Author: Wisconsin Public Radio

With thousands of young Black and brown Milwaukeeans migrating every year to larger cities including Atlanta, Washington DC, and Houston, a group of young professionals has come up with recommendations to keep their colleagues from leaving. Milwaukee’s Millennial Task Force has spent the last year studying the city’s so-called brain drain. The group presented their findings and recommendations early this month to the Milwaukee Common Council’s Community and Economic Development Committee. “While Milwaukee has comparatively low cost of living and opportunities for entrepreneurship, the high rates of poverty, insufficient educational systems, segregation, limited cultural scenes and concerns about public...

In the year of reckoning following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, conversations about race, equity and belonging have gained momentum in some Wisconsin school districts. In several, that meant reassessing the presence of school resource officers and ending contracts with local police departments. Teachers have also grappled with how to surface these issues in the classroom. At the same time, it has sparked a backlash at the federal, state and school board levels, with lawmakers decrying critical race theory as being pushed by “woke mobs.” In a state where several school districts have...

The state Legislature’s budget committee voted to cut funding for public transit in Milwaukee and Madison by 50 percent over the next two years. The transportation plan was approved on June 8 11-4 along party lines, with all Republicans voting in favor and all Democrats voting against it. During the hearing, Republicans said they were cutting state funding for transit programs in the state’s two largest cities because they were receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in federal coronavirus relief aid. While funding for public transportation was cut, the plan still funds the controversial $1.1 billion Interstate-94 expansion in...

Wisconsin Republicans have drafted bills that would limit how race and racism are taught in K-12 and University of Wisconsin System schools across the state. The proposals follow a national trend of GOP legislators advancing bills on the state and national level that they say are aimed at protecting students from harmful and divisive lessons about racism. Opponents argue the proposals will have a chilling effect on important teaching about systemic racism in the United States. Under one of the bills, teachers at public and independent charter schools in Wisconsin would be barred from teaching “that one race or...

Governor Tony Evers will seek a second term in office in 2022. The governor announced his reelection bid on June 5 during a speech at the state Democratic Party convention. Evers, who narrowly defeated former Republican Governor Scott Walker in 2018, told attendees at the virtual convention that Democrats have “a veto pen to protect” in the governor’s office. “Wisconsin, I’m in. I’m running for re-election. We’ve accomplished a lot in the last few years, but we’re just getting started. We have more work to do, together,” he said. “This is the moment where we can choose to fix...