Our Super PAC is Endorsing Jeff Wright for State Superintendent of Public Instruction

This essay is the first edition of "Public School Saturdays"

Hi Folks,

I hope you’re all still enjoying time spent with family this holiday weekend. I’m writing this article in between making a cheesecake and supporting the effort to pull off a difficult Beef Wellington recipe for my friend’s non-traditional, 2-day-late Thanksgiving.

The reason I’m writing this Saturday is to introduce what I’m calling Public School Saturdays, a weekly column where I hope to shine a light on how Republicans are doing their best to kill public education in Wisconsin and the rest of the country.

Public School Saturdays will feature articles by education experts, and those who write the articles will be paid through the sales of our “Rainbow Land” line of sodas, which were created to re-enforce messages of inclusivity and tolerance to the kids drinking it.

I’m no expert in public education, but fixing it in Wisconsin has been one of my passions, and I spent the better half of 2023 raising money to fund a lawsuit to get rid of our state’s 30-year-old parasitic private school voucher system.

This article today will ultimately end with me announcing that the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC is endorsing Sauk Prairie Superintendent Jeff Wright in his bid for to unseat the current State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jill Underly--who we endorsed four years ago and whom the Democratic Party is endorsing this year.

My article tomorrow will discuss why the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC will only support a candidate for Wisconsin’s upcoming Supreme Court race if that candidate indicates a willingness to strike down private school vouchers as unconstitutional if elected.

Unfortunately, the politics of private voucher schools are complicated because a majority of voucher money goes to kids of color in Milwaukee and urban Southeastern Wisconsin—places where there are a lot of Democratic votes.

Democrats of all stripes should support public schools 100% and be horrified by how private vouchers are slowing killing them, but free money from the government is an intoxicating thing. There’s a lot of Democrats in Milwaukee involved in the religious private school ecosystem who are hooked on taxpayer dollars with very little strings attached on how they are spent.

That being said, countless studies have shown that private schools funded through state voucher dollars perform no better than public schools even though private schools are able to kick out kids with special needs--which theoretically should improve their test scores relative to public schools.

In Wisconsin, this means state dollars that should be going to rural school districts are being diverted to private and largely religious schools in urban Southeastern Wisconsin.

But as soon as any Democrat points out the unfairness of diverting rural, public tax dollars to urban religious schools, the “Voucher School Lobby” turns on its mud-slinging machine and starts calling those Democrats “racist” because they’re “trying to take away opportunities from urban kids of color.”

Sure enough, when we filed our lawsuit, the right-wing Badger Institute insinuated I was racist, the Wisconsin State Journal published an op-ed written by a Latina student who had interned for the Devos' school choice lobby, and the National Review wrote a hit piece against me.

Politics aside, the parasitic nature of private vouchers that leach money from public schools hurts many more kids from working class families--of any skin color--than helps them. Why? Because the majority of working-class kids around the state attend public schools, which are slowly dying because of private school vouchers.

In fact, rural Republicans from red states like Texas and Tennessee are starting to wake up and realize that the billionaires funding the "school choice" movement are killing their kid's public schools, and are fighting back. They correctly realize that this is not a partisan issue, but a fight between the haves and the have-nots.

Knowing that we’d get blowback from the well-funded, Betsy Devos-backed voucher school lobby, we put together a 10-week radio series detailing the many ways that private school vouchers hurt kids and public schools. We invited education professionals of color from around the country who supported our lawsuit to counter-act the mudslinging and get our side of the story out.

Unfortunately, the damage was done.

While we were fighting to end private voucher schools, Democratic Governor Tony Evers made a backroom deal with Republican Majority Leader Robin Vos to raise private school voucher money from $9,045 per kid to $12,000, while price per kid in public schools was raised a mere $8,400 to $9,500.

Some would say he was forced to make this deal that hurt Wisconsin’s kids because Vos used voucher school funding as a bargaining chip to pass the entire state budget (especially as it pertained to state dollars going to fund the city of Milwaukee). I say that Governor Evers should have called Vos’ bluff and made him take responsibility for any government funding standoff that may have occurred and stood his ground against throwing more money at bad policy.

When we filed an original action asking the Supreme Court to bypass the lower courts and declare voucher schools unconstitutional, the Supreme Court asked for all parties involved to write Amicus, or “friend-of-the-court” briefs, either in support or against our lawsuit.

In an appalling turn of events, Governor Evers sided with Robin Vos, the Republican Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and the legal arm of the Republican Party--the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, and asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to NOT TAKE our case.

Evers’ fecklessness on school vouchers mostly likely stemmed from him being an establishment Democrat, and the establishment’s #1 concern was increasing the black vote in Milwaukee to defeat Trump in 2024.They probably felt that pushing this issue before the 2024 election might create a blowback amongst Democrats of color in Milwaukee, and they didn’t want to take that risk.

Look how that strategy turned out.

Unfortunately, this establishment Democratic fecklessness was contagious. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly, who had previously signaled her support of our lawsuit prior to the Supreme Court’s asking for her to weigh in on the matter, PUNTED. In a one-page filing, said she was taking no position because her “primary concern is oversight and supervision of public instruction.”

In reality, her own department had publicly provided all the factual evidence that my lawyers felt they needed to prove that private voucher schools were unconstitutional, thus our decision to bypass the circuit courts and try to get this done while we still had a progressive majority in the Supreme Court. Her last-minute refusal to support our lawsuit when we needed her most REEKED of politics.

Underly’s refusal to fight for kids and fight for public schools as the head of the department that’s supposed to fight for both disgusted me, so I was hoping there would be another reasonable candidate to support in this upcoming election.

When I found out that the Wisconsin Teachers Union's political action committee, aka WEAC, was also disgusted with Underly’s fecklessness and was taking on the Democratic Party and supporting Sauk Prairie's superintendent Jeff Wright's candidacy, I was overjoyed.

While I don't know what Jeff thinks about our voucher school fight over the last several years, nor do I know his opinions on Evers' and Underly's fecklessness on these issues, I do know a lot about his character.

Jeff went to high school with me in Stevens Point, WI, and his siblings and parents are top notch people.

His dad and uncle were among the most beloved teachers in the Stevens Point school district, and I’m pretty sure his whole family has been involved in education in some way.

Jeff, who got his Masters of Education at Harvard, understands how schools work in large cities AND small towns. Prior to becoming the superintendent in Sauk Prairie, where he was recently named the "Administrator of the Year" by the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance, Wright was a high school principal on the south side of Chicago for 9 years.

Having grown up with Jeff, I know for a FACT that he will not play politics with kids' educations, and that’s why I’m supporting him even though the Wisconsin Democratic Party is supporting Underly.

I've been saying this for years. While I WILL ALWAYS be a Democrat and support progressive issues, I am often exasperated by the Party's collective lack of courage to do big things when they need to be done.

To wit--Wisconsin's progressive Supreme Court, having decided only 14 cases in the last session, has been the least productive court in 27 years. Imagine what we could have gotten done with a little more courage and "mettle."

But I'll talk more about that tomorrow--back to Jeff Wright.

At this stage in the election, Jeff needs all the financial support he can get. If you’d like to chip in a few dollars to support him, here’s the link.

Thanks for reading our first Public School Saturday column. There’s no doubt in my mind that the decline of America’s public schools has led to a lack of media literacy and critical thinking skills necessary to see Trump as the charlatan that he is.

We simply have to fund our public schools to help provide Americans the tools they need to discern truth from misinformation.

Hopefully our Saturday articles will keep this important cause of supporting public schools at the center of Wisconsin Politics, and hopefully you all will keep buying our Rainbow Land Soda so we can keep funding the effort.

Ok, back to cooking this interminably tough Beef Wellington recipe.

Take care,
Kirk Bangstad
Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC