Joanne Jacobs:

Louisiana students who used vouchers to switch from public to private schools did worse in the first year, then improved, concludes a University of Arkansas study. After three years, voucher students were doing as well as similar students who hadn’t switched; low performers did significantly better in English.

The Indiana study looked at students in grades 3-8 who switched from public to private schools. In the first year, they lost ground in math, but they bounced back in the next few years and moved ahead in language arts in the fourth year.

“Overall, voucher students are lower-achieving students from the public sector and enter private schools substantially behind their private school peers, researchers wrote. “During the [Indiana voucher program’s] first few years of implementation, many private schools lacked the capacity or experience in educating new students who are academically behind.”

More, here.

Compare Madison’s spending to voucher schools.

Joanne Jacobs:

Louisiana students who used vouchers to switch from public to private schools did worse in the first year, then improved, concludes a University of Arkansas study. After three years, voucher students were doing as well as similar students who hadn’t switched; low performers did significantly better in English.

The Indiana study looked at students in grades 3-8 who switched from public to private schools. In the first year, they lost ground in math, but they bounced back in the next few years and moved ahead in language arts in the fourth year.

“Overall, voucher students are lower-achieving students from the public sector and enter private schools substantially behind their private school peers, researchers wrote. “During the [Indiana voucher program’s] first few years of implementation, many private schools lacked the capacity or experience in educating new students who are academically behind.”

More, here.

Compare Madison’s spending to voucher schools.

Amber Walker:

On Monday night, in a 7-0 decision, the Madison School Board approved the district’s $494,652,025 preliminary all-funds budget for the 2017-2018 school year.

The Madison Metropolitan School District highlighted it’s balanced operating budget — representing $390,045,697 of the total funds — will result in a $15 per hour minimum wage for the district’s lowest-paid employees, a teacher starting salary of $41,096, an average 3.25 percent increase in across-the-board raises for staff and $5 million dollars in priority actions aimed at narrowing achievement gaps and raising student achievement.

The remainder of the budget — $104,606,328 — is used to fund construction projects, debt service, and food service costs across the district.

Props to Amber for leading with total spending.

The “no flexibility” statement below is incorrect. One can (mostly) restructure debt, change facility requirements and food practices.

Taxpayers fund all of this, so a complete picture is useful.

Karen Rivedal:

The board on Monday also approved what’s known as its “all-funds” budget, at $494,652,025, which includes the proposed operating budget. This fund captures all budget activity, including construction, food service and debt service, for which there is no flexibility in spending.

Not counting Mertz’s amendment, the total spending plan representing a balanced budget raises property taxes by an estimated 3.97 percent. The owner of a $258,367 home — considered average by the district — will pay a projected $3,108, an increase of $74 over the prior year.

District budget director Mike Barry said the district could know by July how much the $74 average increase could rise, as a result of Mertz’s amendment.

Madison spends more than most ( budget details here ), despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Wisconsin per student voucher data. 

Molly Beck:

The statewide voucher program, in its first year, is at capacity, with about 500 students receiving vouchers statewide, according to the department. Of those, 79 percent did not attend a Wisconsin public school last year.
The program’s enrollment limit will rise to 1,000 next year. The statewide program exists in districts outside of Milwaukee and Racine, which have had programs for years.
Seventy-three percent of students now attending private schools using a voucher were already enrolled in a private school last year, according to the department. Twenty-one percent of students were from public schools. About 3 percent did not attend any school and 2 percent were home schooled.
Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he would probably support adding a preference given to applicants from public schools given those numbers.

Matthew DeFour:

“If the students are performing at or better than they were in the schools they came from, then that would be a compelling case to offer more choices like that to more families across the state,” Walker said. “If the majority are not performing better, you could make a pretty compelling argument not to.”
Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said work on an accountability bill is wrapping up and he hopes it will begin circulating for sponsors by the end of this month. He hopes hearings will be held in late summer and early fall with a bill sent to the governor by the end of the year.
“I hope that everyone comes away happy that this is the right thing to do,” Olsen said. “The voucher people want a bill like this because they’re only as good as their weakest school.”
Olsen said the bill will not only apply the report card system to schools participating in the voucher program, it will also make changes to the report card for public schools.
The report card released last fall didn’t measure high school student growth, because it was based on one test taken in 10th grade. The state budget the governor signed Sunday expands high school testing to grades nine and 11. The accountability bill will ensure future report cards include those tests, Olsen said.
Democrats have been skeptical that Republicans will follow through on holding private voucher schools accountable. Earlier this year Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, compared talk of a bill to Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.
In February, Walker told the State Journal editorial board that he hoped to sign a voucher school accountability bill before the budget was approved. That didn’t happen, but Walker said there was push back from the Legislature.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Carrie Antlfinger:

Students who received vouchers to attend private or religious schools in Milwaukee improved their performance in mathematics and reading last year but still lagged behind public school students, according to a report released Tuesday.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction found that in the second year of testing last fall, about 40 percent of Milwaukee voucher students showed they were proficient or advanced in math, up nearly 6 percent from last year. Nearly 49 percent of local public school students and 78 percent of public school students statewide reached that mark.

Related: Comparing Milwaukee Public and Voucher Schools’ Per Student Spending: Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP.

Mike Ford

I find discussions of the per-pupil funding level of different types of Milwaukee schools usually turns into a debate on how to make a true apples-to-apples comparison of per-pupil support for the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). While basic differences in MPS and MPCP schools and their cost-drivers make any comparison imperfect, the following is what you might call a green apples to red apples comparison.
DISCLAIMER: if you not interested in school funding, prepare to be bored.
Per-pupil support for MPS
Note I am not trying to calculate per-pupil education funding or suggest that this is the amount of money that actually reaches a school or classroom; it is a simple global picture of how much public revenue exists per-pupil in MPS. Below are the relevant numbers for 2012, from MPS documents:
…….
Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP.

Alan Borsuk:

“Instead of focusing on declining academic achievement in Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction is working to hide the problem,” wrote Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm and think tank. “Unfortunately, changing standards for political correctness and to avoid accountability will hurt students today, tomorrow and long into the future.” 

Has the actual achievement of students improved much, if at all? That’s a different question that can’t be answered yet.   

But Wisconsin’s measuring stick for student performance has been changed. And the categories for student performance have been renamed in, shall we say, kinder, gentler ways.  

Results from the state’s round of standardized tests — administered in the spring and known as the Forward tests for third- through eighth-graders and the ACT and PreACT Secure tests for high school students — have been distributed to school districts and schools and, in some places, to families. The overall results will not be made public until sometime this fall. But Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction leaders have released enough information to make clear that significant changes have been made in the accountability system.  

The changes — especially in where the bars are set for categorizing students’ performance — will make it difficult, at best, to compare this year’s results to prior years for the large majority of students in Wisconsin, including large numbers of private school students who take part in one of the state’s four school voucher programs.

———

“Instead of focusing on declining academic achievement in Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction is working to hide the problem,” wrote Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm and think tank. “Unfortunately, changing standards for political correctness and to avoid accountability will hurt students today, tomorrow and long into the future.”  

———-

More.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Sara R. Shaw, Robert Rauh, Jeff Schmidt, Jason Stein and Rob Henken:

We can show that by looking at the overall operating funds available to the district from local, state, and federal sources. Using a metric developed for the Forum’s School DataTool, we found that MPS had operating spending in the 2022 school year of $17,843 per pupil, which was 13.4% above the statewide average of $15,734 and ranked 120th among the 421 districts in Wisconsin.

Declining enrollment and the latest referendum will send those amounts higher for MPS starting in 2025. MPS also ranks relatively high in total revenue per student compared to other large districts nationally. The NCES data show MPS with 2020 revenues of $17,520 per student, 3.7% more than the average funding of $16,894 per student and 25th-highest among the 120 largest districts in the country. As noted earlier, however, there are reasons for higher funding levels given that the poverty rate for school-age children in Milwaukee is among the highest for these districts and is relatively high for districts in Wisconsin as well

Madison taxpayers have long spent far more than most other Districts in the US and around the globe, with a massive tax & $pending increase referendum planned for this fall.

Madison’s K-12 tax & spending summary over the years:

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

Additional background on the Milwaukee Report (Madison’s business community has been dormant for decades on our challenged and well funded K-12 system).

In the 1990s, Milwaukee was widely seen as the epicenter of “education reform” in the country,earning both praise from proponents and scorn from detractors. In the face of poor studentoutcomes and societal trends such as increasing segregation and poverty, multiple interests hadconverged to establish the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the country’s first initiativeto offer publicly funded tuition vouchers for students to attend private schools. Independently operated public charter schools opened a few years later, further expanding the options available tofamilies.

Democratic State Representative Annette “Polly” Williams advocated for the choice programs as ameans of empowerment for low-income city residents, particularly aiming to increase Black families’control over their children’s education. Republican Governor Tommy Thompson publicly expressedhope of encouraging better quality by increasing competition between schools in Milwaukee,following the arguments of free market economists like Milton Friedman. The views of these andother elected officials – supported by a coalition of parent and community organizers, businessinterests, and private philanthropy – rested on the belief that students were not sufficiently orequitably served by the current education system, and that families would take more school optionsif given them.

Opponents, however, characterized the shift of students and funds away from Milwaukee PublicSchools (MPS) as privatization efforts that undermined the traditional public school system and itsobligations under the state constitution. They feared that the resulting dispersion of students wouldexacerbate inequality, fail to offer public accountability and transparency, and divert resources fromMPS, threatening its ability to provide an adequately and equitably resourced system of publicschools to its residents. The stakes were high for Milwaukee students, whose levels of poverty standout on both a statewide and national scale, as well as for the city’s wellbeing and for the state’sworkforce and economy.

The Forum took stock of the resulting educational landscape 20 years later in a 2014 series of reports: “What is the Milwaukee K-12 School System?” and “The K-12 School System in Milwaukee:How has it changed and how does it measure up to peers?” Our research provided a broad overviewof the types of schools operating in Milwaukee, admissions processes, academic quality, student demographics, and education funding. It further analyzed recent changes in the landscape andcompared them to the experiences of national peers.

In the fall of 2023, we took up these questions again, equipped with nearly a decade of additionaldata. We did so in the context of recovery from a global pandemic and a recently passed statebudget and related legislation that, among other provisions, provided K-12 funds and – separately –helped stabilize the finances of both the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. With localgovernment now on firmer ground, the time appeared ripe to return civic attention to the quality ofeducation in the city. Our specific research questions included the following:

● What does the educational ecosystem look like in Milwaukee right now?

● What trends were found in regard to enrollment, demographics, and finances across thedifferent sectors of schools in Milwaukee?

● What trends are identifiable in regard to outcomes for students on the whole in Milwaukee, using both local and national benchmarks?

Corrinne Hess: (more)

Milwaukee Public Schools operated 143 schools in 2023 with a total of 59,899 students. That represented about half of the students served in the city. From 2006 to 2024, enrollment in MPS plummeted by one third. 

Meanwhile, charter school enrollments more than doubled during that same time period from  7,323 in 2006 to 15,695 in 2024. 

Enrollment in Milwaukee’s private choice schools increased nearly 90 percent since 2006 from 15,864 to 30,103 last school year, according to the report. 

Besides parents moving their children from public to private schools, there are fewer children being born (abortion data).

Quinton Klabon:

I hate to see quotations printed uncritically when the report directly contradicts them.

Here is hoping the city focuses on solutions and not the same dull, unhelpful conversations…and soon. School starts for some students next week, everybody in 3 weeks!

Will Flanders:

A new @policyforum report paints a relatively fair picture of the education landscape in MKE. But articles like this zeroing in on the role of school choice are unfair (1/3)

After 30 years of reforms, report examines state of Milwaukee schools (jsonline.com)

Related: Where have all the students gone?

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

A curious WPR article:

The Kickapoo Area School District passed a resolution this spring calling for lawmakers to stop using public tax dollars to fund private school vouchers. The district is also asking that public spending on private school be outlined on property tax bills. 

During the 2023-24 school year, 11 students in the Kickapoo school district received a private school voucher. The district is based in the tiny community of Viola, which has about 700 residents. Taxpayers there contributed $113,811 toward the cost of private school education for those students, an increase of more than 400 percent from the previous year, according to the resolution. 

Dave Zweifel

Many educators complained at the time that the entire voucher program would serve as a foot in the door to eventually undermine the public school system — a system that had served the country since colonial days and was credited with representing the true melting pot among children from different cultures, races and incomes. Besides, experiments comparing public and private schools in other places hadn’t resulted in any significant improvements in student outcomes.

The ACLU filed suit against the religious school expansion and in 1998, the State Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. But, three years later the U.S. Supreme Court okayed the concept, agreeing with voucher proponents that taxpayer money actually went to parents who then could use the money as they saw fit for their children’s education. Therefore, states weren’t directly sending funds to religious schools, the court found.

From those beginnings here in Wisconsin, that seemingly modest little program has blossomed into a colossus that is rapidly creating a complete second school system funded by the American taxpayer.

“Billions in taxpayer dollars are being used to pay tuition at religious schools throughout the country, as state voucher programs expand dramatically and the line separating public education and religion fades,” a report in the Washington Post read earlier this month.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

Enrollment notes.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

WILL:

Decoupling public school funding from choice funding is a win-win from the perspective of both public-school districts and choice/charter schools. School districts will no longer face the uncertainty of voucher enrollment numbers when crafting their budgets for the upcoming school year. In an era of declining enrollment across Wisconsin, this additional stability is important. In most cases, school districts will have access to more state aid than they did before—essentially offering a modest budget boost at a time when many districts are worried about their fiscal reality. And a recent memo from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau confirms that no school district will be left with less funding under this legislation.

Because school districts have the ability to raise property taxes to make up for lost revenue from school choice, this legislation will also result in property tax cuts for most Wisconsin families.

Will Flanders:

It’s an unfortunate reality that demographic factors historically play a large role in student performance; any honest assessment of how schools and school sectors are performing must take those factors into account. Much of the reporting on school performance, though, ignores this reality. This report endeavors to incorporate these factors through rigorous statistical modeling that controls for, and assesses the impact of, several student characteristics. This report has been updated to include data from the 2022-23 report cards.

Among the key findings:

• Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program continue to outperform their public school peers. Proficiency rates in private choice schools were about 8.6% higher in English/Language Arts (ELA) and 7.0% higher in math on average than proficiency rates in traditional public schools in Milwaukee.
• Charter school students in Milwaukee continue to outperform their public school peers. District charters saw 6.9% and 6.6% higher proficiency in ELA and math respectively than traditional public schools.
• Statewide, choice students outperform their public school peers in ELA. Proficiency rates were about 5.4% higher in ELA for students participating in school choice statewide than traditional public school students. No difference was found in math performance.
• Wisconsin continues to struggle with its achievement gaps. Statewide, a school with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency rates 40.6% lower in ELA and 44.0% lower in math compared to a hypothetical school with zero low-income students. For African American students, that gap is 17.8% in ELA and 20.3% in math. Hispanic students have an achievement gap of approximately 6.3% in math, but no significant gap was found in ELA.
• Choice and charter schools are more efficient with taxpayer money. Once the demographics of students in the schools are taken into account, choice and charter schools earn more proficiency per $1,000 of spending than traditional public schools in both Milwaukee and the state as a whole.
• Choice schools offer more value added. 12 of the top 20 schools in the state where student performance exceeds expectations based on demographics are in the state’s choice programs.
• Rural schools perform worse than schools in any other type of geography. On average, proficiency in Wisconsin’s rural schools is significantly lower in both ELA and math than urban, suburban, or town schools.

Commentary.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Michael R Ford and Fredrik O Andersson

In this article, 25 years of data are utilized from nonprofit schools operating in the United States’ oldest and largest private school voucher program to test theories of isomorphism. We find that startup and religious schools belonging to an umbrella organization such as an archdiocese are particularly likely to serve similar student bodies at similar costs. In addition, we find that isomorphic pressures increase the longer a school participates in the Milwaukee voucher program, and that increased program regulation is related to increased sector isomorphism. The results illustrate the difficulty of using New Public Management style reforms, at scale, to encourage a diversity of nongovernment providers to provide a service traditionally provided by the public sector. The results will be of interest to scholars studying nonprofit institutional theories, school choice, and New Public Management style reforms.

Jill Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Molly Beck:

Gov. Tony Evers says he opposes abolishing the state’s oldest school voucher program through a lawsuit filed by some of the governor’s strongest supporters.

Evers, a former state superintendent and public school educator, said eliminating the taxpayer-funded voucher system in Milwaukee could have “traumatic” effects on the nearly 30,000 students who attend more than 100 private schools with the subsidies.

“It wasn’t just created yesterday. It was created decades ago, and I think ending it in such a way is going to be traumatic to a whole bunch of families and kids,” Evers said in an interview with the Journal Sentinel.

“It’s not that I think I’m a huge supporter of the vouchers but I also understand that uprooting the lives of a whole bunch of kids is not the way to address it. I’m not sure what the way to address it is right now, but just saying ‘Boom — it’s over,’ that’s going to be a problem.”

Evers also said it would likely be difficult for Milwaukee Public Schools to absorb tens of thousands of students quickly.

—-

More.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

CJ Szafir:

Despite having a new liberal majority, the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused this month to hear a challenge to the state’s school-choice programs. The lawsuit, supported by the Minocqua Brewing Co.’s progressive super PAC, would have deprived more than 60,000 students of funding. The episode carries a lesson for advocates of education freedom.

Families and school leaders were more engaged. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s brief against the lawsuit represented 22 clients, including parents and private-school leaders. Parents and students spoke out. “The new Supreme Court case will be devastating to all families . . . because it would take away opportunities from children who can’t support their education through a public school system,” Sherlean Roberts, a senior at Marquette University, told us. She attended a charter school in Milwaukee and will be the first in her family with a college degree.

Wisconsin began its experiment with school choice in 1990 with a bipartisan voucher program, enrolling 341 in secular private schools in Milwaukee. The state expanded the program to include religious schools in 1998, private schools outside Milwaukee in 2011 and 2013, and special-needs students in 2016.

Wall Street Journal:

This has been the year for school choice—from vouchers, to homeschooling, to pod schools with parents who use education savings accounts. The winners include charter schools, as union-run K-12 schools lost hundreds of thousands of students during Covid-19 who haven’t returned.

Yes they do. The trend holds for states of all sizes and political persuasions. From 2019-2023, charter enrollment grew in 40 of the 42 states analyzed, while traditional schools lost students in 40 states. Charter attendees surged nearly 20% in Texas (67,148 students), 19% in North Carolina (22,308), and 10% in Pennsylvania (15,353). District enrollment fell 0.83% in Texas and nearly 3% in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Part of the story is that states are working to improve charter offerings. The report says Indiana raised its per-student charter grant to $1,400 from $1,250, while allocating $25 million to a capital fund to help schools with facility costs. Enrollment in Indiana charters is up 9% over four years, versus down 2% for traditional schools. Legislative changes in New Mexico and Idaho come in for kudos as well.

The report flags evidence in New Jersey that growing demand for charters might be eroding political resistance to school choice in a state where public unions have traditionally all but run the government in Trenton.

Matt Barnum and Alicia A. Caldwell:

When Doug Ducey signed an expansive and unprecedented school choice law as Arizona governor last year, he pitched it as a way to help students escape struggling public schools.

“Our kids will no longer be locked in underperforming schools,” Ducey said in a statement at the time. “We’re unlocking a whole new world of opportunity for them and their parents.”

But since Arizona became the first state to allow any family to use public funding for private school or home schooling, students who had already opted out of public schools have been among the biggest beneficiaries. Data from a few other states that have since enacted similar programs show the same trend.

These findings have been seized on by critics who say these programs are draining resources to support middle- and-upper-income families who can afford private education.

“It’s money that was on the table for public schools,” said Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona, a leading opponent of the state’s choice program. “We’re now propping up an entire other school system.”

Supporters of these voucherlike programs, including private-school parents and many Republicans, say they are working as intended: They fund whatever type of education families want, both for students who have left public schools and those who never attended one.

Elizabeth Findell:

The word spread parent-to-parent during a Little Dribblers basketball game in the school gymnasium. The superintendent had sent emails—several—warning that school-choice efforts under way wouldn’t be good for their East Texas school district of 554 students.

The target of Superintendent Brandon Enos’s advocacy was a special session of the Texas Legislature called by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to pass a measure to allow Texas children to receive state funding to attend private schools. Superintendents statewide have feared the measure would drain money from the state’s already lean public-education funding.

“I don’t think it’s very fair,” said Melissa Williamson, a staunch Republican and stay-at-home mother of three, after another mom described the issue to her in the gym. “If a parent wants their child to go to private school, they should have to pay for it or apply for scholarships,” she said. “Because public schools have to take everybody.”

While similar school-voucher bills have passed in several Republican-led states in recent years, the issue has remained stalled over several legislative sessions in Texas because of opposition of Republicans in rural parts of the state, where schools are often the pride and center of small communities. The legislators who represent Cushing, state Sen. Robert Nichols and state Rep. Travis Clardy, have been among the holdouts.

Duey Stroebel:

A couple months after the bipartisan agreement over shared revenue and education were enacted we are already seeing the effects. Besides the record increase in public school resources of $1.2 billion, the deal included the passage of Act 11, which significantly increased state payments to school choice and charter schools. Until earlier this year, voting on education alternatives had almost always fallen along party lines, even though the area of the greatest usage of education alternatives has been Democrat-dominated Milwaukee.

Act 11, which I was privileged to author in the Senate, has laid down a bipartisan marker acknowledging educational alternatives are here to stay in Wisconsin. Five Democrats supported Act 11 on the floor, creating legislative super majorities in both chambers. Moreover, a Democrat governor, who considers himself to be the champion of public education, signed it.

Nicholas Kelly:

Education was a big winner of a bipartisan agreement in the recently enacted state budget. Public schools will receive an increase of more than $1 billion. Per pupil spending for Wisconsin’s private school choice programs will grow by $2,000 to $3,000 per student. 

Even after these historic funding increases, state payments to schools in the parental choice programs will still be less than 70 percent of the funding per student that public schools receive.

With the substantial new education spending, what’s the bang for the buck? What’s the return to Wisconsin taxpayers from their investments in public schools and the parental choice programs? At School Choice Wisconsin, we wanted to find out.

Our approach relied on publicly available data at the Department of Public Instruction’s website. To measure results, we used DPI Report Cards, which provide a comprehensive assessment of how the agency ranks public schools and schools in the choice programs. To measure funds invested, we used DPI data on per pupil public school revenue and state payments for pupils in the choice programs.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Will Flanders and Cory Brewer:

The recent article by Wisconsin Watch, “Wisconsin students with disabilities often denied public school choices,” suggested private schools that participate in Wisconsin’s school choice program can discriminate against students.

The article specifically alleges that choice schools “expel” students with disabilities, without providing a single example of when this has occurred. While this is a criticism often leveled against choice schools nationwide, it doesn’t reflect reality. Schools in Wisconsin’s choice programs are subject to lots of regulations on admissions.

The statutes governing admission to schools in the voucher programs also are crystal clear: Schools must accept all students who apply within their space limitations. If more students apply than seats available, the school does not have the opportunity to pick and choose. Instead, their students must be chosen at random.

The reality is that the budgets of private schools in the choice program are often stretched thin, because of severe underfunding of these institutions compared to the state’s public schools. Given these budgetary constraints, it may be challenging for some private schools to meet the needs of students with the most severe disabilities. But the decision is still ultimately in the parents’ hands after consulting about any limitations the school may have.

It is also important to highlight that private choice schools around Wisconsin likely serve far more students with disabilities than the data from the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) shows. A 2015 study from scholars at the University of Arkansas estimated that the rate of students with disabilities in these schools was likely twice more than what the data shows. The reason for this discrepancy is that private schools lack the financial incentive that public schools have to report a student as having a disability. Public schools receive more money from the state when a student is identified, whereas private schools do not unless the student goes through the lengthy process to qualify for the state’s Special Needs Scholarship Program.

Notes and links on Wisconsin Watch, here.

Wall Street Journal:

These changes bring the scholarships to 73% of per-pupil union school funding from about 61%, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL). It’s the biggest school-choice advance in the state in years. Charter schools also get a per-pupil boost of $1,727 to $10,991. A voucher program for special needs students increases by about $1,600 to $14,671 per student. A proposal at play in the Legislature’s budget negotiations could increase the voucher and charter amounts hundreds of dollars more.

Based on a survey of school leaders with School Choice Wisconsin last year, WILL estimates that at least 18,000—and likely thousands more—voucher seats could be created thanks to the larger scholarships. At least one private high school in Milwaukee that closed last year cited “inadequate” state funds as a factor. Some high school leaders interviewed by School Choice Wisconsin said their schools’ viability was in doubt without an increase in the voucher amount.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has been hostile to school choice, including attempting to freeze enrollment at schools that take the vouchers. But he signed the bill last week, and part of the deal is $1 billion in additional funding for union-run schools. Two Democrats in each chamber also voted for the bill.

Wisconsin coalition for education freedom:

Wisconsin Watch has released its third article in a series attempting to discredit the great work choice programs do in Wisconsin. Their latest article misrepresents admission policies of choice schools while ignoring the fact that public schools often engage in admission practices that would be illegal for schools participating in the state’s choice programs.
Wisconsin Watch is again making false claims.

• In their most recent article, Wisconsin Watch again misrepresents school choice admission practices and now adds a false narrative that schools “expel” students with disabilities at will. Their claims don’t match reality, nor is a single example provided.
• Fact: Schools in Wisconsin’s choice programs may not discriminate against any eligible family based on a student’s disability.i
• As with many individual public schools, individual private schools are not required to provide a full range of disability services. Parents who choose to enroll their student do so only after being fully informed of available services.
  Some Wisconsin public schools have admissions processes that would be illegal for private choice schools.
• Public school districts often have specialty public schools, in addition to their residentially assigned schools. Public schools are permitted to create admission requirements for these schools.
• Public schools having admission requirements is not a new phenomenon, with the practice being documented in Wisconsin for decades.ii (Link)
• Today, specialty schools like those in Milwaukeeiii (Link) use a points system to admit students based on their report card scores, attendance, standardized test scores, and an essay. In Green Bay,iv (Link) students must complete a test for admission to a school for the gifted.
  1
• Choice schools must admit students on a random basis if there is excess demand with few exceptions, primarily related to being in the same family as an existing student.v (Link)
  Public schools reject students in the public school full-time open enrollment program.

Phoebe Petrovic:

As an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin, Joanne Juhnke regularly finds herself on the phone with parents concerned about their children’s treatment at school.

Most complaints concern public schools, which enroll the majority of students. State funding for special education has shrunk, forcing districts to struggle to provide services, and disparate treatment of students with disabilities at public schools persists. But in public school, families have a state body to appeal to: the Department of Public Instruction.

DPI is far less helpful in disputes with private schools, which under state law can legally discriminate against students who need certain disability accommodations — or even kick them out. This applies even to private schools that receive taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers to educate students.

The calls Juhnke receives from voucher families often contain the same story. A family has enrolled a child with disabilities in a private school. Administrators have begun pressuring the student to leave or have kicked them out, something public schools cannot do. The parents are shocked. They’re sure the schools can’t do that.

Many times, Juhnke has to tell them: Yes, they can.

“You went into this school choice program thinking that you were the one, as the parents, who have the choice,” she said. “Really, on the other end, the school holds more choice cards than you do, and you’re coming out on the wrong side of that.”

I find the timing of Wisconsin Watch’s articles curious, amidst budget season. Ideally, the writer might dive deep and wide into the effectiveness of our well funded k-12 system. Reading would be a terrific place to start.

This Wisconsin Watch article was referenced in a recent St Marcus (Milwaukee) podcast. St Marcus operates an extraordinarily successful choice school on the City’s near north side. Read more, here.

Governor Evers’ most recent budget proposals have attempted to kill One City Schools’ charter authorization……

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Phoebe Petrovic

As an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin, Joanne Juhnke regularly finds herself on the phone with parents concerned about their children’s treatment at school. 

Most complaints concern public schools, which enroll the majority of students. State funding for special education has shrunk, forcing districts to struggle to provide services, and disparate treatment of students with disabilities at public schools persists. But in public school, families have a state body to appeal to: the Department of Public Instruction.

DPI is far less helpful in disputes with private schools, which under state law can legally discriminate against students who need certain disability accommodations — or even kick them out. This applies even to private schools that receive taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers to educate students.

The calls Juhnke receives from voucher families often contain the same story. A family has enrolled a child with disabilities in a private school. Administrators have begun pressuring the student to leave or have kicked them out, something public schools cannot do. The parents are shocked. They’re sure the schools can’t do that. 

Many times, Juhnke has to tell them: Yes, they can. 

“You went into this school choice program thinking that you were the one, as the parents, who have the choice,” she said. “Really, on the other end, the school holds more choice cards than you do, and you’re coming out on the wrong side of that.”

Far more important, however, is the context not provided. There are plenty of good-faith Americans who have legitimate concerns about how COVID was handled and how gender and sexuality are currently being handled in schools. 99.99% of them don't do what this man did.

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) May 21, 2023

Baker A. Mitchell and Robert P. Spencer:

The Fourth Circuit’s finding appears to have been based on little more than the convention of calling charters “public charter schools” and their being mostly funded by public sources. But hundreds of American cities contract municipal services out to private companies, which generally aren’t considered state actors. The Supreme Court rejected state-action claims against an investor-owned public utility in Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974) and an operator of a public-access TV channel in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (2019). If these aren’t state actors, surely neither are North Carolina’s charter schools, which the law promises freedom from government control.

Far more is at stake than CDS’s school-uniform policy, which was designed by parents of our students. The ruling comes at a time when the charter-school movement is growing. Oklahoma’s attorney general recently issued a legal opinion stating that religious organizations must be allowed to operate charter schools in the Sooner State. A key aspect of the opinion was a finding that charter schools are not state actors and, therefore, the Constitution’s Establishment Clause doesn’t prohibit the inculcation of religious values, as it does in government-run schools. In Carson v. Makin (2022), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a state voucher program couldn’t discriminate against religious schools.

John Hindraker:

Minnesota, as in other states, concerned parents have banded together to try to wrest control of the public schools away from teachers’ unions, in order to improve the quality of education and to stop left-wing indoctrination. Earlier this year, we started a 501(c)(4) organization called the Minnesota Parents Alliance to lead those efforts in our state. 

Today the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune both posted stories on the MPA and Minnesota’s school board races. The Pioneer Press article is long, and is titled “Social issues bring wave of conservative candidates to MN school board races.” Is educational quality now a “social issue”? 

The Pioneer Press piece is reasonably fair and includes an account of MPA’s founding:

In Minnesota last year, the Center of the American Experiment — a prominent think tank and member of the State Policy Network, which promotes conservative positions like an opposition to public-sector unions and support for voucher laws that help parents redirect tax dollars toward private school tuition — toured the state to fight against an “alarming” rewrite of the K-12 social studies standards for Minnesota schools.

“We filled rooms all across the state,” said the Center’s spokesman, Bill Walsh.

All true so far.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

WILL-Law:

The News: Attorneys with the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit against the City of Milwaukee on behalf of Wisconsin Lutheran High School after the City unlawfully assessed the school for $105,000 in property taxes. The City is trying to tax Wisconsin Lutheran for a campus building that is owned by the school and used for student housing and other educational purposes. The lawsuit was filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel Lucas Vebber, said, “State law provides a property tax exemption for educational and religious institutions like Wisconsin Lutheran. The City of Milwaukee’s attempt to assess the school for more than $100,000 for this property is clearly unlawful.”

Wisconsin Lutheran President, the Rev. Dr. Kenneth Fisher, said, “This is an important issue for our school. We have a huge gap between what we receive in vouchers and our actual costs to educate our teens. We would much rather spend the $105,000 educating our students than paying for an improper tax. We are praying that our money can be restored to us so we can use it to further the ministry of our school.”

Shannon Whitworth:

I work at a high school where the majority of the students are from inner-city Milwaukee. They are confronted almost daily with some form of dysfunction, depravity, or violence.

One day, some of my students challenged me as to why they should put a lot of effort into their studies when, from their perspective, the outlook for their futures looked bleak. I reminded them that God doesn’t want them to live in poverty or hopelessness. Rather, as stated in Proverbs 13, He wants them to live lives of prosperity, generosity and leave a legacy, which is possible if we follow His plan. I was able to share aspects of my faith with my students because the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) has enabled their parents to send them to Milwaukee Lutheran High School on a voucher.

BREAKING: Nebraska Senator Justin Wayne (D) again calls out his colleagues for sending their kids to private school while opposing school choice for others. pic.twitter.com/WiXAmcBRN8

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) January 11, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

The Economist:

Parents seeking government money to send their children to religious schools have won a string of victories at America’s Supreme Court. The dollars began flowing in 2002, when the justices let states provide parents with vouchers for religious schooling. In 2017 the court said states may not exclude church-based preschools from grants for playground resurfacing. And in 2020, in Espinoza v Montana Department of Revenue, parents persuaded the high court that their state must provide tuition assistance for students to attend religious schools if they also offer these funds for secular private schools.

Will Flanders and Libby Sobic:

For many years, Wisconsin has reserved the position of state superintendent of schools for someone steeped in union politics and promising the status quo. But over the past year, COVID-19 has turned many such situations on their heads and polarized politics in a way never seen before. The superintendent election that took place across Wisconsin last week was not excused from the COVID-effect. For once in a long while, the status quo candidate—Jill Underly—faced a very serious challenge from Debb Kerr who, for focusing on getting students back in the classroom and promising to treat all school sectors equally, became the reform candidate overnight.  Unfortunately for Wisconsin students, Underly prevailed. But the race exposed a growing schism on the left around the issue of education reform.

In the primary, Underly garnered support from the teachers unions by expressing her skepticism on school choice, and proposing a freeze on the programs that would effectively eliminate the option for countless kids around the state. Kerr supported working with the voucher and charter sectors, and viewing all sectors as part of a broader team working to improve educational outcomes for Wisconsin students.

In the past it was possible on the national level and in Wisconsin to receive support from the teachers unions while also allowing school choice. For instance, Arne Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education, a supporter of education reform in its most tepid forms,  endorsed Kerr in the last week before the election. However, these Democrats are finding themselves increasingly ostracized from the party’s mainstream when forced to address educational issues. For instance, Duncan’s endorsement of Kerr quickly led to a tweet from Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan claiming that Duncan was a “bad” Secretary of Education for supporting options like charter schools. Pocan also called voucher supporters a “cult.”

Much more on Kerr vs. Underly, here.

Cori Petersen:

This past fall, many public schools made the decision to go virtual as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this wasn’t the case for most private schools. In fact, according to the National Association of Independent Schools, only 5% of private schools went virtual as of October. This is driving demand for private schools across the country and in Wisconsin.

“I think parents have seen how different schools have responded to the COVID pandemic. Some systems and schools went into a self-protective mode and put student needs in a subordinate place,” said Charles Moore, principal of High Point Christian School in Dane County. “Others stepped into ‘harm’s way’ and delivered in-person education despite the potential dangers.”  

High Point Christian School, with locations in Mount Horeb and Madison, welcomed 57 new families to their school this past fall. Many parents cited their desire for their children to learn in person as the main reason for coming to the school. But as we celebrate National School Choice Week this week, it’s important to consider ways to expand access to the choice programs so that low-income families can send their children to an in-person, private school if they so desire. Reforms that would make choice more accessible are longer enrollment periods, allowing children to enter the parental choice programs at any point in time — no matter what grade they are in — and eliminating enrollment caps. 

High Point Christian School is part of the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program (WPCP). This means there are vouchers available for students whose families make below 220% of the federal poverty limit to attend High Point, and other participating schools, at no cost.   

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

Todd Richmond:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction violated state law when it withheld voucher students’ standardized test scores for a day last fall, a judge ruled Friday.

School Choice Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative law firm, sued the department in Jefferson County court in November. The lawsuit revolved around the 2018-19 standardized test scores that the department released that September.

The scores showed only 39% of all students were proficient or advanced in English and that 40% were proficient or advanced in math. Only 20.7% of voucher students were proficient or advanced in English and just 17.8% were proficient or advanced in math.

Students in voucher programs can use state dollars to subsidize tuition at private schools. Republicans have touted the programs as an alternative for students stuck in failing public schools. Democrats argue the programs are a drain on state revenues that could go to help public schools.

Wisconsin has generally lacked a rigorous approach to statewide assessments: see the oft criticized WKCE.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Chris Rickert:

A group of parents and private religious schools is asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to void a Dane County order barring in-person school for most students, saying the order issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic infringes on the right to worship and to an education.

“This case challenges the authority of one unelected bureaucrat to upend the education plans of thousands of students and families and their schools located throughout Dane County via the stroke of a pen,” asserts the petition filed Wednesday by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on behalf of 14 parents, five religious schools, and interest groups for school vouchers and religious and independent schools.

Issued Friday and effective Monday, Emergency Order No. 9 bars schools from offering in-person instruction for grades 3 through 12 until the county meets certain benchmarks showing the coronavirus is better contained. In effect, it applies almost exclusively to private schools because public schools in Dane County had already decided to start the year online for almost all students in almost every grade.

In the WILL petition and a separate one filed on behalf of Fitchburg mother Sara Lindsey James on Tuesday, attorneys argue that Janel Heinrich, director of Public Health Madison and Dane County, doesn’t have authority under state law to close schools and that the order runs counter to the decision the high court made in May striking down the statewide stay-at-home order.

In the May case, the court did not strike down the part of the stay-at-home order closing schools, but that order only closed them through the end of last school year. James’ petition argues state law allowing the state’s public health director to close schools in a public health emergency does not extend to local public health directors such as Heinrich.

(Some) Madison Governance Rhetoric on University of Wisconsin Governance Plans

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

David N. Figlio, Cassandra M.D. Hart, Krzysztof Karbownik:

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and a student fixed effect design, we explore how the massive scale-up of a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes. Expansion of the program produced modestly larger benefits for students attending public schools that had a larger initial degree of private school options, measured prior to the introduction of the voucher program. These benefits include higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Jon Gabriel:

This week, reporters revealed that the state Department of Education released the personal information of nearly 7,000 families who use Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Worse still, they sent it to Save Our Schools, staunch opponents of the program and educational choice in general.

ESAs enable parents, mostly those who have children with special needs, to direct their taxpayer dollars for specialized educational therapies or curriculum. The accounts help bridge the huge financial gap for families requiring customized assistance in the classroom.

The department released a spreadsheet that included the account balances of every ESA account in the state, along with names, email addresses and the grade in which the student is enrolled. Special needs students even had their disability listed.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Dillon Rosenblat:

The Arizona Department of Education likely violated federal student privacy laws when it released a spreadsheet that inadvertently named every parent with an Empowerment Scholarship Account in the state. The spreadsheet then fell into the hands of a group that opposes expansion of the program.

The Yellow Sheet Report, a sister publication of the Capitol Times, also obtained the spreadsheet through a public records request for documents showing the account balance of every ESA account in the state, and, on the surface, the documents the department provided appear to properly redact personally identifiable information. But when the Yellow Sheet Report highlighted the document, it became clear it was improperly redacted. Copying the entire table into a text reader reveals the redacted portions. 

The likely explanation is that the department blackened the background in columns containing the names and email addresses of nearly 7,000 parents with ESA accounts, but didn’t re-scan the document to ensure the words didn’t show through. 

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Do kids who attend private schools w publicly funded tuition vouchers do better than public schools? Research is mixed. Here’s a comprehensive look at the highs and lows in Milwaukee, which I wrote right as ⁦@BetsyDeVosED⁩ was rising to office. https://t.co/esSBjs5T7C

— Erin Richards (@emrichards) September 16, 2019

.@betsydevosed was involved early in Wisconsin’s voucher school expansion and has donated hundreds of thousands to Republican lawmakers since 2003. Here’s my story from 2017: https://t.co/E13KGVGg5h https://t.co/Sz2I4PtaUR

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) September 16, 2019

Despite the fact that media & security & @BetsyDeVosED are in their class, these 8th grade girls are absorbed in trying to “diagnose” the source of a patient’s symptoms. They already dissected a sheep brain. ? Kids are pretty focused at @StMarcusSchool. pic.twitter.com/z0oJrEwQuN

— Erin Richards (@emrichards) September 16, 2019

Why a Milwaukee voucher school to start a fall tour for @BetsyDeVosED? “This is where education freedom started,” says her press sec. (The Milwaukee voucher program started in 1990. Now 30K+ kids here attend private, mostly religious schools w public $$.) pic.twitter.com/eTk06S2yrV

— Erin Richards (@emrichards) September 16, 2019

Related: Mission vs Organization. Then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.”

Betsy DeVos is coming to Wisconsin. So I’m heading to Milwaukee early tomorrow morning to join @MTEAunion and Milwaukee families in sending a crystal clear message: the Trump/DeVos team might not believe in public schools, but we do. https://t.co/XHUzMPbuVn

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) September 16, 2019

An interview with St. Marcus Superintendent Henry Tyson.

Taxpayer supported K-12 school districts substantially outspend voucher schools. Madison’s $18-20K per student is more than double typical voucher school taxpayer support.

Eric Litke:

Voucher schools are an ongoing point of contention in Wisconsin’s divided government, with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers even promising to tighten or end the decades-old program.

The system, which uses taxpayer money to send low-income students to private schools, has been tweaked and debated but ultimately expanded under Republican control in recent years.

In recent comments, one Democratic lawmaker claimed it has grown into a program with a 10-figure tax impact.

“The only thing voucher schools have done for low-income kids is increase their parents’ property taxes. That’s it,” said state Rep. Chris Taylor, D-Madison, during a May 23, 2019, session of the Joint Committee on Finance, the Legislature’s budget-writing body.

She went on to say: “They have failed to increase academic performance of low-income kids or graduation rates of low-income kids, but they’ve increased property taxes. You know how much by? Since 2011, and this is from the (Legislative) Fiscal Bureau — $1 billion.”

We’ll leave the performance arguments for another day and focus on the price tag.

Has the voucher program, also known as school choice, really raised property taxes by $1 billion?

Understanding vouchers

Though the voucher program is often referred to as a single entity, it is actually four different programs.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is the first and largest, launched in 1990. The Racine Parental Choice Program started in 2011, the statewide Wisconsin Parental Choice Program in 2013 and the statewide Special Needs Scholarship Program in 2016.

The programs allow parents to send their children to private schools with a taxpayer-funded voucher. Families must meet certain income limits (though those don’t apply for the special needs program) to qualify for vouchers and must reapply every year.

The programs had a combined enrollment of about 40,000 students in 2018-19, with about 75% of those in Milwaukee.

The state could fund the voucher program by simply paying the vouchers from the state’s general fund — the Racine and statewide programs used to work like this — but instead it is now done through a complex exchange of funds.

The mechanics vary between programs, but generally it works like this:

When a student enrolls in a voucher school, the state pays the amount of that voucher — roughly $8,000 per student — to the school and reduces the state aid to the public school district where the student lives by the same amount.

The state then increases the amount the district can levy in property taxes by the same amount to make up for the lost voucher funds.

The system helps restore district funding levels since losing a smattering of students at different levels doesn’t typically result in lower costs for the district. That is, a district can’t get rid of a grade-level classroom or drop a teacher who teaches a particular subject just because two students in one grade and one in another move to a voucher school.

The district isn’t required to raise taxes; it could make up the money by cutting elsewhere.

But since 2011, the period cited by Taylor, there was just one year where Racine or Milwaukee didn’t increase the property-tax levy to that maximum, according to the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

Dan Rossmiller, government relations director for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, also noted districts are motivated to levy to this maximum since this is a “use it or lose it” system. Districts that don’t tax to that full amount in a given year can’t return to that levy amount in the future.

The state is in the process of changing this system for Milwaukee.

Taxpayers support traditional K-12 school districts with many taxes, including property, sales, income (state and federal) and fees. Voucher schools make do with much less, per student.

Marisa Peryer:

Established in 2015, the school is part of a nationwide network of 35 Cristo Rey Jesuit schools that predominantly reach students from low-income families. Students spend four days a week at the school, then one day a week at businesses across greater Milwaukee as part of the work-study program. The students are not paid; instead, their “pay” goes to the school to pay down the cost of tuition.

Almost all the students are Hispanic, and almost all attend the school on taxpayer-funded vouchers through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. The school continues to grow. Now at 1215 S. 45th St., it soon will double its space as it moves into a vacated Pick ‘n Save store at 1818 W. National Ave.

A few hundred parents, family members and friends gathered in Marquette University’s Church of the Gesu for Friday’s ceremony.

After speeches from salutatorian Wendy Gutierrez-Perez, who will attend College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, and from commencement speaker the Rev. John P. Foley, chairman emeritus of Cristo Rey’s board, Vera took to the podium to give her valedictorian address.

Will Flanders:

Here are 5 findings for our upcoming report on school performance:
1. Milwaukee: Choice Schools Lead in Student Proficiency (even more significantly than DPI data suggests)
Wisconsin’s private and charter schools, much maligned by Governor Evers and other leaders on the left, continue to succeed for Wisconsin students. Once schools are put on a level playing field, all types of charters show a proficiency advantage over traditional public schools (TPS). Led by schools like Carmen Middle/High School of Science and Technology in Milwaukee, non-instrumentalities have 12% higher proficiency in English and 13% higher proficiency in math on average than TPS. This dramatic performance positively exceeded every other sector measured.
Independent charter schools, schools in which the governor has attempted to freeze enrollment, exceeded TPS proficiency rates in math by 8%, as did instrumentality charters (for a brief primer on charter school types, look here). No effect of independent charters or instrumentalities was found for English. Private schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program have higher proficiency rates in both math and English. Proficiency was 4.7% higher in English, and about 4% higher in math than TPS. The inclusion of control variables widens these gaps in most cases, meaning that the results are more positive for choice schools than the data on DPI’s website which lacks controls.

These findings will be enlightening to Governor Evers, who in an interview earlier this week declared vouchers to perform similar to students at Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).

Related: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Vicki Alger and Martin Lueken:

Secondly, Pope’s latest perennial request to the LFB asks for only the program’s costs and doesn’t ask for a single voucher program savings calculation. That omission, however, didn’t stop dozens of media outlets from repeating the ominous headline that vouchers, along with charter schools, “consume $193 million in state aid.” Those outlets also failed to mention that an adjustment to the Milwaukee voucher program’s so-called “funding flaw” has been phasing out its general aid cost for years and will be eliminated by 2024-25. Eliminating that cost, currently $42 million, reduces the Pope report’s combined $119 million voucher programs cost by more than one-third.

Even so, that $119 million voucher cost represents just 1 percent of Wisconsin’s $11.5 billion in total local, state, and federal public-school funding – at most a snowflake effect on public schools, not the negative “snowball effect” Pope describes.

What’s more, whenever students leave a public-school district, a portion of its funding is reduced no matter where they enroll next. In fact, the number of Wisconsin students transferring to other districts through open enrollment alone far outnumbers voucher students, nearly 61,000 transfer students compared to 40,000 voucher students. And that number doesn’t include students whose families moved out of state.

Related:

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison spends far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, now around $20,000 per student.

Governor Evers lead the Wisconsin DPI for many years. That constitutionally independent taxpayer supported organization has issued thousands of mulligans to elementary reading teachers.

Tap for a larger version.

Raw data [Excel Numbers] via Sara Hynek.

Note that taxpayer supported K-12 school districts receive funds from a variety of sources, including federal taxpayer funds along with local fees.

Madison plans to spend $518,955,288 during the 2018-2019 school year. That’s about $20,000 per student (26,917, which includes 4k), which is far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 schools, nearly 3X voucher organizations, for example. Much more on spending comparisons, here.

An “emphasis on adult employment“.

Molly Beck:

He said in the Milwaukee program especially, enrollment freezes in private voucher schools would disproportionately affect children of color living in low-income households.

“Most of our families don’t have the kind of income where they would have realistic choices,” he said at the time.

Under Evers’ proposal, voucher schools also would be banned from charging tuition for students living in poverty under the proposal and would be required to allow students to opt out of religious activities.

All teachers working in schools receiving taxpayer-funded vouchers would be required to be licensed like public school teachers, and all voucher schools would be required to be accredited before receiving taxpayer funds, under Evers’ proposal.

In another provision, increases in the amount of money private voucher schools receive per student would be tied to increases in the amount of money school districts could raise in revenue and receive through the state’s funding formula.

Suspend charter school expansion

Evers in his spending plan also would suspend programs created by Republicans in recent years to expand independent charter schools in school districts that have persistent gaps in academic achievement between groups of students.

The University of Wisconsin System Office of Educational Opportunity, which was created in 2015 and may authorize independent charter schools over the objection of school district officials, would be barred from authorizing new schools until 2023.

The budget proposal also seeks to prevent a flurry of new independent charter schools from opening.

Under state law, charter schools may be authorized by technical colleges, the City of Milwaukee, all UW System chancellors, the state’s tribal leaders, and the Waukesha County Executive. Evers’ budget proposal suspends the organizations’ authority to authorize new charter schools until 2023.

A spokesman for UW System did not respond to a request for comment on the proposals to suspend the system’s ability to create new charter schools.

Another program known as the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program would be eliminated. The program was created in 2015 and required public school districts receiving persistent failing grades from the state to be taken over by county officials.

The program, which was created to address low-performing schools in Milwaukee, requires the county executive to appoint a special commissioner to take over a select number of schools in a district receiving failing grades and turn them over to an outside operator.

Scott Bauer:

Evers is also calling for requiring all teachers working in private schools that accept taxpayer-funded voucher students to be licensed like public school teachers. He also wants to give taxpayers more information on property tax bills about how much of their money is going to fund voucher schools. He’s also calling for a cap on enrollment in the voucher program for students with disabilities.

Jesse Opoien:

Evers is set to deliver his first budget address Thursday evening, but has shared some details from the spending plan with reporters in the weeks leading up to it. His plans for voucher and charter schools were first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday, then shared with other reporters later that day.

Aides to the governor framed the proposal as a way to reduce property taxes and to discuss funding sources for the voucher program without affecting currently-enrolled students.

Opponents of the plan accused Evers of favoring teachers’ unions over students.

“Evers’ budget would end school choice as Wisconsin knows it,” said C.J Szafir, executive vice president of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, in a statement.

Related: The DPI, lead by Mr. Evers, granted thousands of elementary teacher reading content knowledge requirement exemptions.

Yet: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Corey A. DeAngelis:

If only it were that easy.

My just-released study — co-authored with George Mason University graduate student Blake Hoarty — suggests that higher-quality private schools are less likely to participate in two of the most highly regulated voucher programs in the country, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and the Ohio Educational Choice Scholarship Program.

The data suggest that school choice regulations reduce the quality of private schools participating in voucher programs, with quality measured by tuition and customer reviews. Specifically, we find that an increase in tuition of $1000 is associated with a 3 to 4 percent decrease in the likelihood of participation in a voucher program. We also find that a one-point increase (out of five points) in a school’s GreatSchools review score is associated with around a 15 percent decrease in the chance that a school participates in the Milwaukee voucher program.

But this isn’t the first study to find that voucher regulations could inadvertently reduce the quality of options available to families in need. A recent peer-reviewed evaluation I conducted with colleagues at the University of Arkansas also finds that higher-quality private schools are less likely to participate in voucher programs in three other locations: Washington, D.C., Indiana, and Louisiana. And another recent peer-reviewed evaluation I conducted with the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke finds that voucher program regulation likely leads to less private school specialization.

Why does regulation reduce the quality of private schools that participate in voucher programs?

Corey A. DeAngelis:

If only it were that easy.

My just-released study — co-authored with George Mason University graduate student Blake Hoarty — suggests that higher-quality private schools are less likely to participate in two of the most highly regulated voucher programs in the country, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and the Ohio Educational Choice Scholarship Program.

The data suggest that school choice regulations reduce the quality of private schools participating in voucher programs, with quality measured by tuition and customer reviews. Specifically, we find that an increase in tuition of $1000 is associated with a 3 to 4 percent decrease in the likelihood of participation in a voucher program. We also find that a one-point increase (out of five points) in a school’s GreatSchools review score is associated with around a 15 percent decrease in the chance that a school participates in the Milwaukee voucher program.

But this isn’t the first study to find that voucher regulations could inadvertently reduce the quality of options available to families in need. A recent peer-reviewed evaluation I conducted with colleagues at the University of Arkansas also finds that higher-quality private schools are less likely to participate in voucher programs in three other locations: Washington, D.C., Indiana, and Louisiana. And another recent peer-reviewed evaluation I conducted with the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke finds that voucher program regulation likely leads to less private school specialization.

Why does regulation reduce the quality of private schools that participate in voucher programs?

Corey DeAngelis:

EducationNext just released its 12th annual survey of public opinion. The nationally representative survey, administered in May 2018, finds that 54 percent of the general public supports private school vouchers for all students. This result is up 9 percentage points (20 percent) from 2017. On the other hand, only 43 percent of the survey respondents support income-targeted vouchers. This is great news for all families. Here’s why.

Corey A. DeAngelis:

These positive effects are all large. For example, the most recent federal evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program found that vouchers increased the likelihood that parents and students reported that the students were in very safe schools by more than 35 percent. Data from the state-mandated evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program showed that vouchers increased the likelihood that parents strongly agreed that their children were safe in class by 48 percent. In addition, a study found that school vouchers in D.C., New York City, and Ohio largely reduced the likelihood that parents reported school problems such as fighting, destruction of property, and racial conflict.

But this evidence shouldn’t surprise us all that much. When given the opportunity to choose schools, parents frequently put their children’s safety at the top of the list. In fact, a 2013 studyshowed that 53 percent of families listed safety as a top reason for choosing certain private schools for their kids. After all, families care about their children’s safety more than anyone else.

WILL:

on K-12 Education Reform
In almost every context, words matter. Public opinion on particular issues can shift greatly depending on the language used, and K-12 education reform is no exception. To help further understand this, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty commissioned Research Now Survey Sampling International to conduct a statewide survey experiment of 1,500 adults in Wisconsin. We tested a number of messages related to education reform, ranging from vouchers to Education Savings Accounts (ESA). We also surveyed public opinion on spending on K-12 schools and the impact of Act 10, the 2011 collective bargaining reform law, on teachers and students.
To conduct the school choice messaging study for vouchers, charter schools, and ESAs, respondents were randomized into one of several messaging conditions, exposing them to certain types of information. Following this randomization, respondents are asked about their level of support for school choice on a five point scale ranging from “strongly oppose” to “strongly support.” We learn which messages increase support by comparing the average responses of those in the control group to the average response of those in each treatment group.

We found that school choice is in fact popular, but the words that are used to describe it are of critical importance. For example, Republicans increase their support of vouchers when discussed in terms of civics and patriotism. Democrats and African Americans increase their support when discussed in terms of diversity. Surprisingly Education Savings Accounts have majority or plurality of support amongst all demographics, including Democrats, and suggest strong appetite for more school choice

Alan Borsuk:

It’s a much different world for pretty much every school and school district in Wisconsin, both public and private. A few aspects of that, in thumbnail form:

Without vouchers, a lot of current private schools would have closed or would never have opened.

Competition for enrollment in Milwaukee and Racine — and increasingly elsewhere — is intense. Kids equal vitality and money for every school. After all these years, too little is known about how and why parents pick schools, but choice is, in general, popular, and just about every school pushes hard to get students in the door.
The rules of the voucher programs have changed a lot over the years. The good news is that there are fewer really terrible private schools than there used to be and more is posted publicly about the private schools’ performance than there used to be. Income caps on participating families have changed so that a much larger number of kids qualify for vouchers.

Choice is almost everywhere. Even within public systems such as MPS, there are a lot of options for schooling. It is a choice world for parents.

The voucher-public divide remains a polarizing, partisan source of division and disunity in education advocacy.

And most important, in my book: Overall academic outcomes in Milwaukee or Racine have not really improved and are deeply concerning. (The statewide picture is less troubling.)

In every stream of schools, there are good schools — and ones where students chronically do poorly. Overall, only about one in five Milwaukee kids rates as proficient or better in reading, and that is true for both MPS and voucher schools. Charter schools are somewhat better.

Yet, the traditional education establishment continues to resist essential improvements, such as the Foundations of Reading elementary teacher content knowledge requirements.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition:

Main takeaways from the 2017 NAEP 4th grade reading exam:

Wisconsin’s score was 220, below the national average of 222

Wisconsin score statistically declined from 2015

Wisconsin scores have been statistically flat since 1992

Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally, compared to 25th in 2015

All Wisconsin racial, economic status, and disability status sub-groups perform below the national average for that sub-group

Alan Borsuk:

Teachers and the teachers’ union. Don’t expect a happy workforce. The union has turned up the volume on its unhappiness and it remains a powerful force, even without the bargaining powers it had before Act 10, which dramatically curtailed collective bargaining for most public employees, including teachers. Beyond the union itself, it won’t be easy for MPS to attract and retain top teachers, given the renewed money crunch.

Principals. You can advocate all sorts of things as superintendent, but carrying them out depends a lot on the 150 or so principals running schools. I suspect if Driver were candid, she’d say that she worries about the quality of principals overall. And there is concern that a wave of retirements is coming. Good luck finding great principals.

Student achievement. Driver accomplished some things as superintendent, but the most important big picture point to me is that student achievement didn’t change much. A few indicators improved a bit. Overall, the situation continues to be deeply alarming. Year after year, one in five students in MPS (and in the private school voucher program) rates as proficient in reading. Fewer than that are proficient in math. Is it Driver’s fault that things haven’t improved much? Obviously, there’s lots of blame to share. But, ultimately the coach is judged by how the team does on the field. The team is chronically beleaguered.

Relationships. This was Driver’s biggest strength. She connected with all sorts of people — community leaders, philanthropists, business leaders, elected officials, leaders from elsewhere in Wisconsin. This translated into both tangible and intangible support for MPS. But relationships require a lot of tending, especially with so many competing interests. Driver will be a tough act to follow on this front.

Patrick Wolf

Here are the Newspeak translations:

• “Large body” means “five studies,” selected out of 20 rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations that exist on private school choice in the U.S. The authors claim the commentary relies on six studies but one of the supposed studies is a commentary by Mark Dynarski and Austin Nichols that discusses the other actual studies. So “six”, in Newspeak, means “five,” which somehow is a “large body.” Got it?

• “All of which” means “some of which,” as the multi-year Louisiana study cited (of which I am co-author) reports no significant achievement impacts of the program after three years and the Indiana study cited reports that the initial negative results of that program turn positive in reading by year four.

• “Worse than their peers in public school” is incorrect for all five studies. For the Louisiana and DC studies, the analyses compare students who won a voucher lottery to students who lost a voucher lottery. In both places, some of the students who lost lotteries enrolled in private schools anyway but remained in the randomized control group for purposes of calculating the effects of the program. Even more of the control group members attended high-performing public charter schools in their communities after losing the lottery. True, charter schools are “public” schools, but they are special kinds of public schools and should be described as such (at least in Oldspeak). In the Indiana study, the most rigorous program estimates come from an individual fixed-effects analysis, where the achievement gains of students while in the voucher program are compared to their achievement gains when not in the program. They are not compared to their peers but to themselves. The Ohio study matched EdChoice students with descriptively similar public school students at baseline and kept every student in their original group after that, regardless of who in either group actually attended private or public schools. These studies are rigorous precisely because they do not simply compare voucher students with “their peers in public school.”

• “Especially in math” means “almost exclusively in math.” The only lasting negative reading effect in this selective set of voucher studies comes from the Ohio study. The DC study, which is the focus of the commentary, only observes negative effects in math.

The report, from the Center for American Progress.

James Varney:

It was a prolonged mystery that struck Wisconsin education reformers as more akin to a Kafka novel than American due process: Who was behind cryptic demand letters sent under the aegis of the Obama Justice Department, intimating without specific evidence that Milwaukee’s school-choice program was illegally discriminating against disabled kids?

Now, after a six-year bureaucratic and legal tangle in which school voucher advocates said they were stonewalled by Washington, the mystery has been solved. And the answer, they say, is alarming: The federal operation was sparked and practically run behind the scenes by liberal opponents of the program.

Documents released in December through litigation by school-choice advocates showed that lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union and Disability Rights Wisconsin had prodded federal prosecutors to go after the program, which enables low- and moderate-income Milwaukee parents to use taxpayer-funded vouchers to send their children to private schools. Nearly 30,000 students participate in the program.

According to the documents, the liberal groups opposing vouchers coordinated media strategy with the feds and submitted questions that Justice turned around and posed nearly verbatim to Wisconsin education officials. In addition to suggesting that the program was violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by denying access to disabled kids, the groups promised to drum up additional complaints. Their efforts appear to be why Justice kept the inquiry open for four years even though federal and state officials asserted from the start that, even if the unproven charges were true, they were not legally empowered to remedy them in private schools.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Tawnell Hobs:

“The schools that have 20% to 30% voucher kids and 70% to 80% fee-paying kids, they look more like the private schools that we sort of put on a pedestal—that have very ambitious programs,” says Patrick Wolf, a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas who has studied private-school choice programs for about 19 years. “Ones that enroll a very high percent of voucher students tend to be low-resourced.”

The Milwaukee findings offer a potential road map for the Trump administration, which is preparing a national push for school-choice programs to provide an alternative to traditional public schools. President Donald Trump has called for allocating $250 million for scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools, part of a plan to eventually pump $20 billion of federal money into school-choice measures, including vouchers.

Private schools receive less money per student under the Milwaukee voucher program— from $7,323 to $7,969 per student in the last school year—compared with an average of $10,122 for public-school students. The amount, which has increased over the years, was initially set low to help pass the voucher bill in a split legislature.

Public-school officials say they have greater expenses, such as for transportation and for providing services to special-needs students, although they say they haven’t done any comprehensive cost comparisons between public and voucher schools.

Mr. Bender has pushed to expand the funding for the voucher program. Like many proponents, he says the ability of parents to choose is a big benefit in itself, especially for parents seeking a religiously based school.
Mike Ruzicka, president of the 4,000-member Greater Milwaukee Association of Realtors, a group that supports Milwaukee’s voucher program, says that at the outset supporters were overly optimistic about the program’s potential impact.

“We’ve come to the realization that it’s not going to be a panacea,” he says. He says the voucher program helped some students and has provided families with more options, and has also pushed public schools to do better.Local opponents call the program a failure based on its academic record. Wisconsin state Rep. Christine Sinicki (D., Milwaukee), an opponent who was on the Milwaukee school board during the program’s early years, says
the program’s expansion beyond poor students stretched public-school financing by enabling middle-class students who had been paying for private school to attend them with vouchers.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Will Flanders commentary.

Madison spends nearly $20k per student, far more than voucher schools receive. Despite the above average spending, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Erin Richards:

In 2015-’16, Wisconsin was home to just over a million school-aged children. About 860,000 attended public schools. About 123,000 attended private schools: about 90,000 who paid tuition, and about 33,000 who used vouchers. About 20,000 children were home-schooled.

Vouchers are taxpayer-funded tuition subsidies that help children attend private schools, the vast majority of which are religious. In Wisconsin, the annual voucher payments will rise to about $7,500 per K-8 pupil and around $8,000 per high school student this fall.

To qualify for a voucher in the statewide program, students have to come from families earning no more than 185% of the federal poverty level, or about $45,000 for a family of four or about $52,000 if the parents are married. The income limit for the Racine and Milwaukee programs is 300% of the federal poverty level.
Vouchers are different than charter schools, which are fully public schools that are privately operated, often by nonprofits. Charter schools receive freedom from some state rules and school district oversight in exchange for demonstrating higher-than-average student achievement, the terms of which are outlined in their charters, or contracts.

“School choice” refers to vouchers and charters and other options parents can choose outside their assigned neighborhood school. But vouchers are the most controversial because they usually support religious schools that don’t have to follow all the same rules as public schools. Private schools that accept vouchers are not legally obligated to serve all children with special needs, and they do not have to disclose all the same data as public schools.

Voucher schools spend substantially less per student than traditional taxpayer funded school districts.

Locally, Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student annually, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results

Will Flanders::

While creating an incentive to improve, school choice has not come at a cost to the public schools. If, as Taylor claims, school choice is designed to “siphon” money from public schools, it’s making a mess of the job. Per-pupil spending is higher today than it was before the start of the voucher program. And because the voucher amount is substantially less than the amount spent on children attending public schools, the program actually saves money which could, if the Legislature desired, be further redirected to public schools. Under current law, school districts can continue to receive funding for students they no longer educate if they choose to go to a private school with a voucher, meaning that a student leaving actually increases the district’s per-student revenue in the short term. Taylor conveniently ignores these facts.

By repeating the false narrative about school choice, Taylor seeks to propagate a system where Wisconsin families most in need of educational alternatives are stuck in failing schools. An honest look at the voucher sector shows a system that is cheaper for Wisconsin taxpayers and produces better outcomes. Unlike Taylor, I refuse to sacrifice the education of Wisconsin’s children at the altar of the public school establishment. While public schools are and will remain an important part of our educational system, it is time for “advocates” of government-run schools to recognize that they are better served by devoting their energies to education and not politics. Instead of working to deny families choice, they should concentrate on offering a product that parents will choose.

Indeed, Madison school spending grows annually, now approaching $20,000 per student. This, despite its long term, disastrous reading results.

Alan Borsuk:

Every school on the south side is in fear of what Augustine Prep will mean, a leader of a different school told me recently. Some are at least expressing good wishes. Some are not, especially privately.

The biggest thing to watch over the next several years will be enrollment at a lot of the schools on the south side. Augustine, which is a private, Christian school where 100% of students will receive public voucher money, will debut with about 660 students in early elementary grades, sixth grade and ninth grade, said Ramirez and the school’s superintendent, Alfonso Carmona.

The plan is that it will fill out, grade by grade, to become a K-12, with 1,700 students. The intention is to build a second building immediately to the east and for enrollment to grow to 3,000 by a few years from now. If that comes to pass, Augustine most likely would be the largest school operation in Milwaukee, outside of MPS.

The population on Milwaukee’s south side and the population of Hispanics, the dominant portion of the Augustine enrollment, are growing. But it’s hard to envision so many kids going to Augustine without other schools losing enrollment.

St. Augustine Preparatory Academy.

Karen Rivedal:

Lighthouse Christian School, which has operated since 2004 out of Lighthouse Church at 5202 Regent St., will gets its own building at 6400 Schroeder Road, with space for up to 260 elementary students. The $3.6 million, two-phase project will increase classrooms from eight to 19 and will add a cafeteria, a library with computer lab and a gymnasium, among other improvements such as broader hallways, more storage, a bigger playground and better equipment.

“This is the first time each grade level will have its own classroom,” said the Rev. Tia Sierra, the school’s principal and church co-pastor with her husband, the Rev. Marcio Sierra.

Madison’s government funded schools have long resisted governance diversity.

Linda Lutton:

Under the draft proposal reviewed by WBEZ, individual taxpayers could choose to send up to $1 million annually to scholarship organizations rather than to the state Department of Revenue. Those diverted taxpayer dollars would fund scholarships to pay tuition cost at private or parochial schools, or to pay the cost for a public school education in a district outside a child’s community.

All told, the state could dole out $100 million annually in tax credits to finance this scholarship program. If the scholarship fund attracts at least $90 million in donations in any year, it would grow to $125 million. It could continue to grow by 25 percent annually, with no cap, as long as taxpayers send at least 90 percent of the maximum allowed to the fund. Donors could direct their money to a specific school, rather than a specific student, and some eligible students could be turned away.

The proposal is striking in its reach. Any family of four earning up to $113,775 annually would be eligible. In Illinois, 67 percent of families of two or more people earn up to $100,000 a year, according to U.S. Census data.

Another 18 percent of Illinois families earn up to $150,000. The median income is $71,500 for an Illinois family of at least two people, which is how the federal government defines a family.

Corey DeAngelis:

The Actual Test Score Results – and Their Implications

Even the latest experimental results, which show that voucher students in Louisiana and Indiana caught up with or did better than their public school peers on test scores, are less optimistic than prior voucher studies. However, there is not a clear theory for why voucher programs ought to be less-effective now than they used to be, all else equal.

I suspect that the regulatory environment may have something to do with the recent lackluster experimental results. For example, private schools participating in the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) must administer the state standardized test, prohibit parental copay for families using vouchers, report finances to the government, and surrender their admissions process over to the state. As the recent study by me and my colleagues at the University of Arkansas finds, only a third of the private schools chose to participate in the LSP, and those schools were less likely to be the higher quality institutions.

Meanwhile, Madison, now spending nearly $20k/student has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Voucher schools typically spend far less per student.

Molly Beck::

“The governor supports the K-12 education budget he introduced to the Legislature five months ago,” spokesman Tom Evenson said when asked if Walker would support the proposal. “It provides a $649 million increase in funding for our schools, bringing funding for K-12 to an all-time high. After visiting nearly 50 public schools this year, the governor has seen overwhelming support for his plan.”

Walker’s budget did not include the proposal to increase income eligibility for vouchers, and Evenson did not say whether Walker would sign a budget that included an increase.

Beyer said Vos thinks “it’s unfortunate that Senate Republicans refuse to give more families the opportunity to choose the best school for their children.” Jim Bender, a lobbyist for School Choice Wisconsin, said lawmakers’ haven’t had much energy to discuss anything other than transportation.

Joint Finance Committee co-chairman Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, said the matter is still up in the air.

Raising the income limit to 300 percent of the federal poverty level would put the income limits for the statewide program on par with the older voucher systems in Milwaukee and Racine.

The statewide program has been questioned by Democrats in part because the majority of students using the vouchers were already enrolled in private schools.

Robin Lake, via a kind email:

When my son attended our neighborhood public elementary school, he hid under a desk every day. His teacher regularly yelled at the mostly low-income students and typically ignored him – under that desk, he was out of sight, out of mind.

He tested as profoundly gifted, but a constellation of emotional and social issues caused him to shut down in the classroom. Some public schools are successful in educating children like ours, but this one wasn’t. Our son was helped by a full-time aide and a certified assistant teacher, both kind but badly educated about how to work with him. He was lagging academically and faced being funneled into a dead-end, segregated classroom. We were desperate.

We considered private school, but the only ones that welcomed students with special needs – not to mention one who hid under his desk all day – were much more expensive than typical private schools.

I’m an education researcher and policy analyst, and before that point I’d been firmly opposed to school vouchers, for all the typical reasons: their track record, concern about government money going to religious schools, equity issues and a sense that private schools weren’t accountable to parents in the same way public schools are. The voucher debate has long been cast as one between opponents and supporters of public schools, and I was – and still am – in the latter camp: someone who has always believed that public schools matter, should be funded better and have the potential (and duty) to serve all students well.

Much more on vouchers here, and here.

Michael J. Petrilli, Richard D. Kahlenberg, and Kyle Spencer:

Rick doesn’t believe that kids should be forced to attend the school their district assigns to them, usually the one closest to their house, or that private schools should be illegal. I don’t believe that tax dollars should flow to schools without any accountability for results. We both believe in school choice—in allowing kids to choose publicly funded schools beyond their neighborhood public school. The question is how wide those choices should be, especially for families too poor to pay private school tuition, and what the conditions on the schools should be.

Rick supports public school choice, in part as a way to allow poor kids to attend more affluent public schools, and thus further the cause of integration. Same with charter schools. He’s also OK with magnet schools, even though they are selective, and thus don’t take all students. But he draws the line at private schools. Why? It can’t be because of accountability; states like Indiana and Louisiana have demonstrated that it’s possible to have voucher programs that are held accountable for student achievement. If private schools in those states don’t make enough progress with voucher participants, they get kicked out of the program.

Washington Post:

CRITICS OF school choice could not contain their glee over a new study on the District’s school voucher program showing that students attending private schools did not perform as well on standardized tests as their public school counterparts. It is pretty rich that those who have railed against using test scores to hold schools accountable now invoke them to try to shut down the federally funded voucher program. And it is pretty easy for people who already have educational options for their children to discount the importance of school choice to parents who do not.

Wall Street Journal:

President Trump has made a cause of public and private school choice, and liberals who oppose evaluating teachers based on student achievement are now hyping a few studies that have found vouchers hurt student performance. A closer look still supports the case for giving parents choice.

More than 400,000 students in 30 states and Washington, D.C., participate in private-school choice programs whose designs and funding sources vary. Over the last two decades dozens of studies have sought to measure these programs’ impact on student growth. Those with the most rigorous methodologies have produced positive findings.

A meta-analysis last year by the Friedman Foundation found that 14 of 18 empirical studies analyzing programs in which students were chosen at random by lottery found positive academic outcomes. Two demonstrated no visible effect, while two recent studies of Louisiana’s voucher program found negative effects. The Louisiana studies are disconcerting since voucher proponents have hailed the program, and the negative effects were large. Math scores declined in one study by 0.4 standard deviations after one year in private schools, representing a 50% increase in likelihood of failing the state test.

WILL:

“Our study compared outcomes between all K-12 schools in Wisconsin – traditional public, public charter, and private schools in the choice programs. In doing so, it controlled for a variety of socioeconomic factors such as race, poverty, etc. As we acknowledged, we did not control for special needs or learning disabilities because the data simply do not exist for an accurate comparison of the two populations. An academic study found that reported disability rates in MPCP schools were lower than actual disability rates because MPCP schools lack the financial incentives to report disabilities that are available to public schools. Our study does control for socioeconomic status – something which may be correlated with special needs status, but we cannot control for what we cannot measure.

“We hope that someday it will be possible to do such a comparison and we have made a request to DPI for such data. This request has, thus far, been ignored. There are reforms that could enhance the likelihood that special needs students will participate in the choice program – such as expanding access to the Special Needs Scholarship Program and increased voucher funding – but, unfortunately Superintendent Evers is not an advocate for that.

Barato Britt:

True advocates of choice through vouchers shouldn’t suggest vouchers to be the panacea, the proverbial be all end all for education in our nation, no matter how much our President or Education Secretary maintain this assertion.

Vouchers, like all educational options, are one means through which we provide students and families the ability to choose their child’s school, free from arbitrary designations or systems that have for too long demonstrated an inability to serve all students.

While most supporters, generally conservative folks, use phrases like “free market” to bolster the case, vouchers are liberal, almost socialist in nature, when considered from a means tested standpoint with the mission of providing poor families with the same options that wealthier families already enjoy.

Nearly 35,000 Hoosier students today can boast direct access to the private school of theirs and their parent’s choice as a result of this program. And while that number is dwarfed by the nearly 1.05 million Hoosier students in a public school, there is evidence that suggests this effort has not been fought in vain.

Such is the case for 373 students who, through vouchers and Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) opportunities, are being blessed by the opportunity to attend The Oaks Academy. An unabashedly faith based institution, Oaks affords students a high quality classical education, complemented by a commitment to follow students as they matriculate to and through post-secondary opportunities. Based in Indianapolis Near East Side, the school has grown from 53 students in 1998 to 732 students in grades Pre-K through 8th grade, on three campuses purposely housed within close proximity of one another.

Academically, school data bear out the contention for its distinction as a high-quality school. Oaks Academy students are consistently among the state’s top performers on standardized assessments, with 82.2 percent passing both the Language Arts and Math portions of the ISTEP last year.

The schools’ 300 alumni who are tracked carefully after graduation, and the school has determined its 4-year college matriculation rate to be 87 percent.

Additionally, parental involvement is not optional for all Oaks Families, but mandatory as a caring, committed adult must participate in various activities during the admissions cycle and school year to ensure all stakeholders have skin in the game.

Danielle Dreilinger:

Measured like a school district, the Louisiana Scholarship Program earned 61.4 on a 150-point scale, Dunn said. That would be a D on the state public school report card, and worse than any public school system except for those in St. Helena Parish, Morehouse Parish and Bogalusa. No voucher program earned an A.

The individual school scores measure only the voucher students, who take state tests, and not the school as a whole. To protect students’ privacy, results are not published for schools with low voucher enrollment.

Thirty percent of the schools big enough to be counted earned less than 50 points, the equivalent of an F. They currently enroll about 15 percent of this year’s 6,695 voucher students. That’s according to fall 2016 figures.

New Orleans voucher programs skewed lower than their peers in the public Recovery School District, which serves mostly low-income children, according to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune calculations.

Annysa Johnson:

Evers, 65, said his large margin Tuesday reflected Wisconsin voters’ commitment to public education. But he could face a tough fight ahead, he said, if Holtz attracts funding from school reform proponents across the country.

“They both vowed to go after national voucher money, and I assume that will be Mr. Holtz’s M.O.,” Evers said of his challengers. “If that happens…we will work as hard as we can to raise money and get people out to vote the next time around.”

Holtz, 59, was not available for comment, according to his spokesman, because he was celebrating with friends and family. The candidate issued a statement saying he would present “an alternative vision for the future of Wisconsin’s students to that of Dr. Tony Evers.”

Humphries congratulated both candidates in a statement and urged voters to learn more about Holtz’s proposals and to ask Evers what he plans to do differently.

“I remain convinced that Wisconsin students can achieve so much more with the right leadership at DPI.”

So far, Evers has a significant edge financially. As of Feb. 14, he had raised more than $245,000 over the past 13 months, compared to Holtz’s $54,280. But Holtz is expected to pick up many of Humphries’ conservative supporters and could attract outside funding from education reform advocates who see a chance to bring Wisconsin in line with the views of new U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has been critical of Common Core and supports the expansion of taxpayer funded vouchers.

Higher-than-expected turnouts in Madison and Dane County at large — as much as 18% to 22%, according to early estimates — likely helped Evers. Madison and Dane County clerks could not say whether the DPI race brought voters to the polls.

Molly Beck:

The state superintendent race pits two former school district superintendents and longtime educators against each other — a proponent of expanding school choices and an opponent of the state expansion of taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

On the April 4 ballot will be two-term incumbent Tony Evers, a public school advocate backed mostly by liberals and teachers unions who has been at odds with Republicans for years over his adoption of the Common Core State Standards and his opposition to the expansion of private school vouchers in the state.

He took about seven of every 10 votes in the primary.

His challenger, Lowell Holtz, is backed mostly by conservatives and school voucher supporters. He is making his second run for the position and opposes the Common Core State Standards and favors expansion of educational options — including taxpayer-funded vouchers — other than public schools.

Holtz got 23 percent of the vote Tuesday, and was dogged by allegations that he sought to get out of the race in exchange for a guaranteed, taxpayer-funded $150,000 job that would let him oversee the state’s largest school districts, including Madison.

Evers is seeking a third term in the wake of massive membership losses for the state’s largest teachers union, a strong campaign contributor for Evers in the past, setting the stage for the potential of third-party groups spending on behalf of Holtz to ensure the election of a voucher supporter.

Dane County results.

Molly Beck:

“I think our track record is pretty good,” Evers said, citing decreased suspensions and expulsions, increased number of students taking college-level courses while still in high school and modest increases in reading proficiency.

“Is it where we want? Absolutely not,” he said.

Reading a key issuefor Humphries
The state’s reading proficiency levels have been a key issue for Humphries, who has said the DPI must have new leadership in order to improve those levels and students’ skills in other subjects.

Since the early 2000s, Wisconsin’s ranking for reading skills has dropped, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

He said DPI is not aggressive enough in translating their priorities to school officials in an effort to combat some persistent academic problems.

“Unless DPI is held accountable in making sure schools understand the importance … we’re not likely to have an impact, Humphries said. “We’ve seen that with academic achievement gaps.”

Humphries and Holtz have proposed writing new state academic standards, and Humphries said he would introduce a process that would allow persistently low-performing schools to be converted into new ones under new administration, including private voucher schools and charter schools, as long school boards agree.

Notes and links on Tony Evers and John Humphries.

WisPolitics: Lowell Holtz John Humphries Tony Evers

Erin Richards:

Hungerman said he can’t fully explain the reasons behind the numbers.

Maybe, he surmised, parishes that begin to accept vouchers experience leadership change and new priorities. Maybe vouchers caused parishioners to change churches. Maybe parishioners, knowing that their parish has a public funding stream, are less likely to donate, or perhaps they don’t want to donate to help voucher students who may not already be a part of the parish community.

Topczewski, from the archbishop’s office, said declining church revenue caused by fewer Catholics per capita does not necessarily mean declining parish and religious activity.

“Instead, the parish mission shifts to an evangelical mission in a neighborhood that is no longer predominantly Catholic, but whose families still seek out the quality and reputation of a Catholic school,” he said. “The survey misses that schools are a ministry for us.”

Tony Evers (PDF):

1. Why are you running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction?

I’ve been an educator all my adult life. I grew up in small town Plymouth, WI. Worked at a canning factory in high school, put myself through college, and married my kindergarten sweetheart, Kathy-also a teacher.

I taught and became a principal in Tomah, was an administrator in Oakfield and Verona, led CESA 6, and have twice been elected State Superintendent. I’ve been an educator all across Wisconsin, and no matter where I worked, I put kids first. Always.

But I have to tell you, I worry for the future. Years of relentless attacks on educators and public schools have left a generation of young people disinterested in teaching. The words and actions of leaders matter.

We have to restore respect to the teaching profession.

For teachers in the field, endless requirements and policies from Washington, Madison, and district offices are drowning our best educators in paperwork and well-intended “policy solutions” you never asked for.

I know we need to lighten the load.

As your State Superintendent, I have always tried to find common ground, while holding firm to the values we share.

I worked with Gov. Doyle to increase funding for schools and with Gov. Walker around reading and school report cards. But when Walker wanted to use school report cards to expand vouchers and take over low performing schools, we pushed back together-and we won.
When Walker proposed Act 10, I fought back. From the halls of the Capitol to rallies outside, my union thug wife and I stood with the people of Wisconsin.

I champion mental health in schools, fight for school funding reform, and work to restore
respect to the teaching profession.

But I am not a fool. The world has changed.

In my previous elections, we faced weak opponents we outspent. I won 62% of the vote and all but the three counties voted Evers last time.

But last November, Diane Hendricks and Besty DeVos dropped $5 million into the “Reform America PAC” at the last minute and took out Russ Feingold. Devos is likely to be Education Secretary and Henricks has the ear of the President.

And these people are coming for us.

They’ve recruited a field of conservative candidates vying for their support.

The folks at the conservative Wisconsin Institution for Law & Liberty are doing everything they can to undermine the independent authority of the elected state superintendent. These folks have powerful friends and allies through the state and federal government.

But we ore going to win.

We hired great a campaign team in Wisconsin. We’re raising more money than ever, and we
will need to raise more. We’re mobilizing voters and activating social media.

While Wisconsin went for Mr. Trump, those voters overwhelmingly passed 80% of the referenda questions. They love their public schools. That is what we need to connect with to win.

But I need your help. You’ve stood with me before, and I need your help again. I need you to do more than you’ve ever done before. This is the last office they don’t hold, and it is the first electoral battle in the new world. We cannot afford to lose.

2. Do you believe that public schools are sufficiently funded? If no, describe your plan to provide sufficient funds?

No.

My current state budget request restates our Fair Funding proposal. Under my proposal, all students will receive a minimum amount of aid. To provide an extra lift for some students, the general aid formula will weight students living in poverty.

Additionally, the per-pupil categorical aid will be weighted to account for foster kids, English learners and students that come from impoverished families.

Furthermore, changes to the summer school aid formula will incentivize all schools, but
especially those districts that have students who need extra time to achieve at higher levels to engage in fun, summer learning activities.

The people of Wisconsin are on record that they want to keep their schools strong. An
astounding 88% of the districts (600,000 voters) approved revenue limit exemptions just this last November. Ultimately, I come down on the side of local control and support the eventual elimination of revenue limits. In my budget proposal, I requested a reasonable increase in revenue limits. In the future, these increases should be tied to the cost of living.

3. Madison schools have experienced increasing attrition over the past five years and increasing difficulty in attracting highly qualified candidates in a growing number of certification areas. What factors do you have as the causes of this shortage? What measures will you take to promote the attraction and retention of highly qualified teachers and other school employees?

There are several main factors impacting these issues. The first is the negative rhetoric that occurs all too often around the teaching profession. The second is that Wisconsin educators’ pay has taken a significant hit in recent years -an actual decrease of over 2 percent over the past few years (and changes to benefits and retirement have further eroded take home pay). Our current high school students pick up on this, and increasingly they are not look at teaching as a viable career path, and in Wisconsin, our teacher preparation programs are reporting record lows.

We need to continue to highlight the excellent work our teachers do each and every day and bring back teacher voice in to what goes on in the classroom. I am currently working with a small group of Wisconsin educators, including several from Madison, on a project we are calling “Every Teacher a Leader,” an effort to highlight and promote instances of excellent teacher voice and leadership. Let’s highlight the leadership and critical decision-making our educators use every day in their roles. The cultures of our schools must be strong and support teachers as they work with our students. I continue to advocate for additional resources in our schools to address the most pressing needs of our students and to provide resources for teacher to do their jobs.

4. What strategies will you enact to support and value Wisconsin’s large, urban school districts?

I have championed several initiatives to support large, urban school districts, including
expanding access to:

Small class sizes and classroom support staff to help teachers effectively manage behavioral issues;

Restorative justice and harm reduction strategies that reduce the disproportionate impact of discipline on student of color;

Fun summer learning opportunities for students to accelerate learning or recover credits (increased funding, streamlined report requirements);

Community schools, wrap around services and out-of-school time programs that because schools are the center of our communities;

Culturally-responsive curriculum and profession development that helps educators meet the needs of diverse students;

Mental health services and staff integrated with schools to meet students’ needs.

I also support school finance policies that recognize that many students in poverty, English learners, foster youth, and students with special needs require additional resources to succeed.

Finally, I strongly support a universal accountability system for schools enrolling
publicly-funded students. All schools should have to meet the same high bar.

5. What strategies will you enact to support and value Wisconsin’s rural school districts?

In addition to the proposing the Fair Funding changes, my budget:

Fully-funds the sparsity categorical aid and expands it to more rural schools;

Expands the high cost transportation programs; and

Provides funds for rural educator recruitment and retention.

6. How do you feel about the present Educator Effectiveness (teacher) evaluation system? What changes would you like to see to that system?

I support the Educator Effectiveness (EE) system. It was created with input from teachers, administrators as well as school board members and legislators. I believe we have administered the EE program with great care, listening to stakeholders from across that state.

That said, I believe changes need to be made. Recently, I have recommended that results from the state achievement test (Forward Exam) not be a required element in the evaluation process.

We must also continually message that the EE system was created to support professionals through a learning centered continuous improvement process. Evaluation systems implemented in isolation as an accountability or compliance exercise, will not improve educator practice or student outcomes.

7. What is your plan to work with Milwaukee Public Schools to assure that all students receive a quality public education?

While achievement gaps persist across the state, our city of the first class presents unique challenges and requires a multi-pronged approach. Milwaukee is ground zero for our state’s efforts to accomplish major reductions in achievement gaps.

I have worked closely with Dr. Darienne Driver, MTEA and Milwaukee community leaders to support improvement efforts. We are working hand-in-hand to provide more learning time when needed, expand access to summer school, establish community schools, and create a best-in-state educator workforce.

We must continue to have honest conversations about our challenges and provide the resources and support for improvement. Divisive legislative solutions from Washington and Madison have not worked. We need more support for our students and schools, not less.

8. Do you believe the position of State Superintendent of Public Instruction should continue to be an elected position as currently provided in the State Constitution?

Absolutely yes.

The creators of our constitution got it right. Public education was so important they made the State Superintendent independently elected and answerable directly to the people. However, Governors and special interests always try to usurp this authority. The Supreme Court has consistently held up the independent power of the State Superintendent-mostly recently in the Coyne case advanced by MTI. Undeterred by their loss, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is currently working to circumvent the authority of the State Superintendent over the federal ESSA law. Rest assured we are fighting back and must again prevail.

9. Describe your position on the voucher program?

Powerful special interests and the majorities in Washington and Madison have spent years cutting revenue, growing bonding, and expanding entitlement programs like school vouchers. The result: historic cuts to education followed a slow trickle of financial support for public school amidst the statewide expansion of vouchers.

My friend former Sen. Dale Schultz often said, “We can’t afford the school system we have,
how can we afford two-a public and private one?”

It is a good question. A recent Fiscal Bureau reports indicate that over 200 districts (almost half) would have received more state aid without the changes in voucher funding that shifted cost to loca I districts.

When we move past the ideological battles, we’re left with tough choices about priorities and responsibilities. Bottom line: we have a constitutional obligation to provide an education for every kid in this state, from Winter to West Salem.

Our friends and neighbors are stepping up to pass referenda at historic rates to keep the lights on in rural schools. It is an admirable, but unsustainable effort that leaves too many kids behind. Expanding vouchers while underfunding rural schools exacerbates the problem.

That said, we all know the current majorities and proposed U.S Education Secretary support voucher expansion, so here are some key principles for moving forward:

1. The state should adequately fund our public school system before expanding vouchers;

2. The state, rather than local school districts, should pay the full cost of the voucher program;

3. Accountability should apply equally to all publicly-funded schools, including voucher schools;

Finally, we should talk more about the great things Wisconsin schools are doing and less about vouchers. They suck the air out of the room and allowing them to dominate the
conversation is unhelpful.

Around 96 percent of publicly-funded students go to a school governed by a local school board. Regardless of whether legislators support or oppose vouchers, they need to support our public schools. That’s where our focus needs to be and what I will champion.

10. Describe your position on independent charter schools.

In general, charter schools work best when authorized by a locally-elected school board that understands their community’s needs, and is accountable to them.

As both State Superintendent and a member of the Board of Regents, I am concerned the new UW System chartering authority could become controversial and disruptive. New schools are best created locally, not from a distant tower overlooking the city.

11. Wisconsin teacher licensing has the reputation as being one of the most rigorous and respected systems in the country. Recently, proposals were made that would allow any individual with a bachelor’s degree or work experience in trades to obtain a teaching license. Do you support these proposals? Why or why not?

I do not support any proposal that would ignore pedagogical skills as a key component of any preparation program. Content knowledge is not enough. A prospective teacher must know “how” to teach as well as “what’ to teach.

12. Teachers report a significant increase in mandated meetings and “professional development” sessions that are often unrelated or not embedded to the reality of their daily work with children. What will you do as State Superintendent to provide teachers with the time needed to prepare lessons, collaborate with colleagues, evaluate student work, and reflect on their practices?

When I travel the state and talk to educators, I hear this sentiment a lot, but it’s quickly followed by an important caveat: When educators believe that the meeting, the professional development opportunity, the extra responsibility, or the new idea will truly make a difference for kids they serve, they become the first and best champion of it–always.

We absolutely must find ways to lighten the load for our teachers so that the work we do out of the classroom is meaningful, manageable and powerful for kids. My Every Teacher a Leader Initiative focuses on highlighting cultures that support teacher leadership, and this often means that a principal or a superintendent has created systems that value and honor the expertise teachers bring to an initiative. They involve teachers early in decisions rather than convening them after a decision is made to implement it.

I just heard from an educator in a school district that is receiving national attention for its dramatic academic improvement over the past five years. When asked what the recipe for success was, she said the superintendent convened a team of veteran educators on his first day, listened to what they needed, worked long and hard to meet those needs, andkept them involved the whole way. That’s it.

13. Do you support restoring the rights of public sector workers to collectively bargain over wages, hours and conditions of employment?

Yes.

I have been a champion for collective bargain and workers’ rights my entire career. I signed the recall petition over Act 10 – and I haven’t changed my mind about it.

14. Are you interested in receiving MTI Voters endorsement? If so, why?

MTI has been a great partner of mine over the years. I would be honored to continue that collaboration going forward. Additionally, I have five grand-kids Madison Public Schools, and I want to them to continue to be proud of the strong relationship I have with Madison educators.

15. Are you interested in receiving financial support for your campaign from MTl-Voters?

Yes, my opponents will be seeking funding from organizations that have very deep pockets and MTI full financial support is more important than ever.

16. Is there anything else you’d like MTI members to know about your candidacy and why you are seeking election to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction?

I hope our work together, mutual commitment, and shared values continue for another four years.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

The 2017 candidates for Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent are Tony Evers [tonyforwisconsin@gmail.com;], Lowell Holtz and John Humphries [johnhumphriesncsp@gmail.com].

League of Women Voters questions.

Erin Richards:

Together, Travis Academy and Holy Redeemer have received close to $100 million in taxpayer funding over the years. The sum is less than what taxpayers would have paid for those pupils in public schools, because each tuition voucher costs less than the total expense per pupil in Milwaukee Public Schools. But vouchers weren’t supposed to provide just a cheaper education. They were supposed to provide a better one.

CREATED IN 1990 BY A COALITION of black parents and school-reform advocates with the blessing of a Republican governor, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program aimed to allow poor parents to withdraw their children from public schools and send them to higher-performing private schools they probably couldn’t otherwise afford.

Today, a little under a third of Milwaukee’s school-age population attends voucher schools. Overall, test-score outcomes for the Milwaukee Public Schools and the private voucher schools are remarkably low, and remarkably similar: On the latest state tests, about 80 percent of children in both sectors were not proficient in English and about 85 percent were not proficient in math. The voucher high schools, however, posted slightly higher 11th-grade ACT scores this year than Milwaukee Public Schools: a 17.5 composite, compared with the district’s 16.5.

The voucher program is not to blame for all of that, of course, but some wonder why the major reform hasn’t made more of a difference. The program has bolstered some decent religious schools—mostly Catholic and Lutheran—which would have never maintained a presence in the inner city serving poor children without taxpayer assistance. It’s helped to incubate a couple of private schools that eventually became high-performing charter schools. But it’s extended the same life raft to some abysmally performing schools that parents continue to choose for a variety of reasons besides academic performance. And it’s kept afloat a great number of mediocre programs.

Research shows Milwaukee parents have listed small class sizes and school safety among their top reasons for choosing a voucher school. Safety per se doesn’t equal educational excellence, but parents’ perceptions of safety can drive their decision-making. But are those perceptions accurate? Advocacy group School Choice Wisconsin examined police-call data for Milwaukee’s public and voucher schools in recent years and determined voucher schools to have proportionally fewer requests for assistance, but voucher schools also serve a disproportionately small number of students in high school, where many of the most serious school incidents warranting police attention occur. Objective data on school safety are hard to come by without records of incident reports, suspensions, and expulsions.

Henry Tyson, the superintendent of St. Marcus Lutheran School, a popular and high-performing voucher school that now serves children in Milwaukee’s central city, has long been frustrated at the lack of state and local political attention given to policies that would help expand high-performing programs and eliminate low-performing ones.

“I am intensely frustrated by the voucher schools that are chronically underperforming over a long period of time,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, any school that has been open three years or more that is under 5 percent proficiency should close, whether that’s a public school, charter school, or voucher school.”

Milwaukee has failed to develop such a mechanism in part because many choice advocates don’t want to give more power to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which they do not believe is an objective overseer. Other advocates refuse to acknowledge that parent choice alone will not always raise the quality of the market.

“What we need to do is to toil every day and keep pushing for that Berlin Wall moment,” says Kevin Chavous, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer and education-reform advocate who supported the launch of the federally funded D.C. voucher program. Chavous is a founding board member of the AFC, and a tall African American with piercing blue-gray eyes and an industrious nature—he’s written entire books on education reform during long-distance flights. He believes that school choice can and will become the dominant method of delivering educational opportunity in America.

“We’re close to that tipping point,” he said in May 2016 during AFC’s annual conference at National Harbor, a resort hugging the Potomac River just south of D.C.

It’s important to remember that private-school choice is still just a tiny sliver of the pie when it comes to publicly funded education in America. Approximately 50 million children attend public schools run by school districts. About 2.5 million attend public charter schools. And only around 400,000 attend private schools with the help of voucher, tax-credit scholarship, or education-savings account, according to EdChoice. But substantial jumps could be around the corner, especially as the programs continue to expand from targeting solely low-income children to being open to all.

A useful article. Links and detailed spending comparisons would be useful. Madison currently spends around $18k per student, far ahove the antional average. Similar achievement at less than half the cost of traditional K-12 organs is worth exploration, perhaps offering opportunities to help students in the greatest need, such as many in Madison.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

DPI-crafted school report cards are the primary means we have of discovering and comparing outcomes in Wisconsin schools. Schools in all sectors that receive public funding – traditional public, charter, and parental choice private schools – now all use the same annual Forward exam for students and will be evaluated with the same school report card. It’s easy to see that the transparency and honesty of the school report card design is critical to all stakeholders.

As we have stated for several years on WRC, when a school has fewer than half of its students reading proficiently, but is rated as meeting or exceeding expectations on the state report card, we question whether DPI’s expectations match parents’ expectations. Concerns about the disconnect between the report card and reality have been expressed recently in these articles:

Humphries: Is this Wobegon or Wisconsin?, from John Humphries, candidate for Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Instruction Hallelujah – MPS Is Successful Despite the Data and All the Failing Schools, from the MacIver Institute

Alan Borsuk moderated a discussion this week about school vouchers in Milwaukee, with articulate participants Scott Jensen and Julie Underwood. With vouchers clearly here to stay, attention is now shifting to the fundamental question of how to make sure each child is in a successful school, regardless of whether it is traditional public, charter, or choice. This forum is available online:

Lessons from a Quarter Century of School Vouchers

Emma Brown and Perry Stein:

The push toward school choice is deeply unpopular with advocates for traditional public schools, including teachers unions.

“The general population of the United States of America needs to be watchful, and needs to be making sure there’s accountability there for where this money goes,” said Teresa Meredith, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association.

Unions mounted a legal challenge against Indiana’s voucher program, which Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) signed into existence in 2011. But courts put an end to that challenge shortly after Pence took office in 2013, and he led the charge to expand the program, getting rid of a cap on the number of recipients and loosening eligibility requirements for students.

Now nearly 60 percent of Indiana children — including those from low-income families and from the middle class — are eligible for the vouchers, which average about $4,000 per year.

Molly Beck:

He said school districts can save money because of reduced health insurance costs for staff and can be creative in retaining teachers, like providing bonuses.

Humphries said in an interview that Evers was too focused on objecting to the expansion of private voucher and independent charter schools and not focused enough on raising student achievement and closing the gap in academic achievement between white and black students.

“When student learning — not politics — is our focus, there is nothing that we cannot do,” Humphries said Tuesday.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Doug Erickson:

On the latest round of statewide tests, fewer than half of Wisconsin public school students in grades three through eight scored proficient or better in English language arts or math.

The results, released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction, showed 42.5 percent of students scored in those top two categories in English language arts, while slightly fewer, 42.3 percent, scored proficient or advanced in math.

The state simultaneously released scores from the ACT college readiness assessment, now required of all high school juniors in Wisconsin. In this second year of the requirement, the composite ACT score for public school students was 20.1 out of a possible 36, up one-tenth of a point from the prior year.

Erin Richards

The results are the latest picture of how publicly-funded students are performing in core subjects statewide.

A 2-year-old statewide ACT exam administered to all juniors offered a look at performance at high schools funded by taxpayers. Juniors in public schools posted an average composite score of 20.1, close to the same as last year. Juniors using taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private high schools posted a lower overall ACT score — 18.2 — than public schools but made comparatively more improvement from last year.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction made test-score results for all public schools and districts available on the department’s searchable data portal Tuesday. The private-school results can be found in separate spreadsheets on the department’s website.

“The federally required tests give us a look at how kids are doing when compared to a rigorous standard,” DPI Spokesman Tom McCarthy said. “They are not trying to assess whether a student is passing or failing a given grade.”

Danielle Dreilinger:

Louisiana Education Superintendent John White has a radical solution to get 362 voucher students off waitlists: Enroll now, the state will pay later.

These students have all been granted taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private school. But the budget ran short by about $2 million, generating anguish and attention for families that had already made their plans and, in some cases, purchased uniforms.

If private schools agree to enroll these students anyway, without a guarantee of payment, White will go to the Legislature in the spring and ask lawmakers for more money, he said. But if lawmakers’ answer is no, the schools would get less than $100 per child.

Locally, a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school.

Annysa Johnson:

A proposal by a military-style voucher school to purchase a vacant Milwaukee Public Schools building is scheduled to go before the city next week.

Right Step Inc., which is being sued by a group of parents for allegedly abusive practices, is proposing to open a boys-only campus for up to 150 students in the former Centro del Nino Head Start building at 500 E. Center St., on the border of the Riverwest and Harambee neighborhoods. It has offered $223,000 for the building.

The purchase proposal goes before the Common Council’s Zoning, Neighborhoods & Development Committee and possibly the Common Council on Tuesday. The city’s Board of Zoning Appeals will take up its request for a special use permit.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative public interest law firm that is representing the school, has accused the city of dragging its feet on the sale and raising issues — such as test scores and graduation rates — not allowed under the law passed last year to expedite the sale of vacant MPS buildings to competing education providers.

Annysa Johnson:

Plans to build what is expected to be the second-largest private school in the Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher program passed its final hurdle at City Hall and could begin construction as early as April.

Milwaukee’s Board of Zoning Appeals unanimously approved a special use permit earlier this month for St. Augustine Preparatory School, the $45 million project unveiled last year by Waukesha County businessman and school reform advocate Gus Ramirez.

Ramirez, chairman of Husco International, declined to comment. He is expected to release updated plans, including school leadership, at an April 12 event at Discovery World.

Ramirez and a limited liability company known as Achieving Educational Excellence have been given the go-ahead to build a 170,000 square foot school at S. 5th St. and W. Harrison Ave. The school would accommodate up to 1,000 students in kindergarten through grade 12.

Annysa Johnson:

Third- through eighth-grade students in Milwaukee’s private voucher and independent charter schools outperformed their public school counterparts in math and language arts, according to statewide assessment data released Wednesday by the Department of Public Instruction.

But Racine public school students overall outscored their voucher school counterparts. And on the ACT, voucher schools outscored their public counterparts in Milwaukee, Racine and the state.

Those are among the findings that emerged Wednesday after DPI made public the voucher, independent charter and the district-level public schools’ results of the 2014-’15 Badger Exam, ACT scores and the Dynamic Learning Maps exam given to students with severe cognitive disabilities.

School choice and charter school advocates touted the results as proof of the programs’ successes.

Paul Hill:

A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research is one of the relatively few recent studies reporting a negative voucher effect—students using vouchers in Louisiana learned a good deal less than similar students in regular public schools. The reason: students with vouchers had few good choices, since the available schools were weak and had lost large numbers of tuition-paying students.

Molly Beck:

More than 700 students in the Madison School District opted out in 2015, part of the 8,104 public school students who opted out statewide, a substantial increase from the 87 and 583 students, respectively, who opted out last year, state and school district data show.

The surge nationwide in recent years represents a movement of parents opposing testing in growing numbers. Opposition to the number of tests given, how scores are used by lawmakers in determining school accountability, and using scores to evaluate teachers contributes to the growing numbers nationwide.

The increase in Wisconsin also came as lawmakers moved to get rid of the Badger Exam, Wisconsin’s version of the Smarter Balanced exam that was developed using questions from a consortium of states aligned to Common Core, which state Superintendent Tony Evers adopted in 2010.

Statewide data is available here.

Corey DeAngelis, Patrick J. Wolf:

report we examine crime rates for young adults who experienced Milwaukee’s citywide voucher program as high school students and a comparable group of their peers who had been public school students. Using unique data collected as part of a longitudinal evaluation of the program, we consider criminal activity by youth initially exposed to voucher schools and those in public schools at the same time. We also consider subsequent criminal activity by the students that stayed in the voucher program through 12th grade compared to those who were in public schools for the same period. We show that the mere exposure to private schooling through a voucher is associated with lower rates of criminal activity but the relationship is not robust to different analytic samples or measures of crime. We find a more consistent statistically significant negative relationship between students that stayed in the voucher program through 12th grade and criminal activity (meaning persistent voucher students commit fewer crimes). These results are apparent when controlling for a robust set of student demographics, test scores, and parental characteristics. We conclude that merely being exposed to private schooling for a short time through a voucher program may not have a significant impact on criminal activity, though persistently attending a private school through a voucher program can decrease subsequent criminal activity, especially for males.

Chris Rickert:

It’s as if taxpayers face paying for a voucher student twice — once through state taxes for vouchers, and again through district property tax levies for, well, I’m not sure what, given that the voucher students are no longer in the districts.

Dan Rossmiller, government relations director at the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, noted “it’s not always the case where the students are moving from a public school to a voucher school.” That’s because some students who have never attended public school are eligible for vouchers, too.

Of course, like other voucher students, their families still have to fall below certain income limits. And in the absence of vouchers, taxpayers would probably still be paying for a lot of low-income students’ education, anyway (just in the public schools, where public schools’ leaders like to keep them).

Rossmiller’s also right that a district can’t simply close a school or lay off a teacher because it loses two or five or 10 students — and the taxpayer funding that comes with them — to voucher schools. There would have to be bigger losses before districts could find offsetting efficiencies, like closing schools.

Still, changes in district enrollments happen all the time for many reasons. Birth rates go up and down, local economies boom or bust, districts provide better or worse education. Students leaving for other public school districts or for voucher-supported private schools are only two of many possibilities.

Annysa Johnson:

They do not include individual district- and school-level data for public schools or the scores for private schools participating in the state-funded voucher programs.

Among the highlights:

The composite score for juniors who took the ACT was 20 on a scale of 36. That’s below the 22.2 reported in August 2015. Again, DPI said any comparisons would be “flawed” because of significant changes in the pool of test-takers.Until this year, the ACT scores reflected those taken during senior year, in many cases by students who had taken it multiple times. The drop was expected because of a new mandate that requires all juniors to take the exam.

Overall, 45.7% of students scored proficient or advanced on the combined ACT/Dynamic Learning Maps exams; 35.9% did as well in math. The ACT/DLM scores also show significant achievement gaps along racial, socioeconomic and other lines.

In the elementary grades, third- and fourth-graders performed significantly better in math than their older counterparts on the Badger Exam. DPI spokesman John Johnson said that may be attributed to the state’s adoption of the Common Core standards.

“What we think is going on is that those students… had been taught pretty much with the new standards from the time they went into school, as opposed to students in the older grades who transitioned to the new standards,” Johnson said.

Milwaukee Public Schools, the state’s largest district, which has a disproportionate percentage of students in poverty, performed well-below the state average, district officials said Wednesday.

In grades three through eight, 27% of MPS students scored proficient or advanced in language arts and 17% did so in math. On ACT scores, 22% of juniors were sufficient or advanced in language arts and 10% did as well in math.

2014-15 Badger Exam (administered April-May 2015), via a kind reader:

% Proficient/Advanced, English Language Arts, 4th grade:

All: 50.4%

Black: 20.2%

Hispanic: 33.5%

White: 57.7%

2015 NAEP

% at or above Proficient:

All: 37%

Black: 11%

Hispanic: 19%

White: 44%

More, from Doug Erickson.

Vivian Wang:

Laying down a new marker in the competition for school enrollment in Milwaukee, the School Board has approved a high-profile young educator’s proposal for a new charter school, after he promised to ramp up efforts to reverse the flow of students leaving the district for voucher schools and other options.

Maurice Thomas’ planned Milwaukee Excellence Charter School, set to open in 2016, promises an “unapologetically college preparatory” education for grades six to 12, complete with longer school days, an extended school year and strict disciplinary standards. By 2024, Thomas said, 100% of graduates will be at a four-year college.

Such “no excuses” schools have produced higher rates of graduation and better test scores than conventional schools in some parts of the country. Such a school could be especially impactful at the planned location on the city’s northwest side, a historically underserved area in education.

The school will likely be housed in the vacant Edison Middle School building at 5372 N. 37th St.

As a charter school authorized by Milwaukee Public Schools, Milwaukee Excellence will keep the public dollars that follow students into its classrooms in MPS coffers. As an independent school, though, it can be staffed by non-district, non-unionized employees and operate free of some regular rules governing public schools.

Matt Kullig:

Ramirez has not said whether his proposed St. Augustine Preparatory Academy would participate in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, but opponents have predicted the school would elect to educate students using taxpayer-funded vouchers and compete directly with the public schools for state education dollars.

Ramirez said the goal of the school is to change the outlying community.

“Our main goal is to change Milwaukee,” Ramirez said. “We want to make (the south side) a better place to live.”

Ramirez, executive chairman of Waukesha-based Husco International, said the legacy of the school, if built, will be graduates who can positively impact the community for years to come. He said he is “very confident” the area will be rezoned when a city committee meets Thursday.

Ramirez, who has financially supported private voucher schools and charter schools, noted an extensive waitlist at two other south side schools, Ronald Reagan High School and Carmen High School of Science and Technology. Reagan is a high-performing Milwaukee public school. Carmen is an independent charter authorized by MPS.

Union critical of plan

The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, the teacher’s union, criticized Ramirez’s efforts by saying the school would be a drain on public schools. MTEA president Kim Schroeder said the school wouldn’t be beneficial to the community.

“No taxpayer dollars should be used to build another private voucher or charter school in our city,” Schroeder said in a statement. “Taxpayer-funded private schools drain opportunities and resources from the public schools that students and families depend upon.”

Chris Rickert:

But there’s still little doubt vouchers mean taxpayers are going to be on the hook for educating some indeterminate number of additional kids than they would be in the absence of vouchers.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, according to Jim Bender, president of the pro-voucher School Choice Wisconsin. He notes that government doesn’t force citizens to prove they’ve been unable to pay for other basics in order to be eligible for taxpayer help. People applying for food stamps, for example, don’t have to prove starvation or that they haven’t visited a grocery store in the prior year.

Are vouchers a good deal financially?

The answer to that is about as muddled as the answer to whether voucher schools provide an educational product that is any better, on the whole, than the one provided by public schools.

Ultimately, it probably comes down to whether you think parents should be able to choose their kids’ schools when taxpayers are flipping the educational bill.

Madison spends more than $15,000 per student.

Voucher schools operate on substantially smaller budgets.

Mr Rickert neglects to mention and compare total Wisconsin K-12 spending.

Molly Beck

Overall, roughly $4.5 billion annually is devoted to general school funding in the proposed state budget. The cost for new students in the program over the next two years is projected to be about $37 million. In the last state budget, about $384 million was appropriated for the state’s three voucher systems.

Rep. Sondy Pope, D-Cross Plains, said the proposed state budget further harms already financially struggling public school districts. Barca characterized the estimated cost as funds “stolen” from public schools and diverted to the “private voucher school experiment.”

“We simply cannot afford to build two parallel school systems in this state,” said Barca.

Jim Bender, president of voucher lobbying group School Choice Wisconsin, said he could not respond to the memo because it was speculative. He added the memo was created to grab headlines. “Without seeing how they came up with the calculation, it’s very difficult to respond to,” he said.

More from Erin Richards.

It is useful to see an article with complete spending perspective data!

Much more on vouchers, here.

Chris Rickert:

From the way some of the more enthusiastic public school supporters talk, you’d think alternative forms of public education, such as voucher schools, were making millions on the backs of ill-treated kindergartners.
The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voucher schools are not-for-profit, though, and it seems unlikely that any of them is, say, forcing 8-year-olds into sweatshops or flogging them for chewing gum in class.

But you’d never know that from the Madison School District’s denial of an open records request from a pro-voucher organization on grounds that the request wasn’t education-related.

School Choice Wisconsin president Jim Bender says the “vast majority” of about 30 larger districts complied with the organization’s request for student directory data. It is considering plans to use the information to send out postcards reminding parents of the enrollment period for the statewide voucher program.

Alan Borsuk:

An important thing to understand about Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal for making an unlimited number of private school tuition vouchers available across Wisconsin is how unattractive, as a practical matter, his plan is to the schools that it could serve.

An upcoming gusher of private school vouchers? More likely, as it stands, it would mean a modest increase at most, and it might even be a setback.

Statewide uncapped vouchers would be something Walker could promote as an accomplishment —perhaps in Iowa or New Hampshire or to potential donors to a presidential campaign.

But as a practical matter? Look at the specifics.

Consider the predicament of HOPE Via, a Christian school that has been on track to open in Racine this fall. Part of the HOPE network that has five schools in Milwaukee, HOPE Via has obtained a building on Racine’s north side and hired a principal and managing director. School leaders were working on hiring teachers, enrolling students and launching a remodeling of the building.

Then came Walker’s budget message on Feb. 3.

This gets technical quickly, but, in short, the proposal envisions a new way of paying for vouchers, other than in Milwaukee, where things would stay basically as is.

Until now, voucher money has come from a separate state appropriation. Walker proposed taking it from the state aid that would have been sent to each school district if the child involved were attending a public school there.

Erin Richards:

Bender said he thinks it’s unlikely that districts would be bristling at the request if it had come from any entity or individual other than his. School district leaders say that’s not true; they’re concerned about their families’ personal information going out to anyone.

Historically it’s been a nonissue because nobody ever asks for it.

State open records law mandates districts release student directory information upon request, unless parents have opted out of the directory or unless districts have passed policies to further restrict release of the data.

Directory information includes information such as students’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, date and place of birth, major field of study, height, weight, athletic team participation, awards achieved and schools attended.

The information is key to rounding out important school items such as yearbooks, playbills, sports rosters, announcements to the media about student accomplishments and contact lists that help families communicate with each other.

Oshkosh School District Superintendent Stan Mack said his district will comply with releasing all the directory data that state law and its own district policy allow.

Jessica Arp:

“My main concern is that right now we are at a 20-year low in funding for public education so our public schools are already in a state of crisis,” Moffit said.

Sierra disagrees and said vouchers are really about choice.

“We pay taxes also,” Sierra said. “Nothing against public schools, but we decided we wanted our children to come here. So why not use the vouchers and receive the help from the state like every other parent is receiving help?”

The plan faces an unclear future in the Legislature, with both Republicans and Democrats concerned about the funding structure in the plan.

The governor defended the plan in interviews Wednesday, calling it “a workable” plan.

Madison’s Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham blasted the school choice proposal in a statement Tuesday night.

Wednesday she said changes proposed would make it difficult, if not impossible, to do what is right for the district.

“When the announcement like the one that that we heard last night occurs, there’s no doubt that it feels like a punch to the stomach,” Cheatham said.

Cheatham called the political environment at the Capitol unsettling and distracting, and said the expansion of vouchers is very concerning to the future of the school district’s budget.

Madison spends around $15,000 per student, annually, roughly double the national average. Yet, it has long supported disastrous reading results.

The 2009 strategic plan goals… for 2015.