Media reaction to Green's Education "Plan"

After spending so much time explaining why Green's "plan" is empty rhetoric, recycled tricks, and the end of collective bargaining as we know it, I thought I should see how much of that the media reported.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel notes that Green "scrimps on the details," though the reporter doesn't name all the missing details--such as how high Green would raise the income cap for voucher families, where the merit pay would come from, how these changes can happen when Green's budget proposal calls for freezing school spending, and how school districts are supposed to get their kids to school if they can't pay for buses. She also doesn't mention that the plan would be the end of collective bargaining as we know it.

The Associated Press article going around focuses a lot of attention on whether Green would try to keep Tommy Thompson's promise of 2/3 funding for schools:

If state support for schools is frozen, as Green has proposed, any additional costs incurred by schools would have to either be made up through other fund sources such as property taxes, or the schools would have to make cuts.

Whether Green wants schools to raise your taxes or raise class sizes, he doesn't say. The AP article also misses the fact that the plan is the end of collective bargaining as we know it.

The Capital Times draws the distinction between Green's possible merit pay ideas and Doyle's more sensible proposal from earlier this year, which proposed "differentiated teacher pay to encourage teachers to gain additional knowledge and skills that help kids learn or to accept teaching positions in hard-to-staff schools," according to Doyle's people in that article. In other words, is it more important to reward that great English teacher (of course I'm talking about me), or to encourage people to become science or special education teachers, or to teach in districts like Milwaukee and Racine where they can do the most good? The Cap Times piece says nothing about Green's proposal bringing about the end of collective bargaining as we know it.

You can also catch the Democrats' take on Green's "plan" here, though as you might suspect, they sound kind of biased. And they don't mention that the proposal is basically the end of collective bargaining as we know it.