Gennea Gaughan

In the article “The Hidden Back-To-School Supply Parents Can’t Buy: More Bandwidth,” Molly Wadzeck explores how the rise of apps, portals, and emails has created an overwhelming digital “invisible labor” for parents preparing for the school year. While these tools aim to keep families informed, navigating multiple platforms often causes information overload and fatigue—especially for non-English speakers or families with multiple children. Experts emphasize that meaningful family engagement requires schools to shift from overcommunicating across redundant channels toward building direct, two-way conversations focused on individual student progress.

Democratic Gubernatorial Candidates Split on Education; Advocates See Next Year as Pivotal explores the sharp division among Wisconsin’s Democratic primary candidates for governor regarding school voucher programs, with candidates like state Sen. Kelda Roys and state Rep. Francesca Hong advocating to phase them out, while Joel Brennan and David Crowley contend that ending them immediately would destabilize public schools and harm families. Highlighting input from Colleston Morgan, executive director of the Milwaukee-based advocacy group City Forward Collective, the article notes his warning that phasing out or defunding private-school vouchers would effectively underfund one-fourth of students in Wisconsin’s largest city—many from Black and Latino families who rely on school choice—and that gradual phase-out plans could lead to sudden, disruptive school closures.

In There Is No “Responsible” Way to End School Choice, Colleston Morgan, Executive Director of City Forward Collective, argues that phasing out Wisconsin’s Parental Choice Programs would harm 30,000 low-income Milwaukee students by forcing them into an underperforming public school system while pushing Democratic candidates out of step with most voters.

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The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction announced that the Milwaukee Reading Coalition (MRC) may need state legislative approval to access a portion of $19.7 million in remaining Act 20 literacy funds to launch its planned Milwaukee Reading Commission. While city and coalition leaders urge immediate investment to address Milwaukee’s youth literacy crisis and maximize secured private funding, DPI maintains that statutory limits prevent “forward-funding” the program without a formal legislative process. Shifting the focus from bureaucratic friction back to the classroom, City Forward Collective Executive Director Colleston Morgan Jr. emphasized that the city’s reading challenges transcend individual school systems and require a unified, urgent response: “Adult problems have stood in the way of our kids’ education in the city for far too long… We are unified in our perspective, and we’ve got to deal with this in terms of identifying resources to train our teachers.”

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A recent WUWM investigation asks whether Milwaukee has the will to close its racial achievement gap — and the answer is sobering. Milwaukee has the largest Black-white achievement gap in the country, and it’s only grown wider: the gap between Black and white fourth grade readers increased from 39 points in 2019 to 45 points in 2024. City Forward Collective Executive Director Colleston Morgan is featured in the piece, rejecting the notion that this is simply “the way things are” and pointing to CFC’s recent north side schools report as evidence that solutions must involve — but can’t rely solely on — Milwaukee Public Schools. Read the full article.