and will advance to April's general election. Back at the
Capitol Assembly, Republicans passed a package of education
bills. The legislation would realign statewide testing
standards back to national levels, ban the use of cell
phones by students during class time, require cursive
instruction and a specific civics instruction.
Instructional materials must be made available for inspection by
district residents, and 70% of operating expenses must go
toward direct classroom costs and teacher salaries, and limit
pay increases for school administrators. Republicans say
the bills are necessary to improve achievement levels.
>> Since 2011, 2012, we have actually seen with demographic
changes, about a 6.5% decline in the total number of students
attending school in Wisconsin. But we have actually seen a 39%
increase in spending during that same time. So the challenge that
we have is we now know that just simply increasing education
funding doesn't necessarily mean we have higher standards. It
doesn't mean that we have better outcomes. Our test results and
our test scores clearly show that. So what we want to make
sure is that at a time when only 31% of the students who are
taking the fourth grade test are reading at grade level, we want
to make sure that that actually gets better than where it is
now. In fact, right now, that test score is the lowest that
it's been since 1992. Where before many kids, actually many
people were even born. So the results that we have are
disappointing. They are really disappointing. They are really