Yeah this isn’t every­thing that is to blame in what’s wrong with America’s pub­lic edu­ca­tion sys­tem.  Bro­ken homes and fam­i­lies have a lot to do with it too in my opin­ion, but this is some­thing that pol­i­cy­mak­ers can actu­ally pro­vide pos­i­tive change in.

From NRO’s Andrew Stiles at the Corner:

In a new paper released on Wednes­day, Sally Love­joy and Chad Miller of the Amer­i­can Action Forum argue that teach­ers unions’ and their collective-bargaining poli­cies are at least partly to blame for both issues.

The authors cite an array of stud­ies exam­in­ing the impact of teach­ers’ unions and their nego­ti­at­ing strate­gies. The major­ity of these stud­ies have found that collective-bargaining agree­ments typ­i­cally focus on higher teacher pay and ben­e­fits and greater job secu­rity, with lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion given to stu­dent per­for­mance. In fact, teach­ers’ unions have his­tor­i­cally resisted most efforts to hold teach­ers account­able for the aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance of their stu­dents, and have suc­ceeded con­sis­tently. Tenure poli­cies, for instance, make it vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to fire unqual­i­fied or inef­fec­tive teach­ers. Most states award tenure auto­mat­i­cally after about three years, and do not test a new teacher’s mas­tery of even the most basic read­ing and math skills. Per­haps not sur­pris­ingly, this has had a largely neg­a­tive impact on the stu­dents them­selves, espe­cially those in large urban school dis­tricts with a high per­cent­age of black and His­panic students.

The paper com­pares student-performance data from two such dis­tricts, New York City and Chicago (both of which require col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing), with data from Char­lotte, N.C., and Austin, Texas, urban dis­tricts in states where col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing is banned for pub­lic employ­ees. The two dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions reveal how col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing is inflat­ing salaries, com­pen­sa­tion, and job secu­rity while it’s stran­gling poli­cies that could help stu­dent achievement.

Public-school teach­ers in New York and Chicago recently signed collective-bargaining agree­ments that increase pay and ben­e­fits, but place lit­tle empha­sis on stu­dent per­for­mance. In Chicago, for exam­ple, the union fought to ensure that “stu­dent growth” counts for only 30 per­cent of teacher eval­u­a­tions to deter­mine per­for­mance pay. In New York, the union agree­ment offers pay and ben­e­fit increases for teach­ers based on expe­ri­ence and edu­ca­tion lev­els with­out any con­sid­er­a­tion for stu­dent performance.

Data from the National Assess­ment of Edu­ca­tional Progress show that stu­dents in New York and Chicago have con­sis­tently under­per­formed those in Char­lotte and Austin, and per­form con­sid­er­ably lower than the national aver­age. In 2011, only 20 per­cent of Chicago fourth graders per­formed at or above grade level in math, and only 18 per­cent were at or above grade level in read­ing, com­pared with national aver­ages that year of 40 per­cent and 32 per­cent, respec­tively. Stu­dents in New York per­formed slightly bet­ter, but are still below aver­age. Char­lotte and Austin, mean­while, saw much bet­ter results, beat­ing the national aver­ages. Nearly 50 per­cent of Char­lotte fourth graders per­formed at or above grade level; 36 per­cent did so in read­ing. Austin was close behind.

Research indi­cates that high-quality teach­ers have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on stu­dent achieve­ment both in school and beyond, mak­ing the teach­ers’ unions’ resis­tance to performance-based eval­u­a­tion all the more frus­trat­ing. One study by pro­fes­sors at Har­vard and Colum­bia found that stu­dents assigned to teach­ers clas­si­fied as “high-value added” instruc­tors attend bet­ter col­leges, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to have chil­dren as teenagers. Fur­ther­more, sim­ply replac­ing a “low-value added” teacher with an aver­age one can increase stu­dents’ life­time earn­ing by as much as $1.4 million.—

The authors note, opti­misti­cally, that more states appear to be adopt­ing poli­cies that at least include objec­tive student-achievement data in teacher eval­u­a­tions. Twelve states now require stu­dent per­for­mance to be the pri­mary con­sid­er­a­tion in such eval­u­a­tions. Not sur­pris­ingly, right-to-work states have proven to be most eager to do so — the National Coun­cil on Teach­ers Qual­ity lists Florida, Okla­homa, Rhode Island, and Ten­nessee as the most suc­cess­ful states in terms of iden­ti­fy­ing effec­tive teach­ers and remov­ing inef­fec­tive ones, and among those only Rhode Island man­dates col­lec­tive bargaining.

Act 10, you just keep look­ing bet­ter and bet­ter with age.

I won’t make many friends with cer­tain fam­ily and for­mer class­mates, but since it is in the news, it is time to say it: The Kiel Area School Dis­trict needs to finally bite the bul­let, and close down Meeme Ele­men­tary School.

With ele­men­tary enroll­ment declin­ing, the Kiel Area School Dis­trict is tak­ing a look at its two ele­men­tary schools to deter­mine whether it should con­tinue to oper­ate both of them.

Enroll­ment at Meeme LEADS Ele­men­tary School declined by 15 stu­dents over the last four years, from 101 stu­dents in 2009-10 to 86 this school year, accord­ing to infor­ma­tion from the dis­trict. Mean­while, enroll­ment at Ziela­nis Ele­men­tary School declined by 38 stu­dents, from 496 to 458, dur­ing that time period.

An enroll­ment pro­jec­tion analy­sis by the Uni­ver­sity of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Pop­u­la­tion Lab­o­ra­tory projects a con­tin­ued decline in ele­men­tary enrollment.

The dis­trict looks at its staffing sit­u­a­tion every March, Super­in­ten­dent Louise Blanken­heim said. This year, for the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive year, the dis­trict trans­ferred a teacher from Meeme to Ziela­nis. Next year’s fourth-grade class at Meeme would have had only 11 stu­dents, so the fourth grade and one teacher were moved to Ziela­nis for 2013–14.

That led to the ques­tion of whether Kiel should look at hav­ing one or two ele­men­tary schools, accord­ing to Blanken­heim. Know­ing “where the bud­gets have been, where the state budget’s going, know­ing that every year we’re look­ing at enroll­ment and … teacher-student ratio, … (the board) felt that it was … time to do a com­pre­hen­sive study.”

This isn’t the first time the issue of clos­ing Meeme has arisen. In Novem­ber 1981, a Citizen’s Advi­sory Board was formed to review the district’s enroll­ment. After its analy­sis, the advi­sory board voted in 1982 to keep Meeme open, and the school board accepted the recommendation.

Meeme, which opened in 1964–65, became a char­ter school in 2005. Enroll­ment at the school had been declin­ing and the prin­ci­pal at that time thought becom­ing a char­ter school would pro­vide an oppor­tu­nity for the school to offer more indi­vid­u­al­ized pro­gram­ming, Blanken­heim said.

For those who don’t know the geog­ra­phy of the Kiel Area School Dis­tirct, Meeme is located about four miles west of Cleve­land on Man­i­towoc CTH XX, just off of Wis­con­sin State High­way 42.  Ziela­nis is located inside the City of Kiel, about 10 to 11 miles west of Meeme.

Tra­di­tion­ally, the bor­der which sep­a­rated rural KASD house­holds into those who sent their chil­dren to Meeme and Ziela­nis was Man­i­towoc CTH A, which more or less runs through the mid­dle of the dis­trict. My boy­hood home was just west of CTH A.

In the early 90s, just as I was set to start 5th grade and going to Kiel Mid­dle School, the school board at the time sug­gested mov­ing the bor­der west to Lax Chapel Road, some three miles away.  The plan at the time was to bulk up Meeme’s enroll­ment num­bers which even back then were in decline.  The idea was even­tu­ally scut­tled after peo­ple like my par­ents — who still had my two younger broth­ers in ele­men­tary school — and oth­ers in my neigh­bor­hood rose up to protest the move because they didn’t wish to change ele­men­tary schools mid­way through for their kids.

So the debate as to what will hap­pen to Meeme has been on-going and con­stant for the peo­ple of Kiel, School Hill, Meeme, Spring Val­ley, Osman, and other rural areas in the dis­trict.  Those closer to Kiel feel the school has out­lived its pur­pose.  While those closer to the school feel a loy­alty to it, and feel that Kiel is too far away com­pared to nearby places (and schools) like Howards Grove, Man­i­towoc, Valders, and Sheboygan.

(A lit­tle dirty secret / rumor about the ori­gins of Meeme is that it was set up by the Kiel Area School Dis­trict not as a way to serve the rural areas, but as a way to cheat in estab­lish­ing its school dis­trict bor­ders.  With Meeme that far away from Kiel proper, but still a Kiel school, the dis­trict was able to expand its bor­ders to cover the sur­round­ing areas.  This had sig­nif­i­cant effect on the abil­ity for Howards Grove to go north, Valders to expand south, and all but forced Cleve­land into the She­boy­gan Area School Dis­trict.  For instance, did you know that Meeme Ele­men­tary School is actu­ally closer [7 miles] to Howards Grove than it is to Kiel [10 miles]?)

What is hap­pen­ing with Meeme is a real­ity of what is hap­pen­ing across the coun­try.  With peo­ple hav­ing less and less kids, it is forc­ing many school dis­tricts across not only Wis­con­sin to recon­sider the need of some of their build­ings, but also whether the need to hire new teach­ers is war­ranted.  (This is begin­ning to wreck havoc with WEAC and other “More Money for Schools Now!” sup­port­ers, and will utterly col­lapse much of their argu­ment in the com­ing decades.)

With­out as many kids in schools — just because there aren’t as many kids — it is going to cause per pupil num­bers (i.e. in class­room size, teacher to pupil ratios, and per capita spend­ing) to fluc­tu­ate like never before.  Want to see what a state where the aver­age per stu­dent spend­ing is $25,000 a kid?  Wait a few years with the demo­graphic growth we’re under and that will be Wis­con­sin just because there are less and less kids to spread the money around to.

Peo­ple who are crunch­ing the num­bers know all this.  Why do you think the UW-Madison does at its “Applied Pop­u­la­tion Lab­o­ra­tory” anyway?

The real ques­tion going for­ward is what do the pol­i­cy­mak­ers and law­mak­ers do with this knowl­edge and what will those com­mit­ted to the sta­tus quo do with it as well.  For years, groups like WEAC have been scream­ing about things like SAGE based on the belief that there would be more and more kids, and thus the need for more and more teach­ers.  We’re on a path, where the oppo­site is more likely to happen.

So the ques­tion now is, why are groups like WEAC still being lis­tened to when to comes to “the right amount of school financ­ing” when clearly the num­bers are begin­ning to show us all some­thing com­pletely different?

Watch­ing Democ­rats pine over the polit­i­cal future of for­mer Sen. Russ Fein­gold is a bit like watch­ing that mem­ber of a mar­ried cou­ple who liked your spouse’s sister’s ex and still wants to hang with him after the divorce is final.  (Your bet­ter half?  She wants noth­ing to do with him anymore.)

You know, that buddy who goes to you, “Man, I know Reg­gie cheated on Gloria’s sis­ter Mon­ica, but does that mean I have to stop hang­ing with him?  He was fun at poker night!”

Wis­con­sin con­ser­v­a­tives are glad the state finally cut the cord with the for­mer junior sen­a­tor.  Lib­er­als on the other hand — espe­cially those in the Isth­mus — are still clam­or­ing for the guy.  First it was in 2011 dur­ing the Siege of the Capi­tol, then in 2012 it was the Recall.  Ever since then, “St. Russ” has been the stan­dard answer for every ill-informed lib­eral who looks at the Demo­c­ra­tic bench and real­izes the party’s future is so decrepit, they might as well be play­ing in the Rookie Leagues.

Need a can­di­date for gov­er­nor in 2014: Recruit Russ!

Need a can­di­date for attor­ney gen­eral: Recruit Russ! (Give it time…)

Need a can­di­date for U.S. Sen­ate in 2016: Recruit Russ!

Need a can­di­date for Dog­catcher: Recruit Russ!

In all like­li­hood, Fein­gold will spend the next two years in Africa if the report of the Spe­cial Envoy job inside the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion holds up.  (Though given his speak­ing out against the recent NSA news, who knows if that offer is still on the table?)

What he’s going to do in 2016 has always been the mat­ter of intrigue.

Some folks in DC think he ought to run for Pres­i­dent. Jen­nifer Rubin over at the Wash­ing­ton Post has an inter­est­ing analy­sis say­ing that he’d be younger than both Hillary Clin­ton and Joe Biden and with­out a run by New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo, he could be the “Liberal’s Lib­eral” in a field which could be one of the old­est in Demo­c­ra­tic Party history.

Most insid­ers I’ve spo­ken with and know say that Russ wants the rematch in 2016.  (If he doesn’t run, La Crosse Con­gress­man Ron Kind will; though why Kind con­tin­ues to keep bow­ing to party elders puz­zles me.)  He’s still pissed about los­ing in 2010.  His ego hasn’t taken the loss well and despite finally earn­ing real money for the first time in his life, he likes being called “Sen­a­tor.”  He misses the perks.  He misses D.C.  He misses being a pim­ple in the Sen­ate Demo­c­ra­tic leadership’s ass and on and on.

Jack Craver over at the Cap Times reported on this after last weekend’s DPW State Con­ven­tion and offered this analy­sis on the options before Fein­gold.  I’ll fisk at the parts requir­ing them as such.

Fur­ther­more, there are a num­ber of rea­sons why Fein­gold would have a bet­ter shot at win­ning back his Sen­ate seat than win­ning the governorship.

First, John­son, despite his per­sonal wealth, is not likely to enjoy a great finan­cial advan­tage over his Demo­c­ra­tic oppo­nent, at least not to the same extent as Walker will over his. John­son will likely be a top tar­get for Democ­rats nation­ally and the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­nee can count on sup­port from the national Demo­c­ra­tic appa­ra­tus — some­thing that is not a sure thing in the governor’s race.

Sigh…there is so much miss assumed here it’s gonna take a while.

1) The incum­bent advan­tages of fund rais­ing are with John­son this time around, not Feingold.

1A) Since both John­son and Fein­gold are anti-pork, Russ will unlikely be able to ben­e­fit from any “back-scratching promises” Democ­rats hoped to get for John­son being an “aus­ter­ity politician.”

1B) If the Left is hop­ing that gun con­trol is still around in 2016, that’s advan­tage John­son too.  If there is one group Fein­gold wants to stay away, it is the National Rifle Association.

2) Since 2016 is a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year, the down bal­lot races tend to suf­fer in the money depart­ment.  Pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns — espe­cially wide-open pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns on both sides like we’re going to see in 2016 — will suck up all the avail­able money to Sen­ate and House can­di­dates like a sponge.  This will be advan­ta­geous to self-financiers like Sen. John­son if he so wishes to plug into his wal­let once again.

3) John­son will no doubt be a top Demo­c­ra­tic tar­get, but the NRSC is unlikely to give up the seat with­out a fight.

4) If Fein­gold is true to form, he’ll once again tell the DSCC to stay the hell out with out­side ads; the same with any var­i­ous Super­PACs run­ning ads.  You know, the kind that helped Tammy Bald­win bury Tommy Thomp­son.   If he doesn’t, he’ll be labeled as a hyp­ocrite toot suite by not just the GOP, but the media which will get an avalanche of Fein­gold quotes and video where he was attack­ing out­side money and out­side ads.

If the media doesn’t run with it, then once again their bias is showing.

Sec­ond, 2016 will be a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year, a sit­u­a­tion that typ­i­cally favors Democ­rats. Fein­gold lost his seat in 2010 largely due to poor turnout from Demo­c­ra­tic vot­ers and a wave of ener­gized Repub­li­can vot­ers — mean­ing the elec­torate was dis­pro­por­tion­ately con­ser­v­a­tive. It is unclear what the dynam­ics of the 2014 elec­tion will be, but there’s a fair chance that, like most midterm elec­tions, it will favor Republicans.

This is the one trump card Fein­gold and the Democ­rats have going for them; pres­i­den­tial year turnout in Wis­con­sin.  It’s the same rea­son Kind wants to bypass 2014 and look at 2016 instead for a statewide run.  If the 2012 recall and the 2012 Pres­i­den­tial elec­tions have shown us any­thing, it is that Wis­con­sin isn’t so much a split elec­torate as two com­pletely dif­fer­ent elec­torates — one for years where a gov­er­nor is up statewide, the other for years where the pres­i­dent is up statewide.

Democ­rats seem to be bank­ing and invest­ing on that trend continuing.

How­ever, 2016 could be a bad year for Democ­rats.  It will mark the end of the Obama’s eight years in office and that tends to never work well elec­torally for the party of the sit­ting Pres­i­dent.  In 1980 (which got Bob Kas­ten elected in the Rea­gan land­slide), Repub­li­cans gained 12 seats.  In 2008, Democ­rats used the end of the George W. Bush years to gain 8 Sen­ate seats.

On the other hand, 1992 saw lit­tle gain for either side.  Democ­rats gained a seat in the Sen­ate, but Repub­li­cans gains seats in the House.  (See for your­self here.)  Who knows what’s going to hap­pen in 2016?

Which is why all the early game analy­sis right now is pretty point­less.  Three-plus years is an eter­nity in pol­i­tics and lord only knows what kind of land­scape we’ll be look­ing at by then.

The num­bers are a bit mis­con­stru­ing here.  Box office infla­tion is not cal­cu­lated in (it costs about three times more to go see a movie today than it did in 1980), but given the track record of Mar­vel vs. DC in terms of movies released, this makes a lot of sense.

Films based on Mar­vel comic books have gen­er­ated 47 per­cent more in domes­tic box-office sales on aver­age than DC Comics movies, accord­ing to data com­piled by Paul Sweeney, an ana­lyst at Bloomberg Indus­tries. The 28 Mar­vel films dat­ing back to 1998 have aver­aged $190 mil­lion, com­pared with $129 mil­lion for 23 DC Comics movies start­ing with “Super­man” in 1978.

“The Avengers,” the 2012 movie fea­tur­ing Iron Man, Cap­tain Amer­ica and the Hulk, was the highest-grossing film for either comic-book brand, with $1.5 bil­lion in global receipts. The suc­cess of Mar­vel movies has given a boost to Walt Dis­ney Co., which acquired Mar­vel Enter­tain­ment Inc. at the end of 2009 for about $4 bil­lion. Time Warner Inc. (TWX), mean­while, has hitched its for­tunes to DC Comics fare, includ­ing the Bat­man films and this week’s “Man of Steel” release.

“Time Warner is clearly rely­ing on DC Comics to replace (if even pos­si­ble) the Harry Pot­ter fran­chise,” Sweeney, who relied on data from Box Office Mojo and SNL Kagan, said in an e-mail. The Harry Pot­ter films, based on the J.K. Rowl­ing books, ended their run in 2011.

The 1998 vs. 1978 fig­ure is also telling.  1998 was when the first “mod­ern” Mar­vel movie, “Blade” star­ring Wes­ley Snipes, was released.  Prior to that, Marvel’s movie efforts were frankly laugh out loud jokes.  There’s a 1990 film ver­sion of “Cap­tain Amer­ica” that went straight to video, and typ­i­cally might air on inde­pen­dent TV chan­nels at 3 AM as filler.  Also in 1994, a “Fan­tas­tic Four” film was made that was so hor­rific, the stu­dio never even released it and is only sold as a nov­elty gag at comic book conventions.

(I seri­ously thought of buy­ing it on VHS when I went to Wiz­arld World Chicago in 1998.)

I don’t doubt that Time Warner is now look­ing to DC Comics to try to fill the gap left by Harry Pot­ter.  In 2009, they re-organized the com­pany and put them in the film divi­sion and placed writer Geoff Johns (Green Lantern, Jus­tice League, Aqua­man) in the posi­tion of “Chief Cre­ative Offi­cer.”  Johns first job out of col­lege was work­ing as an assis­tant for Richard Don­ner (Super­man: The Motion Pic­ture, Super­man II, Lethal Weapon), so his expe­ri­ence in the film indus­try was to help shep­herd in new project for film and television.

How­ever, after Bat­man and Super­man films (they already report­edly have given the go-ahead for a “Man of Steel” sequel), the barn is a lit­tle empty.  They say there’s a “Jus­tice League” film under devel­op­ment for release in 2015, but no one exactly knows what the plot is or who’s star­ring in it.

I wrote as much in a com­ment I left at “Out­side the Belt­way” on this story:

This analy­sis pretty much explains why Dis­ney forked up $4 Bil­lion for Mar­vel Comics (and its char­ac­ters for movie rights) in 2009. After a botched film strat­egy — inci­den­tally started under Stan Lee — of sell­ing off film rights to who­ever was will­ing to pay for them, the com­pany finally got its act together and cre­ated its own stu­dio to pro­duce their own char­ac­ters under their own ban­ner. Sure, there are mis­takes like Fox and Sony now intent on hang­ing onto the X-Men, Fan­tas­tic Four and Spider-Man rights until per­pe­tu­ity, but they’ve pulled off a mar­ket­ing and fran­chis­ing mir­a­cle with the Avengers-based films.

(Until the var­i­ous con­tract nego­ti­a­tions with the film actors blow up in their faces that is.)

DC on the other hand has been treated like the red-headed step-child in the Time Warner fam­ily. Oh sure, they have “Bat­man,” but beyond that, the rest of the line-up of char­ac­ters goes mostly no where or gets treated with dis­re­spect by cor­po­rate. At one time, there were plans for a “Flash,” “Won­der Woman,” and “Green Lantern” sequel. Now, noth­ing in any of those avenues — mostly because the first “Green Lantern” got panned at the box office. Now, they hope they can do “Jus­tice League,” but that seems built into the premise that “Man of Steel” does well this weekend.

As for an actual story in the “Jus­tice League,” heck, they’ve got peo­ple work­ing on it…or so they say.

The paths of the two major comic book com­pa­nies into Hol­ly­wood should have been eas­ier for DC, since being under Time Warner, they could have been pump­ing out smart ver­sions of their char­ac­ters for decades. But it has proven mostly a stigma that Hol­ly­wood has towards comics and comic book writ­ers; that the peo­ple best trained to write scripts for them, are often the last peo­ple brought into the room to help with the process.

After all, they’re “Comic Book Peo­ple,” and we’re “Movie Peo­ple” they say. What would they know about the sub­ject of a [Insert DC Comic Book Char­ac­ter Here] movie that Bar­bara Streisand’s ex-hair dresser wouldn’t?”

Mar­vel? They bring in their cur­rent writ­ers and artists, for­mer writ­ers and artists who did iconic runs on these char­ac­ters, put them in a room with the scriptwrit­ers and pay them decent con­sul­tant fees. Check the cred­its of any Avengers-based movie (You know, that stuff you’re fast for­ward­ing through to get to the post-credits scene.), you’ll see names of many icons in the indus­try there.

Mar­vel also has one guy — Kevin Feige — plot­ting their entire movie line-up; act­ing as cap­tain for the entire company’s long-term goals on the big screen. DC? They hope it’s Christo­pher Nolan, but no one knows for sure if he’ll commit.

So why is Mar­vel beat­ing DC in the movie biz? Mar­vel has a plan, and mak­ing sure they put out qual­ity prod­uct behind it. DC has an idea of where it wants to go, but no real course to take it. Each company’s suc­cess is an exten­sion of that.

So once again: Make Mine Marvel.

Put it another way:  Mar­vel, is in some­thing it calls “Phase 2″ in its movie plans, with it all cul­mi­nat­ing in “Avengers 2″ in 2015.  After that, they’ve already started work­ing out plans for “Phase 3″ films which would be lower bud­get affairs with char­ac­ters like “Doc­tor Strange,” “Black Pan­ther” “Ms. Mar­vel” and “Ant Man.”  The think­ing there is, this will lead to another Avengers, or dif­fer­ent Avengers team, for 2018.

DC’s movie plans?  Yeah…we’ll get back to you on that.

Very solid picks for Gov. Walker’s per­ma­nent selec­tions to the UW Board of Regents.

Gov. Scott Walker announced on Mon­day the appoint­ments of three new mem­bers to the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin Sys­tem Board of Regents.

Mar­garet Far­row and Jan­ice Mueller were named as two cit­i­zen mem­bers to the 18-person board, and Joshua Inglett of the Uni­ver­sity of Wisconsin-Platteville was named as one of the panel’s two stu­dent regents.

Far­row and Mueller will serve seven-year terms on the board, which is respon­si­ble for estab­lish­ing the rules and poli­cies that gov­ern the uni­ver­sity sys­tem. Inglett will serve a two-year term. Each appoint­ment is sub­ject to con­fir­ma­tion by the state Senate.

Far­row was the first female lieu­tenant gov­er­nor, a posi­tion she held from 2001 to 2003. She is also a for­mer state leg­is­la­tor in both the Assem­bly and the Sen­ate and the for­mer Elm Grove Vil­lage Board president.

From 1998 until she retired in 2011, Mueller served as the state audi­tor within the Wis­con­sin Leg­isla­tive Audit Bureau. Mueller was also the first woman in state his­tory to hold that posi­tion. Walker said he expects Mueller’s appoint­ment to bring increased over­sight and trans­parency to the UW System.

Inglett, the new two-year stu­dent regent, replaces Katie Pointer, who for the sake of per­sonal dis­clo­sure was a sum­mer finance intern / staffer dur­ing the 2010 Ron John­son cam­paign.  She helped with a lot of the logis­tics with fund raisers.

By appoint­ing Far­row and (espe­cially) Mueller, Walker is show­ing that he wants peo­ple on his Board of Regents who will no longer be asleep at the wheel run­ning the UW Sys­tem.  That will mean many more audit requests and many more requests for infor­ma­tion for the pub­lic and state leg­is­la­tors to delve into.

It also means that unless Walker’s pre­vi­ously appointed regents side with Doyle’s remain­ing mem­bers of the board, Kevin Reilly’s days are numbered.

I’ve said to myself that I’ll quit this blog full-time if it becomes more of a chore than a delight.

We’re not there yet, but there sure are a lot of days where the lat­ter feel­ing does have the upper hand.

Thanks for being here over the past decade, and espe­cially for com­ing back after the three times I sus­pended the site do to work-related activ­i­ties with the Green and John­son cam­paigns, as well as my 21 months in the Bush Administration.