School Finance and Education Policy Research

Public education in Wisconsin is a critical element in personal, community and statewide prosperity. Over the past 20 years, public schools have been at the center of significant controversy involving cost, educational achievement, governance and teacher quality. Since IWF’s inception, education-related issues have been at the center of the organization’s research agenda.

School funding has been a priority since 1996 when IWF published an analysis of a Wisconsin policy that revised how state aid to school districts was distributed. Since that time, IWF has published a series of reports on the impact of school budget cuts, problems in the state aid formula and alternative plans for ensuring adequate state aid for schools. Read more...

WAES is driving force in funding reform

The Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES), was established by IWF in 1998 as a coalition of parents, teachers, students and education officials responding to public school budget cuts eroding the quality of education across the state. Using research from IWF, WAES organizers traveled statewide to help citizens and education stakeholders understand how and why the state school funding system was failing to work in the best interest of students and communities. Read more...

Message delivered to Legislature:
Change the school-funding system

Partners in WAES and their friends from around the state delivered an important message to legislators, Nov. 15 – in the strongest way possible: Wisconsin’s school-funding system is broken, it needs to be thrown out, and the Legislature needs to come up with a better plan by July 1, 2009.The audience for over six hours of testimony was the Senate Education Committee and the point of the message was support for Senate Joint Resolution 27. Read More...