“I didn’t have one phone call, I don’t have one email about this NAEP data. But my phone can ring all day if there’s a fight at a school or can ring all day because a video has gone out about a board meeting. That’s got to change, that’s just got to change. …
“My best day will be when we have an auditorium full of people who are upset because of our student performance and our student achievement and because of the achievement gaps that we have. My question is, where is our community around these issues?
“I feel that people have become very numb to our data and numb to poor performance. I can appreciate that it is frustrating. I have been in education my whole life and it is frustrating, you do feel like the work that we’re doing isn’t getting us where we want to be. But we can’t give up.”
She said, “Look, the data are telling us that what we’re doing isn’t working. Arguing hasn’t gotten us anywhere. Being polarized in our education beliefs has not gotten us anywhere.”
Madison spends more per student than Milwaukee, yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results.