2011 alum Jon Alfuth is approaching education from two angles: as a geometry teacher and as a policy analyst for elected officials.

The results surprised a few people: Milwaukee Public Schools' per-pupil expenditures are in keeping with the Wisconsin average and with comparable districts across the United States. The findings were published in a report co-authored by 2007 La Follette School alum Vanessa Allen, a researcher with the Public Policy Forum in Milwaukee.

An award-winning article by 2012 alum Alex Marach has been published in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board.

Public affairs students in David Weimer's cost-benefit analysis class are helping state agencies and community organizations make better decisions about criminal justice reform, environmental regulations, child welfare, mental health treatment and other policy areas.

A new analysis by suggests that school districts could see an aggregate 7 percent reduction in allowable revenues relative to the 2010-11 revenue limit — if the Wisconsin governor's budget includes a mandated reduction of $500 per pupil in the sum of general aid received from the state and local property tax revenue.

Improving nutrition and physical activity in child-care settings may be one of the best tools the state of Wisconsin could use to reduce the prevalence of childhood obesity, which affects 14 percent of preschoolers and 9 percent of adolescents in the state.

Resolution of the financial problems facing the eurozone is likely to be contentious and prolonged, two scholars argue in the spring 2012 La Follette Policy Report.

The practicality of the La Follette School program has stood Grant Cummings in good stead. In his position as an analyst with the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau, Cummings finds he has used something from nearly every course he took at La Follette, even though he has been on the job for less than a year.

Since graduating from the La Follette School in 2010, Allie Bagnall has been researching and analyzing sovereign wealth funds, international banking regulation, international finance, reserve accumulation and balance of payments, and other macroeconomic topics for the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.

1983 La Follette School alum Bruce Beck retired from the University of Wisconsin–Madison after 28 years of helping to manage the campus' vital statistics, including trends in grade distribution, faculty salary comparisons and freshman test scores. Read more in campus news …