With Valentine’s Day nearing, my family just took its annual love survey. Using a privately-run, publicly-funded love rating system, my family members and I rate our love for one another using a scale of 1 to 5. While the surveys are done individually and anonymously, the answers are compiled collectively and the results are shared publicly. Why, you may ask, do we go through this annual ritual and analysis of our family love? Because who better to turn to in matters of love than business-minded reformers. These data meisters profess that we must measure what we value. In our family, we value love, so – hence – the love meter matters.

On February 27th, the Opportunity to Learn Campaign will be hosting a webinar on racial justice with the Applied Research Center, an OTL ally. The webinar will provide advocates and organizers with valuable tools for framing and combating racial disparities in our nation's education system. Sign up here!

Have you ever felt that you fell through the looking glass hand-in-hand with Alice to a place where up is down, north is really south, and wrong is actually right? If you watched Governor Scott Walker’s State of the State message on Tuesday you might very well have felt you were in Wonderland where everything you know in your heart of hearts is wrong for kids and public schools was talked about as a viable education reform strategy.

Our allies at Opportunity to Learn – Wisconsin will be hosting an exciting panel at the 92nd annual Wisconsin Education Convention in Milwaukee! It's a fantastic chance for educators to learn about the state's OTL Campaign and the types of supports and policies students need to succeed. The Convention will take place Thursday, Jan. 24th at the Delta Center

Need some help developing or advocating for policies in your state to tackle school pushout and end the school-to-prison pipeline? Then look no further than this newly released state policy guide from the Opportunity to Learn Campaign! The guide provides advocates and policymakers with recommendations for ending the ineffective and discriminatory practice of out-of-school suspensions as well as a summary of the significant action and legislative proposals that are already underway in states to address our national pushout crisis.

Budgets are like waterbeds. Push down in one area of the bed and it will just force another area of the bed to rise. And if you let out all the water, it will stop being a bed altogether. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is underfunding education (pushing down on one side of the waterbed) to balance the state budget, thereby raising the amount of funding that communities have to provide to continue educating their children. But what about communities that can't afford to assume the extra costs? Well, it's not a waterbed without water.

Let's hear it for the advocates in Wisconsin who are pushing a proposal for fair funding for the state's public schools! "Fair Funding for Our Future," put forward by State School Superintending Tony Evers, aims to restore the funding lost in recent years to budget cuts, close loopholes in the funding system, and establish a sustainable and equitable funding system for the future.

Thrown under the school bus this week by the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) were 76 Wisconsin schools that "Failed to Meet Expectations" as calculated under the state's newfangled school accountability system. But dig deeper into those rankings and you'll see they only add to the mountain of national data showing that students' socio-economic status affects their access to the resources and opportunities they need to succeed. Standing atop this heap of evidence, advocates must remind legislators, parents, school leaders, and taxpayers that reducing childhood poverty does much to reform public schools.

Let's do the math: Cut enough funding from Wisconsin's schools and other public services and you will eventually, through lack of spending, end up with a state budget surplus. But rather than shuffle that surplus off to the state's Rainy Day Fund, let's acknowledge that all those cuts have our schools looking under the weather. We need to reinvest that money now, because today it isn't just raining in WI schools, it's downpouring.