I was saddened and disappointed by the tone, content, and assumptions underlying Joan’s recent post on UW-Madison’s PEOPLE program and feel a need to respond as a parent who is engaged in trying to address cultures of racism in Madison schools and as a graduate and staff member of UW-Madison. I’ve interspersed the responses with Joan’s original wording:

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Nico Savidge

A popular UW-Madison outreach initiative will cut back programs that help disadvantaged students in the suburbs of Milwaukee and Madison prepare for college, while ramping up services for students within Wisconsin’s two largest cities, campus officials said Monday.

The result, administrators say, will be a Precollege Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence, or PEOPLE program, that better supports students.

The revamp comes one year after a critical evaluation found the initiative was falling short of several goals.

Milwaukee students will be the biggest beneficiaries of the changes. They will be able to join the program earlier and will have access to new after-school tutoring sites UW-Madison plans to launch in the city.

Pat Schneider:

UW-Madison spends nearly $5 million a year on the program, most from state funding.

Goldrick-Rab said the study was frustrated by the lack of data routinely collected about the program. Poor data use in the past led to the program making unrealistic and unsupported high rates of success, she said.

That was the case for a 2014 Cap Times feature story on the PEOPLE program.

The Education Northwest evaluation also flags a number of management deficiencies, including the need for better organization of systems and processes, better coordination with K-12, community and campus partners and improved recruiting, hiring and retention of staff.

Deficiencies in program design is also not uncommon in this arena, said Noel Radomski, director of WISCAPE, a UW-Madison center for research into post-secondary education challenges.

Much more on the People program here.

Addressing Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results and K-12 achievement issues would surely improve higher education opportunities.

The Madison School District 3.5MB PDF, via a kind reader’s email:

Dear Community Members,
The preliminary plan to eliminate achievement gaps provided a framework around which to engage members of the community in a discussion about what we need to do to address the achievement gaps. To gather input, we held community input sessions, met with community organizations, and talked with our staff. Summaries and an analysis of session feedback are listed in the plan and at mmsd.org/thefuture.
That input served as our guide in developing these recommendations. Then, we also considered educational research, the new federal mandates of the Response to Intervention (RtI) program, cost, and logistics, as well as community input. We reviewed what has worked in our school district, in our community, and in other districts across the country.
I believe that if we are going to do better by our children, we must invest. But I also believe we have a responsibility to balance the needs of our community and leverage resources for the greatest impact on student achievement. The final recommended plan is reduced from a financial perspective. This was done to ensure greater sustainability from a fiscal perspective.
The revised plan maintains the six original areas of focus. These six chapters illustrate the landscape of education today – areas that are critical to closing achievement gaps. They also represent areas where leverage exists to eliminate our achievement gaps. Any successful plan to close student achievement gaps must employ a combination of strategies. If there were one simple answer, it would have been employed a long time ago and replicated in districts across the country. Our reality calls for many solutions at many levels of the organization. Our problem is a complex one. Our solutions must be equally complex in their approach.
The good news is that research on what works has been going on for years. Although there is no one right way to teach all students, the research is solid on increasing student performance through an aligned curriculum, effective instruction, frequent monitoring of progress, research-based decision making before a child experiences failure, having interventions in place to help learners, and involving the entire community in support of children.
To address this last point, this plan also asks for a commitment from the community to join MMSD using elements of the Strive Model (Kania, John and Kramer, Mark. (2011). “Collective impact.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011) to develop a network which links services to schools through a collaborative district approach as well a school-based grass roots “community school model” approach based on each school’s need. This concept is elaborated where appropriate in each chapter and in the conclusion of this document.
The recommendations within this plan focus on academic rigor, expectations, accountability, response to behaviors, professional development, cultural competence,3 parents as partners, hiring for diversity, and establishing a new relationship with our community. It also is a plan that supports the federal mandates of Response to Intervention (RtI), which is the practice of providing high-quality instruction, interventions, and progress monitoring which is matched to student needs to make decisions about changes in instruction, and analyzing student response data decisions through collaboration.
These final recommendations reflect some effective work already under way that needs additional focus in order to meet student needs and RtI requirements, some promising practices, and some new ideas. These recommendations are all based on research and are a call to action to our staff, our families, and our community.
Some recommendations from the preliminary plan have been made more cost effective, and others have been elaborated upon. The following items are either new, have been eliminated, or have been revised to allow further planning during the 2012-13 school year:
New Initiative: Ensure all K-12 Students Demonstrate Proficiency in the Standards for Mathematics Practice
New Initiative: Drop-Out Recovery
New Initiative: Increase Options for Restorative Practices in the MMSD Student Conduct and Discipline Plan
Eliminated: PEOPLE Program for Elementary Students Eliminated: Youth Court Expansion to Middle School
Eliminated: Implement 21st Century Community Learning Centers in the Highest Need Elementary Schools
Eliminated: Professional Development – Technology Coach
Eliminated: Collaborate with the Community to Implement the Parent-Child Home Program
Further Planning: Extend the School Day
This final recommended plan, Building our Future, was developed to eliminate our achievement gaps. As a school district, we know we need to take new action. We also know we must work with you, members of this great community, to better address the needs of our children. We now look forward to discussing this final proposed plan with the Board of Education. Let’s work together to make a difference for our children.
Sincerely,
Daniel A. Nerad, Superintendent

Pages 117 to 123 describe the baseline metrics.
Matthew DeFour has more.

Joan, since you don’t allow response comments to your posts, I am forced to post here.
I’m sorry that I misread your editorial comments about what you imagine the PEOPLE program and its students to be about, to constitute a larger set of questions about fairness and access to UW-Madison. So, to keep it short and sweet, here are my responses to what I take to be your two primary questions:
1) Do I believe that students with a 2.75 GPA can succeed at Madisson?
Yes. I have first-hand experience with our undergraduate population and the people who serve them, probably more than you. There are studens with 2.75 GPAs and lower who do very well at Madison; there are students who come in with 3.5 and higher GPAs who founder. SOURCE: student service workers and admissions staff at UW-Madison.
2) Do I believe that the admissions rules should be bent for students who complete the PEOPLE program?
Yes, IF that is what is happening. The article says that students must maintain a MINIMUM 2.75 GPA to stay in the program; there is no information on the average GPA of PEOPLE students admitted to UW-Madison. As quoted in my previous post, the article clearly says that PEOPLE graduates who are unlikely to succeed are not admitted. As such, I must believe that there is some judicious application of admissions criteria in borderline cases.
That said, the University of Wisconsin System has a responsibility to prepare all of its students for the world they will inherit. That world is increasingly multi-ethnic, and all students’ employment options are very much linked to employer perceptions of whether those students are culturally competent to succeed in businesses with diverse staff and customer bases. Simply put, the future employment options of our students rest on our ability to recruit and retain a diverse student body. This becomes a factor on the side of giving students the benefit of the doubt in borderline admissions cases, and has little to do with whether those students ultimately succeed or fail.
On a personal note, I salute you and your accomplishments. I worked my way through UW-Madison from the age of 17, ending with an MA and PhD in history, at the time ranked fifth in the United States (minoring in sociology, ranking first in the United States)against private and public insitutions. I know that the curriculum is rigorous. I came into the graduate program with 26 students;there were 3 of us left after the MA level. As a grad student I was a tutor and a TA, and you are rightfully proud of your achievements. However, that does not entitle you to make uninformed assertions about what high school students who are working hard to prepare for higher education are or are not likely to achieve if admitted.