“They are not really focusing on the future. They are continuing to obsess about the past and the good work that we have done. Unlike where our Democratic colleagues are, we're really looking at the issues that are important to the entire state of Wisconsin," Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said during the press conference. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Assembly Republicans announced a broad education agenda Tuesday along with a set of task forces. The slate of proposals they plan to advance this fall includes one to encourage school district consolidation and one to push Gov. Tony Evers to opt into a federal school choice program, though exact bill details were scant. Among the new task forces is one that pursues goals similar to those of a Republican committee established this year to improve government efficiency.

As Wisconsin lawmakers return from their summer break, they are beginning to roll out their goals for the rest of the legislative session through early 2026. Democratic lawmakers have also been rolling out  bills, including a package to cancel Walker-era labor laws and one that would reauthorize the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program. 

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rocherster) knocked Democrats’ proposals at the press conference Tuesday. 

“I’ve been watching over the course of the past several weeks as my Democratic colleagues have been talking about what they would like to accomplish this fall and the vast majority of things they’ll be introducing are repealing some good things that we have done,” Vos said. “They are not really focusing on the future. They are continuing to obsess about the past and the good work that we have done. Unlike where our Democratic colleagues are, we’re really looking at the issues that are important to the entire state of Wisconsin.” 

Republicans’ education proposals seek to address a number of issues.

Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie) said new GOP legislation seeks to help address financial issues school districts are facing by encouraging them to look at consolidating and sharing services. 

Currently, there are 421 public school districts across the state. Nedweski said that given declining enrollment, that number may need to be cut. 

“We have lost 53,000 students over the last decade,” Nedweski said, “Because student enrollment is the primary driver of our state’s school funding formula, districts experiencing declining enrollment receive less money in state aid.” 

As state support for education has declined, Wisconsin school districts have increasingly had to go to referendum to ask for additional funding from local property taxpayers. Public school advocates blame record-breaking  referendum drives on state funding not keeping pace with inflation. During the most recent state budget, Democrats and advocates called for additional per pupil funding for public schools, but Republicans rejected it and provided no increase to schools’ general state aid.

“Democrats might argue that the solution is something to throw more money at the problem, but it does not solve the issue that there are just less kids being born today than there were 20 years ago,” Nedweski said. “It’s a birth rate issue as enrollment continues to decline, especially in smaller rural districts. Many schools will face difficult decisions, and our goal is to provide support and give tools, remove barriers, and create incentives for voluntary consolidation.”

Nedweski argued that consolidation would help address the “cycle of referendum.” 

She pointed to her own district as an example, saying she has seven single-school K-8 school districts and two school districts that are high schools. 

“That’s a lot of administrative costs and a lot of redundant services and money being spent that couldn’t be going to teachers and into the classroom, so many of them have gone to referendum over the last couple of years, some have been successful, some have failed,” Nedweski said. “We’re seeing a failure rate increase and consolidation cases like these could lower overhead, reduce costs and allow schools to serve students more efficiently and more effectively.” 

She said the specifics of the financial incentives are still being worked out, but will include providing state funds to help consolidating districts equalize their mill rates if they vary, a grant program for school districts exploring consolidation and potentially a policy related to “grade sharing,” among two or more school districts. 

“We are still sort of polishing up some of this policy that we really have taken input from people all around the state from administrators, even educators,” Nedweski said. 

A bill from Rep. Jessie Rodriguez (R-Oak Creek) will instruct Evers to opt into a new federal school choice tax credit program. 

A provision in the federal law signed by Trump in July and that goes into effect in 2027, will provide a dollar-to-dollar tax credit of up to $1,700 to people who donate to a qualifying “scholarship granting program” to support taxpayer-financed private-school vouchers. Governors have until Jan. 1, 2027 to opt into the program.

“This program isn’t about one educational school,” Rodriguez said. “Instead, it helps public, private, charter and even homeschool families access the tools they need to help their kids succeed.”

Rodriguez noted that the scholarships can be used for tutoring, transportation costs, supplemental courses and other costs. 

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Evers has already said he will not opt Wisconsin into the program. If the bill were passed by the Senate and Assembly instructing Evers to take action, he could veto the legislation. 

Rodriguez called on Evers to reconsider.

“He claims that opting our state in would be ‘catastrophic’ to public schools, but the federal tax credit can benefit students in private and public schools alike,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “Having Wisconsin join this federal program should be a slam dunk!… This is a chance to bring more resources into our classrooms — public, private, rural and urban — to help our children succeed.”

Teachers Bill of Rights and other bills

Rep. William Penterman (R-Hustisford) is authoring a bill that would implement a “Teacher’s Bill of Rights” that he said would seek to ensure teachers have recourses when  students exhibit disruptive or violent behavior. The language of the bill isn’t yet available.

“Every teacher needs to be safe in his or her classroom, so there needs to be a policy in place,” Penterman said. “What is the recourse if I, as a teacher, send a student away for some sort of violent, disruptive behavior? Teachers and administration need to be on the exact same page. We’re still finalizing some of the details, so I look forward to sharing the final bill with you when it comes out.” 

Rep. Joel Kitchens (R-Sturgeon Bay) said lawmakers will try to help address disparities in math performance by passing legislation similar to a new reading instruction law, but for math. He said the bill will seek to implement screeners to help catch students who are struggling early and put them on an individualized plan to help catch them up. 

“This bill is not going to be the full solution to the problem, but I think it’s a very good first step,” Kitchens said.

Kitchens said he also plans to introduce a bill to ban drones from flying over schools without written permission from school administrators following some complaints from constituents.  

“This is both a safety and a privacy issue,” Kitchens said. 

Another bill from Rep. Dave Murphy (R-Greenville) seeks to make it easier for students to participate in college dual enrollment courses. 

Vos said the bills do not negate Wisconsin’s local control policies for school districts. 

“We always stood strongly in favor of that, but there are some statewide standards,” Vos said. “As an example, if you look at protecting teachers, I think that’s very easy for us to say. It doesn’t matter if you teach in Milwaukee or Burlington, River Falls or Rice Lake, you should have the same protections to ensure that if a disruptive student happens at your school where it’s taking its division and that they’re standing behind you.”

Vos said that the goal of his caucus is to release bill drafts over the next two weeks, then move them through the public hearing process in time to be considered during an October floor session. 

The bills would also need to advance in the Senate.

“We are the ones who work a little bit faster in the Assembly, but an awful lot of things become  law because of our partnership with the state Senate…  I am extremely confident by February, when we adjourn, we will have produced a good package of bills we can all stand behind,” Vos said. 

Speakers’ task forces

The lawmakers also announced the creation of four bipartisan task forces by Vos, including one focused on protecting children online, one seeking to make state government more efficient using artificial intelligence, one to better elder services and one that will explore how to rework the state’s rulemaking process after a recent state Supreme Court ruling took away some of lawmakers’ power to block rules. 

The task forces will meet this fall with the goal of wrapping up their work by the end of the year.

The rulemaking task force will be chaired by Rep. Brent Jacobson (R-Mosinee). He said the task force will seek to identify agencies with broad rulemaking powers that may be “better left to the Legislature,” to strengthen standing committee review of rules and to write a constitutional amendment proposal that will reimplement the Joint Committee on the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR). 

Jacobson said the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s Evers v. Marklein II decision in July — which found that state laws giving JCRAR broad powers to block administrative rules indefinitely were unconstitutional — was a “180-turn” on the rulemaking process. 

The Evers administration has  taken steps after the ruling to implement rules without the approval of legislative committees. Republican lawmakers have, in turn, tried to block the implementation of the rules, including a committee last week calling on the Evers administration to drop a proposed rule language change that would replace the phrases “mother” and “woman” with “member” and “father” with “other parent.”

Jacobson made an appeal to Democrats, noting the Evers will not be in office come 2027. 

“There could be a Republican in the governor’s office after next year’s election, and this topic could be one of Democrats’ top priorities next session,” Jacobson said. “With an open governor’s race, we have an opportunity for a bipartisan revamp of the way we hold bureaucrats accountable in Wisconsin.” 

Rep. Patrick Snyder (R-Weston) will chair a task force dedicated to looking at elder services. Rep. Lindee Brill (R-Sheboygan Falls) will chair a task force on “protecting kids.”

“We face a rising youth mental health crisis in our state. We recognize that social media and unrestricted access to the internet has opened a deep chasm into our family structure and filled it with mindless or even dangerous content,” Brill said. “As so many forces try to rip families apart and divide them from each other, we have an obligation to work diligently to keep families together, connected, informed and strong.”

Rep. Jim Piwowarczyk (R – Hubertus) will chair a task force on government efficiency and modernization. It is different from, though related to, a committee formed in the last legislative session that mirrored the federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Wisconsin’s version is called the Government Oversight, Accountability and Transparency Committee (GOAT). 

The Speaker’s Task Force on Government Efficiency and Modernization will specifically look at ways to replace outdated processes with modern tools, reduce administrative overhead through automation, integrate systems and use data to predict demand and allocate resources more effectively. 

The GOAT Committee also has a goal of working to eliminate government inefficiency.

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University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. (Miles Maguire | courtesy of the photographer)

Republican lawmakers are proposing a state law to  limit tuition increases after the University of Wisconsin system approved another tuition hike earlier this month. 

The Board of Regents voted earlier this month to increase tuition by 5% at most UW campuses. UW-Green Bay is the exception with a 4% tuition increase after opting out of an additional 1%. UW-River Falls received a 5.8% increase in tuition to help support student success initiatives. 

According to the UW system, the increase will be an average of about $382. 

The draft bill, coauthored by Sen. Andre Jacque (R-New Franken) and Rep. David Murphy (R-Greenville), would prohibit the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents from increasing undergraduate tuition by more than the consumer price index increase in a given year. The authors said the latest increases were “roughly double the increase in the Consumer Price Index over the past year.” 

“Now more than ever, the Legislature must implement a common sense law placing controls on these types of skyrocketing tuition increases,” the lawmakers wrote in a cosponsorship memo. “That’s why we are again introducing legislation to cap tuition and fee increases for in-state Wisconsin undergraduates at levels no higher than the rate of inflation.”

UW spokesperson Mark Pitsch said in a statement responding to the bill that the UW is “among the most affordable across the U.S.” 

“It is critical that we have the flexibility to maintain the quality that students deserve and parents expect,” Pitsch said. 

UW President Jay Rothman proposed the tuition increases earlier this month following the signing of the new state budget, which provided a little over $250 million to the UW system — an amount that fell below the requests the system had said would be necessary to avoid tuition increases. 

“After a decade of a tuition freeze and lagging state aid, we believe we have struck a balance for students and families with this proposal and the recent state investments in the UWs as part of the 2025-27 biennial budget,” Rothman said in a statement at the time.

This is the third consecutive tuition increase since the end of the 10-year tuition freeze — a trend that comes as state funding makes up a smaller portion of the UW system’s budget.

State funding currently makes up about a fifth of the UW’s total revenue. In contrast, state general purpose revenue made up 41.8% of the UW System’s budget in 1984-85. 

Regent Ashok Rai said that even with the state investment, there continues to be a gap between the funding and the UW system’s ability to keep up with inflation and compensation increases for faculty and staff. 

“The proposed tuition rates will ensure that UWs remain affordable compared to our neighboring peers,” Rai said.

According to the UW, its tuition increased just 7.7% from 2015 to 2025 — a rate below the tuition increases for its peers in other states, which had tuition increases ranging from 21.7% to 28.8% over the 10 years.

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