Budget Cuts: We Won't Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That's Okay.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Another approach might be eliminating programs or initiatives that are more closely aligned to student learning. Possibilities here could include reducing our school staff who are not classroom teachers, like Reading Interventionists, Instructional Resource Teachers, and Positive Behavior Coaches. We could also eliminate special interventions for struggling readers. The reading recovery program is the best-known example. While reading recovery is backed by research that supports its effectiveness, it's an expensive program and, at least as of a couple of years ago, we hadn't seen in Madison the level of successful outcomes in terms of students' reading progress that had typically been achieved elsewhere with the program.

My view is that we should have in place an established schedule for evaluating the effectiveness of our intervention programs, like Reading Recovery, and we should be willing to make difficult decisions based on what the evaluations tell us. But that evaluation and review process should be separate from our budgeting process. We shouldn't look at cutting programs like Reading Recovery strictly as a cost-saving measure. I doubt that we're willing to eliminate all intensive interventions for struggling readers - I don't even know if we could do so legally - and it's far from obvious that substituting one intensive reading intervention program for another would end up saving us all that much money.

Much more on the Oconomowoc School District's high school staffing an compensation plan, here.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 3, 2012 10:31 PM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas