- I'm Frederica Freyberg.
Tonight, the future of school choice in Wisconsin
under the Trump administration.
After that, a closer look at the implications of the Trump plan
to uproot Obamacare.
Then, in our look ahead, we'll learn about the promises ahead
for First Lady Tonette Walker's Fostering Futures program.
And WPR's Shawn Johnson joins me for a Capitol Insight segment.
It's "Here and Now" for January 20.
- Funding for "Here and Now" is provided in part by Friends of
Wisconsin Public Television.
- A first look tonight at the Trump administration and the
newly sworn-in president's priorities for public education.
Ahead of the inauguration, it was a week chock full of cabinet
hearings in Washington, including the hearing for
Secretary of Department of Education nominee Betsy DeVos.
Ms. DeVos spoke to her support of something Wisconsin is very
familiar with - school choice.
- Parents no longer believe that a one size fits all model
of learning meets the need of every child.
And they know other options exist, whether magnet, virtual,
charter, home, faith-based or any other combination.
- Thanks in large measure to Betsy DeVos,
Wisconsin is ahead of most of the rest of the nation
when it comes to private school and voucher programs.
Our first guest has been at the forefront
of the choice movement in the badger state.
Jim Bender is the president of School Choice Wisconsin.
Thanks a lot for being here.
- Thank you for having me.
- We just heard Betsy DeVos.
What's your reaction to her being picked for this post?
- Well, I think following the general theme
of this entire election process, change is coming.
There's no doubt about it.
Exactly what form that's going to take,
we're going to have to find out.
But right now I think her statements there were reflecting
where we are not just as a state here in Wisconsin, when you look
at the polling on school choice and the support that's there now
and growing.
So nationally you're seeing the same thing.
Milwaukee had the first voucher program 26, 27 years ago.
Now there's 25 states that have programs.
42 states that have independent charters.
You've got hundreds of thousands of students in there.
Nationally you're seeing a growing movement.
In Wisconsin you're seeing a growing movement.
And the poll numbers and general support just keep going up
and up for educational options.
- Describe how influential Betsy DeVos was in Wisconsin
with us being at the vanguard
with that Milwaukee choice program?
- So I think when the program started here, you had a number
of people, my predecessor of School Choice Wisconsin,
Susan Mitchell worked with Tommy Thompson, Howard Fuller, Polly
Williams, Tim Sheehy at MMAC to get the first program started.
After that happened, then there was much more of a national
movement that got started once there was one solid program.
Susan Mitchell and Betsy DeVos, at that point,
were part of that national movement.
Betsy has led the charge since then.
It's helped promote the Milwaukee program, expand it in
various forms to other states and then in return now that
we've expanded the program outside of Milwaukee to Racine
and statewide, American Federation for Children,
the organization that she ran,
has been influential here in Wisconsin.
- So should she be confirmed to this secretary post,
what might that mean going forward for Wisconsin?
- So they've talked at least President-elect Trump, now
President Trump, has talked about injecting
like $20 billion into school choice across the country,
which would be a dramatic increase.
What I think we're finding out is that, you know,
it doesn't sound anyway like there's going to be
a new federal program to administer those dollars.
They're really looking more at block grants and interjecting
not just that new money for school choice, but as I have
often said, I think the whole movement is going to be
kind of de-emphasizing the federal role in education.
So even for traditional public schools, I think they will get
much more flexibility than they've had in the past
without all the strings being tied to federal.
So I think you're going to see block grants.
I think you're going to see more money put down to the states.
And I think everybody will be beneficial -- or will benefit
from a reduced role from the federal government in education.
- What kinds of regulations from the federal Department of
Education would people like yourself like to see go away?
- So I think from a school choice standpoint, the federal
government right now doesn't play much of a role.
The programs here in the state of Wisconsin for vouchers are
funded by state dollars only.
There aren't any federal dollars that go into it.
From the traditional public school side, you've just got --
whether you're dealing with -- you know, you've got different
title funding for teacher prep.
For low-income students, you've got IDEA, Title IX.
You've got all these different functions.
And I don't think that -- at least what I'm hearing,
you're not seeing necessarily a reduction in any of the funding
of those items, but just the way they are administered will allow
local districts to have a bit more flexibility with how
they're going to be applied.
In other words, I think you've got a number of people here in
the state that are full-time employees that are on compliance
measures to make sure that the federal dollars are spent
the way that they're supposed to be spent.
We just got done seeing school improvement grants
for the country.
$7 billion was invested from 2010 to 2015.
Yesterday the results came out that those dollars had no impact
on improving low-performing schools across the country.
So we spent $7 billion over five years
through the traditional system.
Arne Duncan put it in place.
President Obama, one of his key measures.
It's kind of telling that it came out the day before
he left office that after those $7 billion got done,
there was no improvement.
Part of the problem was that plan had very structured ways in
which you could spend the money and didn't give the local
schools the ability to be innovative with those dollars.
And we just didn't see any results.
- We need to leave it there. Jim Bender, thanks very much.
- Thank you.
- The statewide expansion of school choice in Wisconsin
accounts for 3,000 students
beyond the core choice school districts.
Those districts are Racine and Milwaukee.
As of the current school year, there are 121 private schools
participating in the Milwaukee parental choice program.
Total Milwaukee enrollment is approximately 28,000 students.
The program is estimated to cost more than $200 million
in 2016-2017.
Racine has 19 choice schools, serving about 2500 students.
But it's Milwaukee that has been ground zero for the national
school choice movement.
We go there now to a democratic member of the assembly education
committee, who says it's time to put the brakes on state money
for choice schools.
Representative David Bowen is in Milwaukee and thanks very much
for joining us.
- Thank you so much for having me on your show.
- You're welcome.
Now, putting the brakes on school choice at this point
is going to take spike strips.
It seems likely it will be further expanded here
and nationwide.
What's your reaction to that?
- Well, I think the problem is that people
are playing partisan games when we really should be looking at
the evidence and at the data, right?
We know for a fact that just because there is school choice,
in a sense, it does not increase the educational outcomes of our
students, of the preparedness that our families have as they
deal with situations outside of the walls of their schools,
rising poverty, especially in the state of Wisconsin.
We've seen that there are challenges that just having
competition and choice does not address.
- What do you think of Betsy DeVos being named Secretary of
Education?
- Well, I think it was another move where we weren't really
looking at, you know, the person that's best equipped to really
focus on increasing educational outcomes.
I understand Ms. DeVos has connections on the choice and
privatizing education side
that have led her to circles
where people have picked her, you know.
And I think that it more so should be someone that has the
experience, that has the preparedness to take on such an
operation of the Department of Education and truly be aware of
everything that you need to be acclimated to, to really focus
on improving educational outcomes, not just using skewed
data and studies and big money
that has influenced our politics
and our education systems to change things the way that you
see fit.
- Do you feel as though she represents a threat
to public schools?
- I think she recognizes or resembles a threat
to quality public education
for all of our students.
You know, I think that we have a long way to go to actually make
sure that we are prioritizing, you know,
the outcomes and the things
that we need to do to increase those outcomes.
And we need folks
that are not going to bury their heads in the sand
or just cherry picking the things that they want to do.
We need folks that are really committed to addressing the lack
of focus that has happened on our education systems,
where we've put them behind.
We haven't invested the amount of dollars that it takes, on
rural and urban education, especially in Wisconsin.
And we need folks that are not going to just see this as a
partisan issue, but that are really committed to the outcomes
of our young people and, you know, helping our families have
access to a quality of life that compliments the experience that
our children have in education.
- Now, meanwhile, Governor Walker in his State of the State
said his budget would include what he called a "significant
increase for public schools." So what's your reaction to that?
- Well, the problem is that the governor continues to not focus
on the educational outcomes of all of our students.
In his State of the State he was talking about increasing funding
for rural school districts, which is half
of the approach that we need.
I don't think we can have another approach to improving
education by pitting school districts against each other,
rural and urban districts.
Another situation where we are not really moving in the
direction that we need to address the fact that we have
families all over our state that are affected by the things that
are also happening outside of those school walls.
We have a growing number of rural districts that are being
impacted by poverty to an alarming rate.
And I think the governor needs to change his focus.
- All right. We need to leave it there.
We'll be watching for what's in his budget.
Milwaukee State Representative David Bowen, thanks very much.
- Thank you so much.
- In tonight's closer look, how some medical doctors are eyeing
the repeal of the Affordable Care Act?
This week, Wisconsin Physicians for a National Health Program
spoke out about their concerns.
Dr. Melissa Stiles is a member of that group.
Doctor, thanks very much for being here.
- You're very welcome.
- Well, you say that you have concerns about the rapid repeal
of the Affordable Care Act without a proven plan in place.
What are those concerns?
- Yeah. Significant concerns.
My main concern is that we don't go backwards.
We did make some tremendous strides with the Affordable Care
Act in terms of expanding coverage, and I think fixing
some of the inadequacies of our health care system.
And my fear is we go backwards in terms of coverage and
potentially losing coverage for 20 million Americans in the
first year of the repeal and up to 30 million in the second is
not the right direction.
- Now, Obamacare, as we've come to call it, was not a proven
plan when it was put in place either.
So why this call, you know, for this new plan,
whatever it might be, that it be proven?
- Sure.
Obamacare had some proof because it was -- a lot of the major
tenets of the plan were based on the Massachusetts plan.
So there was some evidence that it did work.
So there was a demonstration.
When we look at what's being put forth, and, as you know, we
don't have a plan put forth yet, but we could predict that ones
put forth by Ryan and also Price in the past, of high deductible
plans coupled with health savings accounts, there is no
demonstration project for that, not even in a city, in a region,
state or any other nation that has done that.
- Now, when you note Price, you mean the incoming DHSS Secretary
nominee, Dr. Tom Price, and he has a plan that really closely
mirrors -- Speaker Paul Ryan's plan with some of those prongs
of which you speak.
So how would the repeal, getting closer to the ground, of the
Affordable Care Act affect your patients?
- Potentially the major -- the people that were most affected
by this were people that had small businesses -- and I
practiced in a small community, Belleville, for 25 years, had a
number of dairy farmers.
A lot of those couples had to have a second job for health
insurance.
I gave an in-service on the Affordable Care Act
one evening in Belleville.
It was packed.
People finally saw the light that
they could have health insurance without being tied to a job.
There were people there with pre-existing conditions
that now could get insurance.
So those are the main people affected.
I think when we also look at the 20 million people that
potentially will lose insurance, those people were the most
vulnerable.
They couldn't -- they didn't qualify for Medicaid
and they were in this gap.
And so now they had subsidies
that they were able now to get insurance.
- And there's a certain number of those people in Wisconsin
as well.
- There is.
And the estimate is about 225,000.
- So what about the uncertainty of all of this for people who
just got kind of used to the Affordable Care Act, for
physicians and hospitals and, again, patients?
- And a lot of organizations are calling for caution.
The Wisconsin Hospital Association on their blog, on
their website, calls for caution as we move forward.
And the concern is not so much if we do repeal, not so much
what we repeal it with.
The concern is as much as how we do it.
When you look at how everything is intricately involved, all now
the pillars of what I consider our health care currently,
Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act,
and employer-based insurance,
are all affected by any repeal of the ACA.
When we look at the assurances that the ACA gave in terms of --
you wouldn't be denied for pre-existing conditions.
You would not have your insurance cut off
if you developed an illness.
You had to wait up to 12 months if you had a job with a
pre-existing condition to get insurance.
Those same assurances are also for employer-based plans, along
with no out-of-pocket costs for preventive services.
So this affects not just people that are getting insurance, but
the subsidies, it affects all of us.
For Medicare, there are tremendous research going on in
terms of how we really should look at value-based care.
Also, close the loophole, what we call the doughnut hole for
Medicare prescriptions, which is so vital for our patients.
- Also very important and very changeable right now.
Dr. Melissa Stiles, thanks very much.
- Thank you.
- Next, in our look ahead, the roll-out of a specific kind
of care for a specially-affected population.
Wisconsin First Lady Tonette Walker spoke about it
at last week's State of the State address.
- We call our initiative Fostering Futures.
Fostering Futures is about creating hope by advancing
principles of trauma-informed care across Wisconsin.
Let me give you an example.
If a child is belligerent and angry as he meets with his child
welfare worker, we used to say, "What's wrong with that child?"
But with trauma-informed care, we teach people to ask the
question, "What happened to that young person?"
Instead of labeling the child as good or bad, this approach moves
us to better understand what could be causing the behavior.
Just so we're clear, we know there still have to be
consequences for their actions, but shifting to trauma-informed
perspective gives us access to more tools for success
and better outcomes.
[applause]
- First Lady Tonette Walker is on the steering committee of
Fostering Futures, as is Elizabeth Hudson,
a licensed clinical social worker
with the Wisconsin office of Children's Mental Health.
Elizabeth, thanks very much for being here.
- Oh, thank you so much. It's a great opportunity.
- First just very briefly, what is trauma-informed care?
- It's a good question and it's a big concept and it's very hard
to sort of distill it down.
But simply put,
it is a principle-based culture change process.
Many people have a sense that it is an intervention or a therapy,
but actually it's giving people information about what happens
after exposure to stress that is toxic in our bodies and then
with that knowledge how do we need to change how we are in
relationships, whether it's service relationships
or community connections, et cetera.
- So how do you change?
I mean, what is the thing that you do with trauma-informed care
that's different from what the people who have experienced this
stress or this adversity might have found before?
- Right.
So I loved that Mrs. Walker used that phrase "it's not really
what is wrong with you; it's what's happened to you." So
before, we would probably be -- and I was part of this system
of, you know, being a professional therapist -- have a
label to identify a belligerent child with.
And it might be a label like oppositional defiance disorder
or reactive attachment disorder.
And instead of being very proscriptive and medicalizing
situations, with trauma-informed care we take a more,
I would say compassionate look, a less clinical look
at behaviors to say, "Why does this behavior make sense?
Why would a child who is being interactive with someone
like a child welfare worker have a very negative reaction?"
- Does the sheer acknowledgment of that on the part of people
like yourself help these people behave differently?
- Well, it's been one of the sort of great advances in having
people with lived experience lead this movement in many ways,
because those folks who have experienced early trauma or
early adversity know how that's impacted them, but they've never
had the ability to share that as part of their medical history or
as part of why they become involved in child welfare, other
areas.
So this has allowed them to give voice to what has happened and
then we are now better able to figure out how to be effective.
- So this is a statewide initiative, and the First Lady
talked about county workers being trained up and state
workers.
Are there other states across the country approaching this as
a statewide initiative?
- That's the key phrase, a statewide.
There are states that are doing pockets of activity and have
been.
I'd say it's been very popularized within the past four
years, but it's taken quite a bit of time for it to become
generally acknowledged.
And in Wisconsin, because we had for four or five years a really
wonderful grassroots movement, we now have the partnership with
leadership in state government and infrastructure that has such
power to create social change now adopting this as something
that they want to do.
And that is very unique in the nation.
And we're being recognized as such.
- Well, more reporting to do on this.
Elizabeth Hudson, thanks very much.
- Thank you.
- In tonight's Capitol Insight, we're joined by Wisconsin Public
Radio Capitol Bureau Chief Shawn Johnson to talk money.
It's kind of like finding 20 bucks in your coat pocket when
you pull it out for the winter, an unexpected if modest
windfall.
In this case state budget writers are looking at better
than expected state tax revenues and lower than expected
spending.
More now with Shawn.
Hi Shawn. - Hey Fred.
- So I want to take a look at those numbers right away,
the kinds of numbers that budget writers are now looking at.
State revenue estimates show $455 million more,
with spending at $266 million less.
So that's good news.
But people up at the capitol already have designs on
$300 million of this, right?
- It happens quickly as soon as you get a good revenue estimate,
people have ideas for it.
There's no shortage of ideas when estimates are good.
And so the thing to remember
is that this money is not in hand yet.
- It's not like that $20?
- It is not like that $20.
It's like pulling out an idea of $20 you'll have over the course
of two and a half years.
It's not there yet.
It's not to say that it won't be and it's the best number that
legislators have and the governor has as he goes ahead to
craft that budget.
But it is a projection.
- So the $300 million is something that
Speaker Robin Vos wants to make use of
to help fill this transportation budget hole.
- Yeah.
So the way that the governor said he would raise
transportation revenue is if he had a corresponding tax cut
somewhere else in the budget.
And so Assembly Republicans are saying, "All right, we have this
money now.
Let's cut taxes by $300 million in the general fund." They
didn't say how.
And then we can raise revenues in the transportation fund.
They didn't say how they would do that either.
So it's really kind of a tax swap, but this new revenue
estimate if it holds makes it possible.
- It's interesting, though, because I know that the
Republicans are intent, many of them, on this sustainable kind
of revenue for transportation, but if this is a one-time, $300
million tax reduction, or would that be forever?
Is that laid out at all?
- We don't know.
If you look at the press release where they announced this plan,
it was a lot of quotes and about one line in there that said,
"Here's basically what we want to do." The governor's office
said they're waiting on details of the plan.
So are we.
- Well, it's a good start at least to be able to talk about
having these kinds of extra revenues.
But you've reported before on the idea that sometimes
these estimates don't hold.
- You have to look back to 2014.
I mean, they had really good estimates in 2014.
They came in almost a billion dollars higher than expected.
Republicans quickly passed a tax cut.
The estimates didn't really pan out.
By the 2015 budget they were facing cuts to a variety of
agencies.
So that's the danger of putting too much stock in these
estimates.
When they're off even by a little bit in terms of
percentage, it can mean big cuts down the road potentially.
- It is good, though, notwithstanding the idea that,
you know, it's not cash in hand and they are just estimates
because the governor has these proposals to increase funding
for things like broadband and K-12 and other things.
So at least they're starting on the plus side
with their estimates.
- Right.
I mean, Assembly Republicans have their ideas.
The governor has been talking about stuff for months now
where people were saying, "How are you going to do that?"
Here's one way you could do it.
- All right. Shawn Johnson, thanks very much.
- Thanks.
- Now for an update away from the state capitol, in the woods
of Wisconsin, where wolves are once again in environmental
news.
This week both of Wisconsin's U.S.
Senators Baldwin and Johnson signed on in support of
legislation that would remove protections for the gray wolf
in Wisconsin and several other states.
The wolves have been protected under the Federal Endangered
Species Act.
The senate bill replaces protections with wolf management
programs.
And finally tonight, a look ahead to next week.
That's when I'll have an update on a Syrian immigrant living in
Wisconsin seeking asylum.
I'm Frederica Freyberg.
Have a great weekend.
- Funding for "Here and Now" is provided, in part,
by Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.