial tensions have reached alarming
levels across the United States, Walker has eliminated the only program in the
state designed to counter segregation in the public schools and improve opportunities
for African-Americans.
Walker signed the budget in Waukesha County, an
overwhelmingly white county that is among one of the wealthiest and most
conservative in the entire United States.
On Monday, Walker will return to Waukesha and officially
launch his bid for President. It is an apt indication of which side he will
protect in what is an increasingly divided and unequal country.
photo credit: Barbara J. Miner
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