Wisconsin State Journal:

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides. (

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

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

Lucia Mutukani:

“The numbers also verify that many people are leaving, or planning to leave, big cities as telecommuting becomes the norm for many businesses.”

Housing starts increased 17.3% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.186 million units last month, the Commerce Department said. The percentage gain was the largest since October 2016. Data for May was revised up to a 1.011 million-unit pace from the previously reported 974,000.

Still, homebuilding remains 24.3% below its February level. The South and the West accounted for about 75% of housing starts last month. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast starts increasing to a rate of 1.169 million units.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides. (

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

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

Dave Zweifel:

If the Madison School Board hopes to convince the district’s voters to approve two referendums totaling $350 million this fall, it might be wise for it and the school district it governs to stop playing games with our long tradition of open government.

At the same meeting this week where the board authorized a $317 million referendum to renovate and repair the district’s four high schools and another $33 million measure to permanently raise the district’s budget, it also kept the employment contract for its new superintendent a secret until after it was signed.

In other words, the board didn’t want any feedback from the public on the merits of a contract for one of the area’s most important and highest-paying public jobs.

This was a departure from just a few months ago when the board hired Matthew Gutiérrez who wound up withdrawing because of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the Texas district he currently is still serving. His contract was made public in advance and open to comment, giving the public the transparency it deserves from all governmental bodies.

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

Scott Girard:

Madison Teachers Inc. is demanding the Madison Metropolitan School District begin the 2020-21 school year virtually amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

In a press release Thursday, MTI asked district leadership to make five commitments:

• All virtual learning for the first quarter of the school year and until health officials report zero new cases for 14 consecutive days

• A larger operating referendum on the November ballot

• Fund in-person safety supplies and protocols when return is possible

• Assure all students have age-appropriate electronic devices and access to the internet prior to Sept. 1

• Share leadership with employee representatives and the school community by “being transparent before making decisions on matters of significance.”

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

Dave Daley:

In 2013, the Madison school district had a zero-tolerance policy for misbehavior. Suspension was almost automatic for most violations. When Cheatham became superintendent that year, she was determined to bring down suspension and expulsion rates that she felt unfairly affected black students.

Black students made up 62% of expulsions for the previous four years compared to only 19% for white kids in a district where black students were just under 20% of the population. “Racial equity” became Cheatham’s mantra. 

She was convinced the district’s zero-tolerance approach was partly to blame — it did not give a troubled student the opportunity to learn from misbehavior or for the school to learn what was behind the bad conduct and find ways to help. 

So in 2014, Cheatham, who is white, implemented her Behavior Education Plan (BEP) geared to helping students learn positive behavior to keep them in the classroom. The district would use options such as an in-class suspension or mediation with a “restorative justice” circle to try to talk through the bad conduct with the student and the students’ peers and teachers. 

The BEP also would be “culturally responsive” — that is, take into consideration the fact that poor, black kids in challenging circumstances can behave differently than their white peers.

Mueller-Owens believed in and fervently promoted Cheatham’s discipline agenda.

“The dominant culture lacks an understanding of how other cultures interact with each other,” he told a Madison Commons writer in 2018, explaining why black students were suspended at higher rates than white kids. “The BEP comes from a heart of justice.”

Others disagreed. Some teachers and observers felt the BEP made it difficult to keep order in the classroom, gave the upper hand to students disinterested in learning and even put teachers in danger. 

Worse, some argued, the classroom disruptions were hurting black students the most — a group already struggling to close the achievement gap with white students.

One of the policy’s sharpest critics is Peter Anderson, a highly regarded Madison liberal who is leading a campaign to toughen classroom discipline. 

“The way that Dr. Cheatham chose to implement the Behavior Education Plan had the effect of undermining teachers, the end result of which — if nothing changes — will be a failed Madison school system, in which it is the at-risk students who will be trapped,” Anderson wrote in an email to the Badger Institute.

“White guilt and black rage are a toxic mix that helps nobody,” he continued, adding that with biracial grandchildren in the Madison schools, he’s “very concerned for what these policies mean both for the disadvantaged kids these efforts are supposedly intended to protect and for the future of public schools in racially diverse metropolitan areas.”

“Continuing Cheathamism cheats the black kids it purports to champion,” Anderson, founder of Wisconsin’s Environmental Decade (now Clean Wisconsin), concluded in a January blog post.

2005: Gangs & School Violence forum audio / video.

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

Scott Girard:

Logan Wroge:

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides. (

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

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

Logan Wroge:

The Madison School Board approved a contract Monday to hire a Minnesota school administrator as the next superintendent before releasing details of the agreement to the public.

District spokesman Tim LeMonds said in an email Jenkins is “not an official employee of the district until the contract is voted on,” adding Madison is “one of very few districts that publicly posts contracts.”

LeMonds also said the district is “not required to make a contract public until it is ratified by the board.” The contract was emailed to reporters soon after the vote.

A contract with Seguin, Texas, superintendent Matthew Gutierrez was publicly available before the board voted on Feb. 3 to approve that agreement.

Scott Girard:

The pay is more than what was agreed upon with Matthew Gutierrez, who was hired in an earlier search this year but rescinded his acceptance amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Gutierrez would have been paid $250,000.

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

Alan Borsuk:

They make for timely reading. Among the news stories I found:  

Then: Sept. 7, 1976, The Milwaukee Journal. This was the first day of court-ordered desegregation of Milwaukee Public Schools. I organized the newspaper’s coverage that day. The hope was that this was “the beginning of an exciting new era in Milwaukee education,” as one story put it. Which, of course, isn’t an accurate way to describe the era since then. Desegregation overall in the Milwaukee area has been limited, at best, and, by some measures, segregation of Black students particularly has increased in recent years.       

Now: The Milwaukee School Board passed a resolution in June calling for a new effort to desegregate schools across the Milwaukee area. Good luck.  

Then: Sept. 26, 1986, The Milwaukee Journal. I wrote a story that focused on the sharply differing levels of educational success of kids in the suburbs and kids in the city. I quoted John Witte, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor: “To the extent that education achievement is equated with life chances, these two groups face very unequal opportunities.”     

Now: Yup.  

Then: April 19, 1995, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, with a large front page headline, “Fuller quits.” After almost four years as superintendent of MPS, Howard Fuller resigned, saying the system was too mired in the status quo to make necessary changes.

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

Administration PDF:

Proposed Question 1:

Shall the Madison Metropolitan School District, Dane County, Wisconsin be authorized to exceed the revenue limit specified in Section 121.91, Wisconsin Statutes, by $6,000,000 for 2020-2021 school year; by an additional $8,000,000 (for a total $14,000,000) for 2021-2022 school year; by an additional $9,000,000 (for a total of $23,000,000) for the 2022-23 school year; and by an additional $10,000,000 (for a total of $33,000,000) for the 2023-2024 school year and thereafter, for recurring purposes consisting of operational and maintenance expenses?

“Unknown revenues from the state…
Now more than ever public education funding is at risk and local control will matter.”

Question 2:

Shall the Madison Metropolitan School District, Dane County, Wisconsin be authorized to issue pursuant to Chapter 67 of the Wisconsin Statutes, general obligation bonds in an amount not to exceed $317,000,000 for the public purpose of paying the cost of a school building and facility improvement project consisting of: renovations and additions at all four high schools, including safety and security improvements, plumbing/heating and cooling, science labs and classrooms, athletic, theatre, and environmental sustainability improvements; land acquisition for and construction of a new elementary school located near Rimrock Road to relocate an existing elementary school; remodeling the district owned Hoyt School to relocate Capital High; and acquisition of furnishings fixtures and equipment?

The presentation deck failed to include:

1. Total tax & spending changes over time.

From a kind reader, posted at mmsdbudget:

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.
1. 4K-12 enrollment: -1.6% (decrease) from 2014-15 to projected 2020-21

2. Total district staffing FTE: -2.9% (decrease) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21

3. Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): +15.9% +17.0% (increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21

4. Total expenditures per pupil: +17.8% +19.0%(increase) from 2014-15 to proposed 2020-21

5. CPI change: +10.0% (increase) from January 2014 to January 2020

6. Bond rating (Moody’s): two downgrades (from Aaa to Aa2) from 2014 to 2020

Sources:
1. DPI WISEdash for 2014-15 enrollment; district budget book for projected 2020-21 enrollment
2. & 3.: District budget books
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/data/)
6. Moody’s (https://www.moodys.com/)
– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

2. A comparison of Madison’s maintenance spending vs other taxpayer supported school districts.

“Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.

3. Enrollment forecasts.

4. Achievement and spending information; “bang for the buck”.

5. Substantive property tax burden between school districts. The included mill rate comparison is one part of the equation.

Changes in assessed value, redistributed state and federal taxpayer fund changes and spending growth data have gone missing.

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 Choi:

“It was because I recognized that unless we are giving opportunity and a quality education to the young men and women in the United States, then we won’t have the right people to be able to make the right decisions about our national security,” McRaven said. “They won’t have an understanding of different cultures. They won’t have an understand of different ideas. They won’t be critical thinkers.”

“So we have got to have an education system within the United States that really does teach and educate young men and women to think critically, to look outside their kind of small microcosm because if we don’t develop those great folks, then our national security in the long run may be in jeopardy,” McRaven added.

McRaven recommended the US develop a “culture of education” within communities, particular those where residents believe they cannot afford an education or where they think their children aren’t “smart enough.”

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

Scott Girard:

Carlton Jenkins said moving to work in the Madison Metropolitan School District would be like “going home.”

One of two finalists to become the district’s next superintendent, Jenkins was an associate principal at Memorial High School in 1993 and earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout the day Tuesday, the Robbinsdale School District superintendent spoke with students and staff via video, interviewed with the School Board and participated in a community Q and A session on Facebook Live.

“You will have a superintendent, if you select me, that comes here unapologetically knowing and loving Madison,” Jenkins said. “I am a Badger through and through.”

The School Board announced Jenkins and Oak Park Elementary School District 97 superintendent Carol Kelley as finalists last Thursday. After both interview this week, the board will deliberate in closed session Thursday.

Those who have thoughts on the choice can submit comments on the district’s website by 11 a.m. Thursday. To leave comments on Jenkins, visit mmsd.org/jenkins. Kelley’s community Q and A will be 7:15 p.m. Wednesday night.

The district’s timeline for a hire outlines a potential August start date.

Logan Wroge:

Carlton Jenkins will become the next superintendent of the Madison School District, returning to the city where he started his administrative career in education more than 25 years ago.

The Madison School Board announced Friday it chose Jenkins, superintendent of Robbinsdale Area Schools in suburban Minneapolis, as the permanent leader of the Madison School District. He will be the first Black superintendent of Madison.

He starts the job Aug. 4.

In a second search to fill the superintendent vacancy after the initial pick fell through this spring, the board opted to go with Jenkins, 54, over the other finalist Carol Kelley, a superintendent of the Oak Park Elementary School District 97 in Illinois.

“I speak for everyone on the Board when I say that we are very excited to share this news with our community,” Board President Gloria Reyes said in a statement.

Jenkins received a Ph.D. in educational leadership and policy analysis from UW-Madison in 2009 and a master’s degree in educational administration from the university in 1993.

Related:

2013 – 2019: Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison experience.

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

Annysa Johnson:

Wisconsin on Tuesday joined several states and the District of Columbia in suing the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos, arguing its policy dictating how states share federal pandemic relief funds with private schools is unconstitutional and siphons much-needed funding from public schools.

“The funds allocated to schools in the CARES Act provide vital support at a time when schools have had to make significant changes to the way they teach students,” said Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul.

“Instead of ignoring congressional intent and diverting funds away from public schools, Secretary DeVos should follow the law.”

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Plaintiffs include the states of Michigan, California, Maine and New Mexico.

At issue is a rule issued by DeVos’ office in late June that spells out how states are to allocate a portion of their K-12 funds under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, act, with private schools.

Notes and links on the state of Wisconsin’s taxpayer supported K-12 governance.

Louisa Moats:

The most fundamental responsibility of schools is teaching students to read. Because reading affects all other academic achievement and is associated with social, emotional, economic, and physical health, it has been the most researched aspect of human cognition. By the year 2000, after decades of multidisciplinary research, the scientific community had achieved broad consensus regarding these questions: How do children learn to read? What causes reading difficulties? What are the essential components of effective reading instruction and why is each important? How can we prevent or reduce reading difficulties? Two decades later, hundreds of additional studies have refined and consolidated what we know about bolstering reading achievement, especially for students at risk.

Scientists use increasingly sophisticated technology that can picture the brain’s activation patterns or measure split-second reactions to speech or print. New statistical methods can document the complicated interactions of many factors as students develop reading skills. Fine-grained analyses illuminate the nature of individual differences and individual responses to instruction. These advanced investigative techniques have confirmed and extended the bedrock findings about reading and effective teaching of reading that were known 20 years ago. Evidence to guide our practices is stronger than it has ever been.

Unfortunately, much of this research is not yet included in teacher preparation programs, widely used curricula, or professional development, so it should come as no surprise that typical classroom practices often deviate substantially from what is recommended by our most credible sources. As a result, reading achievement is not as strong as it should be for most students, and the consequences are particularly dire for students from the least advantaged families and communities.

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

Annysa Johnson:

Howard Fuller announced this month that he is retiring from Marquette University, where he is a distinguished professor of education and founder and director of its Institute for the Transformation of Learning.

At 79, Fuller has served in many roles in his lifetime: civil rights activist, educator and civil servant. He is a former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and best known in recent decades as a national advocate for school choice, which provides taxpayer-funded vouchers, typically to low-income families.

He is founder of Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy, a local charter high school, which beganinitially as a private religious school in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.He is a controversial figure for many public school advocates who believe school choice bleeds needed dollars from those schools.

In addition to retiring from Marquette, Fuller has resigned all of his board appointments, except for that of the school.

Fuller sat down with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel education reporter Annysa Johnson for a lengthy and wide-ranging discussion. These are excerpts:

Question: When you first announced your retirement, I could sense a weariness in your voice. It was clear you were struggling with where we are in this country right now. What can you say about education in the context of this moment?

Fuller: One of the things that became absolutely clear when the pandemic hit was what we already knew, and that was the inequities in education in this country. What the pandemic did was show which schools were already into the 21st century and which were holding on tightly to the 20th century, still functioning with an industrial-age paradigm. When the pandemic broke, the people who were tied lock, stock and barrel to the industrial-age paradigm, were lost. They had no idea what to do. Because everything was centered onyou gottacome to a building, the teacher is the center of learning, etc.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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

Libby Sobic:

The roundtable was hosted by Vice President Mike Pence, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway as well as Wisconsin parents, school leaders and school choice advocates. Building off of Lee’s comments, Pence said, “every parent became an educator, in part, and had to make choices in the way they use their own time and the way they became engaged… I’m really struck by your comment that maybe this challenging time through which we’ve passed has reinvigorated that principle in parents.”  

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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

Scott Girard:

If the vote goes as expected, the 2020-21 school year will be the first in more than two decades without a police officer stationed in each of the district’s comprehensive high schools.

Employee Handbook changes

Madison Teachers Inc. is organizing opposition to a set of proposed Employee Handbook changes that would change the rules around layoffs and surplus staff.

District administrators have asked the board to approve language that would eliminate seniority as the mechanism for layoffs and forced moves to other sites, instead using other to-be-determined standards evaluating performance. The changes would also allow for 30-day notice of layoffs instead of the annual May 15 layoff notices.

With the district considering a November operations referendum and the state still uncertain on its revenue losses from the pandemic, MMSD chief financial officer Kelly Ruppel told the board earlier this month she’s trying to create as much flexibility as possible for the months ahead.

That included an $8 million cut from last year already. Earlier this month board members agreed that cutting an additional $8.4 million to protect against the possibility of state cuts was a good idea. Doing so meant cutting the planned base wage increase for staff.

Ruppel said that means hitting pause on “any new spending, in order to maintain the most flexibility until we know more.” 

The other option she offered to board members was cutting up to 92 staff positions. If the referendum is on the ballot and approved or if state cuts don’t happen, the district could add wage increases back in mid-year. Hiring for eliminated positions would be a bigger challenge.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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

2005: Gangs & School Violence audio / video.

Mark Brown:

A school principal will always need a good working relationship with the local district commander, but police are asked to intervene in too many situations, Dozier believes.

“We put too much on them,” she says. “It doesn’t necessarily warrant a police response.”

The problem with getting police involved is that it sucks students into a situation from which they might never recover.

“Once a kid touches the criminal justice system, it just steamrolls,” Dozier says.

It’s not enough for CPS to give a school the option of getting rid of its police officers if no resources are offered to take their place.

In Chicago’s resource-poor schools, it’s hardly a surprise that school communities would choose to hang on to what little they have, no matter how imperfect.

Dozier agrees with those who say the $33 million that CPS spends on its police contract should be reinvested in alternative resources.

“You have to give the schools what they need,” she says. “You can’t just take [police] out and say, ‘Good luck.’ ”

Maybe that can’t be accomplished by the beginning of this school year. But it ought to be the stated goal of the Chicago Public Schools.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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

2005: Gangs & School Violence audio / video.

Scott Girard:

Madison School Board president Gloria Reyes said in the release the district is “very fortunate to have an impressive pool of highly qualified candidates participate in this process.”

“With a focus on how candidates aligned with the Leadership Profile, the Board was able to select two phenomenal finalists, both with deep roots in education and instruction, and today we are excited to introduce them to our community,” Reyes said.

MMSD had 26,842 students in the 2019-20 school year, with demographics of 41.7% white, 22.3% Hispanic, 17.8% Black, 8.5% Asian, 9.3% Two or more and less than 1% each of Pacific Isle and American Indian, according to state data.

In its earlier search, the district had three finalists. In addition to Gutierrez, Georgia education official Eric Thomas and College of Saint Rose professor Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard also visited the district for an interview and public Q and A. Consultant BWP and Associates conducted both searches.

Jane Belmore has served as the interim superintendent since last August, when Jennifer Cheatham left for a position at Harvard after six years in MMSD

Logan Wroge:

The finalists, Carol Kelley and Carlton Jenkins, will proceed with interviews next week.

Jenkins is in his fifth year as superintendent of the Robbinsdale School District in New Hope, Minnesota. He’s held educational leadership positions — including chief academic officer, principal, assistant principal and health teacher — in Michigan, Ohio, Beloit and Madison, and received his PhD from UW-Madison.

Kelley, an educator with 25 years of experience, is also in her fifth year as superintendent of Oak Park Elementary School District 97 in Illinois, the district said in an announcement. She also served for three years as superintendent of Branch Township School District in New Jersey and has a background as an elementary and middle school principal and a classroom teacher.

In these challenging times, our local businesses need your support. Find out how to get food, goods, services and more from those remaining open.

Kelley holds a doctorate of education from the University of Pennsylvania, the district said.

In addition to the next round of interviews, Jenkins and Kelley will participate in online engagement sessions with district staff and students during a “Virtual Day in the District.” The sessions will include an opportunity to ask questions of the candidates and provide feedback.

Notes and links on the 2020 Superintendent pageant, round 2.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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

2005: Gangs & School Violence audio / video.

Scott Girard:

Most members who spoke with the Cap Times said they favored removing officers, but didn’t think doing so immediately would solve the problem at the heart of the issue: feeling safe at school.

And some of the committee members wonder what happened to their months of work and why Reyes is calling for another subcommittee to investigate how to transition to having no SROs in schools. Under the contract with the Madison Police Department, a decision needs to be made by Sept. 15 to be effective June 2021.

“I just hope that the work that the ERO Ad Hoc did is not completely disregarded,” said former School Board member Anna Moffit. “People took a lot of time to put that report together and we did spend a lot of time in our schools talking to staff, talking to students, looking at research.

“I would hate to see a new committee be created and doing the same thing over again.”

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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

2005: Gangs & School Violence audio / video.

Scott Girard:

The Madison School Board will vote Monday on continuing or ending early its contract with the Madison Police Department to have officers stationed in its four comprehensive high schools.

Based on public statements from board members this spring and previous votes, it’s likely the board will vote to end the contract early, though contractual language won’t allow it to take effect until June 2021.

Board president Gloria Reyes announced the planned vote in a news release Wednesday afternoon. The board will meet in a special session at 4 p.m.

“The safety and wellbeing of every student that walks through our doors each day is a tremendous responsibility,” Reyes said in a statement. “As leaders in education, we recognize that now is the time to intensify our commitment to dismantling systemic racism by addressing inequities that only serve as mechanisms of division, and this decision is a significant step.”

Thomas Sowell’s book “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” is scheduled to be available June 30.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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

Wisconsin DPI:

Responding to COVID-19 is a tremendous undertaking for schools. Schools are tasked with re-envisioning educational delivery models in a span of weeks and adjust practices accordingly. As we look toward the fall, the safety and health of our students, educators, and families remains of the highest importance.

The Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is providing this guidance to aid in school districts’ decision making as they look to build educational services and supports in a COVID-19 environment.Under state law, school districts determine the operations of their buildings and the learning environment. Risk mitigation and health factors will drive decisions regarding school operations.

While I expect schools to reopen this fall, they will undoubtedly look different. There will need to be social distancing, new cleaning and disinfecting procedures, and changes to how educators deliver instruction. There will be students who are not able to return to school due to health concerns and students and staff who may be quarantined due to exposure. This means every school district will need to plan for both school operations on campus and remote learning.

The DPI will be using federal CARES Act dollars to support school districts around remote learning options. Changes will need to be made as districts look at how they provide meals to students, transport students to and from school, move through their buildings, and gather to celebrate achievements.

The DPI partnered collaboratively with our state’s educational leaders: the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, Association of Wisconsin School Administrators, Wisconsin Council of Administrators of Special Services, Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, Wisconsin Association of School Boards, Wisconsin Education Association Council, and the Cooperative Educational Service Agency Statewide Network and in conjunction with the Department of Health Services.

Education Forward was developed to help local education and community leaders plan appropriately for students to return to school this fall. There are 421 school districts, 26 independent charter schools, and 792 private schools serving a school-age population of over 1,000,000 students in Wisconsin.

Due to the extensive variance in schools, this guidance is offered as a workbook to be considered in conjunction with the Department of Health Services risk assessment checklist. Please use these tools to discuss school district reopening plans with local health agencies and ensure information is complete in regards to the magnitude of risk associated with options being considered. The DPI will continuously update this guidance as new information arises and provide additional resources as they become available to support school operations and the learning environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the inequities existing in Wisconsin.As we look to address these inequities and the planning around the pandemic,the DPI is focused on providing school districts the necessary supports andregulatory relief to pursue innovative strategies to ensure equitable access to learning.

Thomas Sowell’s book “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” is scheduled to be available June 30.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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

Melinda Anderson:

Racial inequality in Baltimore’s public schools is in part the byproduct of long-standing neglect. In a system in which eight out of 10 students are black, broken heaters forced students to learn in frigid temperatures this past winter. Black children in Baltimore’s education system face systemic disadvantages: They’re suspended at much higher rates than their white peers; they rarely pass their math or reading tests; their campuses are chronically underfunded.

Yet this stark reality is juxtaposed with a largely unnoticed educational phenomenon underway in the city.

In a brightly painted row house in East Baltimore, Cameren Queen, who’s 13, walked confidently to a colorful trifold poster, cleared her throat, and began to speak. Her oral presentation—“All About Hepatitis C”—was the culmination of two weeks of work. With animated precision, she rattled off common symptoms of hepatitis C, specified risk factors, described prevention strategies, and listed treatment plans. Seated to her right, the instructor—her mother, April VaiVai—listened intently, scrutinizing facts and peppering Cameren with questions. The two of them are part of a thriving community of black homeschooling families, here in Baltimore and elsewhere throughout the country, taking the adage “Parents are a child’s first teacher” to another level.

The homeschooling population in the United States is predominantly white and concentrated in suburban or rural areas. In 2016, black children accounted for 8 percent of the 1.7 million homeschooled students nationally, according to U.S. Department of Education statistics. What federal education data don’t show, though, is what’s driving those 136,000 or so black students and their families into homeschooling. Nor do the data reveal the tenacity and tradition that bond this homeschooling movement—a movement that challenges many of the prevailing stereotypes about homeschooling, which tends to be characterized as the province of conservative Christians, public-school opponents, and government skeptics.

For VaiVai and many other black homeschoolers, seizing control of their children’s schooling is an act of affirmation—a means of liberating themselves from the systemic racism embedded in so many of today’s schools and continuing the campaign for educational independence launched by their ancestors more than a century ago. In doing so, many are channeling an often overlooked history of black learning in America that’s rooted in liberation from enslavement. When seen in this light, the modern black-homeschooling movement is evocative of African Americans’ generations-long struggle to change their children’s destiny through education—and to do so themselves.

Sowell’s book “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” is scheduled to be available June 30.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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

Thomas Sowell:

For decades, there has been widespread anxiety over how, when or whether the educational test score gap between white and non-white youngsters could be closed. But that gap has already been closed by the Success Academy charter school network in New York City.

Their predominantly black and Hispanic students already pass tests in mathematics and English at a higher rate than any school district in the entire state. That includes predominantly white and Asian school districts where parental income is some multiple of what it…

One piece of rhetoric that seems plausible on the surface is that charter schools “skim the cream” of students, leaving the public schools worse off. But this ignores the fact that admission to New York City charter schools is by lottery—that is, by luck—and not by students’ academic records or test results.

No doubt more motivated students are more likely to apply to charter schools. But only a fraction of those who enter the admissions lotteries win. This means that the majority of those motivated students remain in traditional public schools. The fraction that go into charter schools do not prevent traditional public schools from properly educating the much larger number who remain. If traditional public schools fail to do so, that is their own responsibility, and cannot be blamed on charter schools.

Teachers unions and traditional public school administrators have every reason to fear charter schools. In 2019 there were more than 50,000 New York City students on waiting lists to transfer into charter schools.

If that many students were allowed to transfer, in a city where expenditures per pupil are more than $20,000 a year, the result would be that more than a billion dollars a year would transfer with them to charter schools.

Sowell’s book “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” is scheduled to be available June 30.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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

Craig Franklin, via a kind email:

1.       The total 2019 tax levy for City of Madison property is $713,571,544.19.  This amount includes lottery, school levy and first dollar credits paid by the State of Wisconsin. The total tax outstanding, from City of Madison property owners, as of May 31, 2020 (the date of the last settlement) is $69,035,668.53. [9.6%]

2.       Of the 76,048 parcels in the City of Madison, 12,077 are currently utilizing the installment method of payment (as of the May 31, 2020 settlement). [15.8%]

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results. [the Madison School District administration has been planning a substantial 2020 tax & spending increase referendum].

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

“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”.

Will Flanders:

Wisconsin public school teachers made, on average, $55,985 in salary during the 2017–18 school year with an average of 14.2 students per teacher. During that school year, spending was $13,670 per student in local, state and federal funding. This means that about $195,392 is spent on the average classroom in the state. Of that, only about 28.4% ends up in the pockets of teachers. Where is the rest of the money going?

An illuminating answer comes from investigating the share of district staff who are teachers relative to those in other roles. We can use data from DPI’s “All Staff” files over the past decade to tease this out. The chart below shows the percentage of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff in the 10 largest districts in the state that are identified as teachers by the Department of Public Instruction since 2008. The majority of districts fall below the 50% threshold in every year — meaning that for every teacher in the district, there is more than one employee in another role.

The biggest offenders in recent years are Eau Claire, Milwaukee, Racine. Both of these districts have dropped below the 40% level in recent years for several consecutive years. In fact, WILL’s 2019 Truth in Spending study found, “The percentage of money a district spends on [administration and transportation costs] relative to others is associated with lower performance on state exams.”

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

“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 DeAngelis & Matthew Nielsen:

On average, the United States currently spends over $15,000 per student each year, and inflation-adjusted K-12 education spending per student has increased by 280% since 1960. In California, where the previously mentioned football coach resides, inflation-adjusted spending on K-12 education has increased by 129% since 1970. Furthermore, data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that nearly a third of all state budget expenditures go toward education.

This is a particularly pernicious myth in the education debate because increased education spending generally isn’t associated with better results. Stanford University economist Eric Hanushek reviewed nearly 400 studies on the topic and concluded that “there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources.”

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

“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”.

David Blaska:

Nonetheless, Ald. Tag Evers its all J’accuse!

“We have defunded our schools — 90% of our black and brown students are not reading at grade level —  and then used police to keep order.”

Madison has “defunded our schools”? Since when? On an absolute dollar basis, the State of Wisconsin has never shoveled more money at K-12 education. Madison taxpayers approve extra-spending referenda almost every other election.

• Madison school property taxes are UP 37% since 2012,

• While 4K-12 enrollment is down 1.6% from 2014-15.

• Total expenditures (excluding construction fund): is UP 17.0% during the same period.

• The proposed school budget for next year increases per pupil spending 19.0% from 2014-15. (Cost of living is up 10% during that time.)

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

“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”.

Scott Girard:

Administrators are concerned about a potential state budget repair bill that could cut funding to K-12 schools, though Gov. Tony Evers told the Cap Times last week he’s hopeful such a measure can be avoided amid lower than anticipated revenue for the state. The budget Ruppel recommended Monday would save $8.4 million from what has been previously discussed, mostly through cuts to wage increases to save room in case such a bill is approved.

“Pause on any new spending in order to maintain the most flexibility until we know more,” Ruppel said.

If the previously planned increases in base wages and the “steps” on the district’s salary structure were maintained, as many as 92 school-based staff positions could be cut, according to the presentation.

If a state budget repair bill did not come to fruition or there was additional funding from the federal government, raises could be reinstated before the final budget approval, while reinstating the positions in the middle of the school year would be more challenging.

Ruppel also offered expense-saving possibilities of keeping five vacant central office positions open for a savings of $500,000 or more as well as a pause on Strategic Equity Projects like a new reading curriculum and increases to School Security Assistant pay, saving up to $550,000.

Board member Savion Castro said he was supportive of Ruppel’s recommendation among the options presented Monday night, although he acknowledged it was not a good choice to have to make. Most others expressed a similar sentiment.

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

“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”.

Logan Wroge:

I wonder how the taxpayer supported Madison School District’s “infinite campus” online usage looks today, from the teacher, staff, student and parent perspective?

2012 Madison school district infinite campus usage report.

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

“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”.

Karen Lenington:

Homeschooling- it’s all the rage right now! One year ago no one would have believed that every school-age child in America would be educated at home by the end of the 2019-2020 school year. Ironically, just weeks before this educational upheaval, Professor Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard called for a summit to examine the pro’s and con’s of homeschooling. Her now-postponed summit was “by invitation only”, and I hope her panel was more than just one-sided.

As a former homeschooler and current homeschooling mother of four, I offer my sympathy to those who were unwittingly thrown into homeschooling with a few paltry hours of notice. At six years in, I have found a nice stride, and have a unique perspective which I would love to share with Professor Bartholet over coffee, (from at least six feet away) if I could.

First, Professor Bartholet is concerned that homeschooled children are restrained from adequate social interaction and diversity.

My children, like most homeschoolers I know, are actually very well-socialized. Our family is part of a homeschool co-op with art, gym, sign language, drama, and academic classes. We participate in a local Christian school’s sports program. We helped with our church’s game booth at National Night Out 2019, and helped maintain Grandpop Bubbles’ booth at the Kipona Festival 2019. Our church family provides love and fellowship from members of all ages at worship services, family game nights, picnics and hymn-sings at church member’s homes. At our church’s kids Bible club my children learn and play with neighborhood children from a broad range of ethnic and economic backgrounds. National missionaries from India, Ghana, Uruguay, the Philippines, Lebanon and Mexico have stayed in our home and have entertained my children with stories of their native homelands. What a rich sampling of diversity my children have experienced!

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

“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”.

Briana Reilly:

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

“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”.

Chris Rickert:

All 16 of the school districts completely or partially within Dane County have waived or loosened at least two academic standards to help seniors graduate at a time when schools have been shut down since mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Information from the districts and the state Department of Public Instruction also shows that the poorer and more diverse a district’s student body, the more likely the district’s leadership sought graduation requirement waivers from the state and lowered other standards.

The Wisconsin State Journal asked the districts to report whether they had:

• Changed grading standards after schools shut down;

• Reduced the number of credits needed to graduate;

• Sought waivers of the state’s civics exam, minimum instructional hours and educator effectiveness requirements;

• Made any other changes to help seniors graduate.

Every district had loosened requirements in at least two areas, and two districts — Middleton-Cross Plains and Sun Prairie — had loosened them in six, including waiving the requirement that students complete a certain number of community service hours to graduate.

The county’s largest district, Madison, reported reducing the number of credits needed to graduate from 22 to the state minimum of 15, moving to a pass/fail grading system and getting state waivers for the civics test and minimum number of instructional hours.

DPI had made clear at the beginning of school shutdowns that it would not seek to deny waivers of the civics, minimum instructional hours and educator effectiveness requirements. Some districts did not need waivers for the civics exam because it had already been administered by the time the schools were closed.

Linn Posey-Maddox, an associate professor of educational policy studies at UW-Madison, said the pandemic exacerbates existing racial inequities in education

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

Michael Graham:

“Is it your belief that only well-educated parents can make proper decisions for what’s in the best interest of their children?” asked a dumbfounded Rep. Glenn Cordelli (R-Tuftonboro).

Rather than saying “no,” Dietsch instead repeated her view that parents without college degrees are less capable of overseeing their children’s education.

“In a democracy, and particularly in the United States, public education has been the means for people to move up to greater opportunities, for each generation to be able to succeed more than their parents have. My father didn’t graduate from high school, so it was really important that I went to college,” Dietsch said.

‘When it gets into the details, would my father have known what courses I should be taking? I don’t think so.”

When committee vice-chairman David Luneau tried to inject that Dietsch was not, in fact, saying parents without college were less fit to oversee their children’s education, Dietsch interrupted to reaffirm her position.

“If the dad’s a carpenter, and you want to become a carpenter, then yes — listen to your dad.”

Former Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes: August 3, 2013

“The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”

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

“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”.

Mike Antonucci:

The Center for Public Integrity reports that police contracts have “arbitration clauses that often force police departments to rehire fired misbehaving cops” and that cop unions “have successfully lobbied for state laws granting police officers far more job security than the average U.S. worker.”

A former attorney for the Service Employees International Union penned an editorial in USA Today explaining that police contracts often have provisions to expunge disciplinary records after a certain amount of time.

“Even in cases where an officer is fired for misconduct, the agreement requires an appeals process that frequently leads to reinstatement, especially if the investigating agency has committed procedural errors,” he wrote.

“The law enforcement community — and especially its unions’ — first response, when one of its officers is caught red-handed, is to circle the wagons, vilify the victim or survivor, and bat away any criticism or dissent as virtual sedition,” wrote Kim Kelly in The New Republic.

All these points should be familiar to union observers, and especially those writers expressing outrage these past few weeks. Not only have police unions been operating this way for a long time, but you could take any of the above quotes and apply them to teachers unions without hesitation.

This may help explain why other unions have been noticeably silent when the subject of police unions is broached. The Center for Public Integrity approached the leaders of 10 major unions and labor groups for comment on its story. None were willing to talk about police unions.

The backlash over police brutality is causing school districts to rethink their employment of sworn police, called school resource officers (SROs). These officers are usually contracted with the local police department, but in some cases they are school district employees, represented by the teachers union. Both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers represent thousands of school security personnel, including SROs.

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

“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”.

Jasmine Lane:

Shallow successes allow us to pat ourselves on the back. But a high graduation rate is meaningless when our graduates enter the world without a fundamental grasp of the tools and knowledge necessary for full participation in life and citizenship. We can hope for a reimagining of schooling during this time, but nothing will change in our schools until we prioritize the education of our students.

Yes, there is trauma: from pandemic fear, from centuries of racism and violence. We will likely need a trauma-informed approach as school begins in some form again. Some say that means educators should let relationships be the focus. But that does not necessarily mean relationships outside of content-the “I teach kids, not content” approach. I would reframe that to say: I teach my students content. That’s my job and what my students trust me to do.

Doug Lemov of the Uncommon Schools charter network writes that “relationship building starts in the classroom with attentiveness to the craft of teaching and with attentiveness to the progress and experience of the learner.” I knew my students’ lives because they decided to tell me, not because I made them do an emotional check-in. I provided them with routine during distance learning by greeting them and giving them a brief overview of the day in a synchronous setting. I created an opportunity for hope by not overly dwelling on the woes and news of the present. And I continued to build relationships by capitalizing on the trust that I had earned from doing the best teaching I could.

And in all this, I was helped by the subject I teach: literature. One of the beautiful things about literature is its ability to center isolating and abstracted fear in previous human experience. Albert Camus wrote in The Plague: “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars always take people equally by surprise.” Literature attests that people have been here before, and their experience can strengthen us -if we know how to access it.

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

“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”.

Jasmine Lane:

My grandfather was in his late 30s when he first learned to read and later went on to complete his GED at the age of 42. With his formal education ending around age nine so he could start working, and during a time when if caught reading he would be attacked, threatened, or possibly murdered for daring to be a Black man reading in the Jim Crow south, he took the risk and taught himself to read using the bible. 

I tell this story not to celebrate the strength of my family, but to paint a picture of how woefully detached the debate over basic literacy is from the desires of families. Just two generations ago people risked their lives to be able to read and here we are today watching the educational establishment—through its degradation of standardised assessments, emphasis on the individual over the collective whole, and dismissal of science—risk the subjugation of an entire people to second class citizenship. It is frightening and marks the gravest miscarriage of justice we have seen this side of educational history. An entire generation of children is not being taught to read. 

No Expectations, No Problem

In 2017, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that sixty percent of children nationwide are not reading proficiently. If we look to the disaggregated data by race, it becomes even more stark. Though these levels of proficiency have not improved in the last 30 years, we’ve been made to believe that tests don’t matter. That tests are racist and cannot accurately measure what our students know. We can call tests racist (the people making them might be), and  inaccurate measures of achievement (they actually measure general knowledge), but overall, what has this amounted to? A lowering of expectations across the board. 

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

Scott Girard:

Madison Teachers Inc. has filed a complaintagainst the Madison Metropolitan School District related to a survey sent out to staff last week.

The Prohibited Practice Complaint was filed Monday with the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission and seeks an immediate cease and desist of the survey and asks that the district be made to destroy any records related to the responses before reviewing them.

The survey was only two questions long, but one of those questions asked staff how they would prefer the district deal with an anticipated $5 million to $9 million in additional budget cuts for the 2020-21 school year. The two options were to freeze most compensation increases currently in the budget, including base wage, or to eliminate 92 full-time equivalent positions while keeping wage increases intact.

Related:

Act 10

Four Senators for $1.57M

“An emphasis on adult employment“.

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

Logan Wroge:

Madison’s teachers union is shifting its stance on school-based police officers and is now advocating they be taken out of the city’s main high schools — but only if 33 additional support staff are hired.

In a statement Sunday, Madison Teachers Inc. said it backs the removal of school resource officers, or SROs, stationed inside each of the Madison School District’s four main high schools — a move local activists have demanded of the district for years.

“We see the systematic racism that exists in our current structures and join the voices of our students and our community in calling for dramatic change in how we educate and interact with all of our students, especially those most marginalized in our schools and society,” MTI president Andy Waity said in the statement.

The major caveat, though, is MTI will only support the removal if certain positions at the four main high schools are staffed at recommended levels by the American Civil Liberties Union.

According to MTI, achieving those levels at each high school based on the ACLU’s “metric of equitable staffing” would require additional hires of:

One counselor, one nurse, one psychologist and four social workers for East.

One counselor, one nurse, one psychologist and five social workers for La Follette.

Two counselors, one nurse, one psychologist and five social workers for Memorial.

One counselor, one nurse and seven social workers for West.

“If we remove police officers from our schools, but do not adequately staff those same schools with social workers, nurses, counselors, and psychologists, we are perpetuating harm upon our most vulnerable young people,” the statement said.

2005: Gangs & School Violence Forum audio / video.

Related:

Act 10

Four Senators for $1.57M

“An emphasis on adult employment“.

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

Noam Scheiber, Farah Stockman and J. David Goodman:

Over the past five years, as demands for reform have mounted in the aftermath of police violence in cities like Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and now Minneapolis, police unions have emerged as one of the most significant roadblocks to change. The greater the political pressure for reform, the more defiant the unions often are in resisting it — with few city officials, including liberal leaders, able to overcome their opposition.

They aggressively protect the rights of members accused of misconduct, often in arbitration hearings that they have battled to keep behind closed doors. And they have also been remarkably effective at fending off broader change, using their political clout and influence to derail efforts to increase accountability.

While rates of union membership have dropped by half nationally since the early 1980s, to 10 percent, higher membership rates among police unions give them resources they can spend on campaigns and litigation to block reform. A single New York City police union has spent more than $1 million on state and local races since 2014.

Related:

Act 10

Four Senators for $1.57M

“An emphasis on adult employment“.

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

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The “real help” will come from other federal funding, she said. For example, Wisconsin is slated to receive $175 million from Congress for K-12 schools through what’s known as the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund. The law allows governors to disperse the money as they see fit, so private schools could potentially be left out of distribution.

Melissa Baldauff, a spokeswoman for Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, did not respond to two emails asking whether Evers would include private schools in the allocation of these funds.

“Everyone’s equally hit by this pandemic,” Schmeling said. “Every school is being affected by this with additional costs and problems to mitigate.”

Taxpayer supported public K-12 schools receive funds from several sources, including local property taxes, redistributed state and federal taxpayers and borrowed sources. Various grants also find their way to public systems.

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

Natalie Wexler:

On national tests last year, only 18 percent of black 4^th-graders scored proficient or above in reading; the figure for white 4^th-graders was 45 percent. For 8^th graders, the percentages were 15 and 42 percent. It’s sobering that over half of white students fail to meet the proficiency bar. But the figures for black students should outrage anyone who cares about social justice. These dry statistics translate into greater struggles in high school, lower college attendance and graduation rates, a higher likelihood of incarceration, and generally bleaker futures. And we’re going in the wrong direction: Those abysmal percentages for black students are lower than the figures from two years before.

Want to know something even more outrageous? There’s abundant scientific evidence that explains why our standard approach to reading instruction isn’t working for so many black kids—and others. But educators and policymakers are often unaware of that research; some reject it. Schools continue to double down on the same things that haven’t worked for decades, expecting a different result.

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

Scott Girard:

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

Alan Borsuk:

First, success in reaching proficiency in reading is shockingly low among students from low-income homes and those who are black or Hispanic. The Wisconsin gap between white kids and black kids has often been measured as the worst in the United States. 

Only 13% of black fourth through eighth graders in Wisconsin were rated as proficient or better in reading in 2019. For Milwaukee, it was 10%. Same for Madison.  

Second, this has not changed for at least two decades. I’ve gone over results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress going back to the 1990s. Same story, every time: Wisconsin at the bottom.    

Despite some (but too few) very good early childhood programs, many thousands of children each year walk into kindergarten already behind their better-off peers. Many thousands walk out of third grade not really ready for what’s ahead.   

Has anything been done to try to make reading outcomes better? Well, sort of.  

In 2011 and 2012, a Wisconsin “Read to Lead” task force was created to figure out how to get more kids to proficiency in reading by the end of third grade. The chair was then-Gov. Scott Walker and the vice-chair was then-State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers. It was a tepid effort and it certainly didn’t lead to improving things.  

Starting around then, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation launched Milwaukee Succeeds, an everyone-at-the-table effort of civic leaders. It made third grade reading a top priority. It moved slowly, backing a few modest, even if good, efforts. Overall, nothing changed.  

Even as nothing improved, the reading education establishment in Wisconsin stuck pretty much to doing the same things. Maybe the philosophy is: If it’s not working, don’t try to fix it. There’s been some increase in teaching kids how to sound out letters and words (phonics), but it has hardly been a full and energized effort. 

How important is reading? Very.  

Consider a fresh voice: I read this past week an article in the New York University Review of Law and Social Change by McKenna Kohlenberg, a Milwaukee area native who is in the home stretch of getting both her law degree and a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy analysis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.   

It uses Madison as a case study in what Kohlenberg calls the “illiteracy-to-incarceration pipeline.” She cites research that 70% of adults who are incarcerated and 85% of juveniles who have been involved with the juvenile justice system are functionally illiterate. 

“Literacy strongly correlates with myriad social and economic outcomes, and children who are not proficient by the fourth grade are much more likely than their proficient peers to face a series of accumulating negative consequences,” Kohlenberg writes. 

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

Gloria Reyes, Madison School Board President:

Dear MMSD Family and Community:

I would like to acknowledge the hurt our community is feeling after recent events of racial injustice. I stand by the many voices who have so passionately rallied our community to speak out against racism, and reject it in all its forms. I honor and respect your voice, ard recognize this is not a time to remain silent, as silence only will perpetuate a long-lasting problem. We must instead take this opportunity to call out the obscene inequalities that exist in our society that have caused trauma to people of color for far too long.

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

Reyes is a former police officer. https://t.co/HB0xGCSNaQ

— Patrick Marley (@patrickdmarley) June 5, 2020

Chris Rickert:

A group protesting the presence of police officers in Madison’s four main high schools placed what appear to be dozens of American flags scrawled with obscenities targeting police overnight Thursday on the lawn of the Madison School Board president, a former Madison police officer, according to a video taken by the woman and posted to Facebook.

In these challenging times, our local businesses need your support. Find out how to get food, goods, services and more from those remaining open.

Gloria Reyes is also the person tapped as part of a new initiative from the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County to train 75 “peacekeepers” in de-escalation techniques and have them monitor protests occurring this week against the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

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

Scott Girard:

Logan Wroge:

But the district and MTI meet annually to see if they can reach consensus on changes to the employee handbook, which replaced collective bargaining agreements.

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”

Libby Sobic:

Wisconsin schools are about to receive a massive influx of federal funding to the tune of $221 million. This funding is part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) and is allocated to benefit K-12 schools and institutions of higher education in both the public and private sectors. But a national battle is being waged in D.C. over how this funding should be allocated to K-12 private schools. In Wisconsin, K-12 private schools are uncertain which side the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) will take. If DPI fails to follow the U.S. Department of Education’s guidance, it will prevent millions of dollars from reaching thousands of private school Wisconsin students.

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

Briana Reilly:

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report [PDF]

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

Emily Files:

But there is still the question of how MPS will be able to sustain new positions when it faces severe financial challenges. Those challenges include $170 million in deferred maintenance, a future loss of $24 million in state integration aid due to the ending of Chapter 220 program, and a possible cut in state support because of the pandemic.

In recent weeks, MPS board members added new expenses to the budget proposal, including funding for more ethnic studies teachers and increasing minimum pay to $15 per hour. At a meeting Thursday, the school board will decide whether to approve the spending plan.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.

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

Mckenna Kohlenberg:

For in cities like Madison, reputationally progressive jewel of the state that denied Dred Scott his citizenship and citizen rights nearly two centuries ago, so too does the racialized illiteracy crisis lawfully disparage young Black men to non-citizen subjects and deny their access to democratic society to- day. If this academic year mirrors the past 12 in Madison, at least 85% of Black fourth graders currently attending the city’s public schools are four times more likely than their peers to drop out, and 2/3 will end up in prison or on welfare. If this academic year mirrors the past 12 in Madison, the vast majority of the 166 Black boys who began fourth grade in the city this past fall are now members of a discrete class that is more likely to spend time incarcerated than to become func- tionally literate in school. Coining this the age of the mass and disparate illiter- acy-to-incarceration pipeline, this Article reinforces the reality that we have not ended the subjugation of Black men in America, we have merely found yet another away to disguise it.

The appearance in print of Mckenna’s paper is perfectly timed with the recent settlement of the “Gary B.” case in Michigan.

And the Michigan settlement may have an impact on a similar case in Rhode Island.

Finally, here’s what it looks like in California, where a similar suit has already been settled.

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

Ed Treleven:

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

Alessandro Romano, Chiara Sotis, Goran Dominioni, and Sebastián Guidi:

The fact that the framing of information can dramatically alter how we react to it will hardly surprise any reader of this blog. Incidentally, the canonical example of framing effects involves an epidemic: a disease that kills 200 out of 600 people is considered worse than one in which 400 people survive. Whereas this imaginary epidemic was just a thought experiment, an actual global pandemic turns out to be an unfortunate laboratory for framing effects. In a recent experiment, we show how framing crucially affects people’s responses to one of the most important building blocks of the COVID-19 informational puzzle: the number of deaths. We show that the logarithmic scale graphs that the media routinely use to display this information are poorly understood by the public and affect people’s attitudes and policy preferences towards the pandemic. This finding has important implications because during a pandemic, even more than usually, the public depends on the media to convey understandable information in order to make informed decisions regarding health-protective behaviours.

Many media outlets portray information about the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths using a logarithmic scale graph. At first sight, this seems sensible. In fact, many of them defend their decision by showing how much better these charts are in conveying information about the exponential nature of the contagion. For history lovers, the popular economist Irving Fisher also believed this, which led him to strongly advocate for their use in 1917 (right before the Spanish Flu rendered them tragically relevant). Fisher was ecstatic about this scale: “When one is once accustomed to it, it never misleads.” It turns out, however, that even specialized scientists don’t get used to it. Not surprisingly, neither does the general public.

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

Cori Petersen:

Just $47: that’s the amount of money that is preventing Katrina Olguin from being able to enroll her kids in the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program (WPCP). “We were just $47 over and I did everything to adjust it legally. And then they were just like, no, sorry,” she said.

Olguin has three sons who will be in grades K-5, fourth and ninth in the fall, and she would like them all to attend Heritage Christian Schools, a high-performing school her two older sons attend. It’s also where Katrina is a teacher. The Olguin’s fourth grade son is already in the WPCP because parents can apply at three different windows, K-5, first and ninth grades and Olguin enrolled him when he was going into first grade. Their financial situation was very difficult then.

“Five years ago my husband almost cut his hand off at work, so for the past five years we’ve always been in a situation where we are below income,” Olguin said.

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

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) sued the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) on behalf of a West Allis family, Heritage Christian Schools, and School Choice Wisconsin Action (SCWA), after the department adopted an illegal policy to block a family from enrolling in the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program (WPCP) – the statewide voucher program. The lawsuit was filed in Waukesha County Circuit Court.

Background: To apply for the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program (WPCP), families must submit financial information to determine whether they meet the income eligibility requirements in state statute – 220% of the poverty line. Further, the WPCP has specific grade entry points for students who are already in a private school – kindergarten, 1^st, and 9^th grade – meaning families with children in private schools who want to participate in the WPCP have specific windows when they are eligible to apply.

The Lawsuit: When the Olguin family in West Allis applied to the WPCP for their kindergartner and 9^th grader to attend Heritage Christian Schools, a high performing school, DPI determined the family was $47 over the income threshold. To meet the threshold, the Olguin family made a legal contribution to an IRA account, resubmitted their tax return and reapplied to the program. But DPI refused to consider the Olguin’s new application, citing a ‘one and done’ policy that families are allowed only one submission during an enrollment period – regardless of a change in circumstances. Without relief, their 9^th grade son will never receive a voucher unless he were to switch schools from a private school to a public school and then back again.

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

Blacks for Political and Social Action of Dane County, Inc.:

In the midst of these challenges, the Madison Metropolitan School District heard its superintendent-designee, Matthew Gutiérrez, was rescinding his acceptance of the position to remain as superintendent of the Seguin, Texas school district. This lack of a permanent superintendent can have an incredibly negative impact on African American students. The initiative known as “Black Excellence” began under the leadership of former superintendent Jennifer Cheatham. Cheatham has been gone for almost a year. Nothing about the current leadership suggests that Black Excellence is a district priority. African American children in Wisconsin experience the widest achievement disparities in the nation in reading and mathematics. Our eighth graders are performing 47 points below their White counterparts in mathematics. Our fourth graders are performing 39 points below their White counterparts in reading. Where is the collective outrage over these disparities? Who on the current school board is demanding improvement?

The racial problems of MMSD run long and deep: Issues of achievement, disproportionate assignment to special education, lack of access to honors and advanced placement classes, disproportionate levels of suspensions and expulsions, and disproportionate graduation rates (59% Black vs. 88% White). In the midst of this there is an inverse relationship between the percentage of teachers of color and that of students. Eighty-eight percent of the teachers are White in a district with a student population that is 43% White. And, we have had repeated instances of White teachers using racial epithets and other disrespect toward Black students and their parents (e.g. a White teacher mistakenly sent a text to a Black parent about how the parent and her child were so dumb).

African Americans in Madison have been more than patient when it comes to improving their status — education, employment, housing, and every other measure of health and well-being. There have been over 40 years of reports, task forces and initiatives. Post-pandemic Madison will be a “new” Madison. We have learned a lot in the midst of crisis. We know that far too many of our community members are one paycheck away from poverty — loss of housing, food, health care, childcare, schooling, etc. What is the place for African Americans in this new Madison?

Related, Madison K-12 experiments:

English 10

Small Learning Communities

Reading Recovery

Connected Math

Discovery Math

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

Linda Borg:

A settlement in a Detroit “right-to-read” lawsuit could have significant ramifications for a similar case filed by students in Rhode Island who are seeking to affirm their constitutional right to a civics education.

In the Detroit case, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer agreed on Thursday to pay $2.7 million to the Detroit schools for literacy programs. Whitmer also said she would submit legislation that would provide the Detroit public schools with an additional $94.4 million for more literacy programs. (The legislature would have to approve the additional spending).

Last month, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes the state of Michigan, dismissed the trial court’s decision and found that the plaintiffs, a group of Detroit students, had made a case for their suit to go forward.

In Rhode Island, the suit argues that Rhode Island students are being denied their constitutional right to a civics education.

During a hearing last year before U.S. District Court Judge William Smith, Michael Rebell, the students’ lawyer, argued that Rhode Island is failing its students by not instructing them in the values needed to participate in a democratic society.

Madison’s “illiteracy-to-incarceration pipeline”: Booked, but can’t read

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

Chris von Csefalvay:

In early March, British leaders planned to take a laissez-faire approach to the spread of the coronavirus. Officials would pursue “herd immunity,” allowing as many people in non-vulnerable categories to catch the virus in the hope that eventually it would stop spreading. But on March 16, a report from the Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team, led by noted epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, shocked the Cabinet of the United Kingdom into a complete reversal of its plans. Report 9, titled “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand,” used computational models to predict that, absent social distancing and other mitigation measures, Britain would suffer 500,000 deaths from the coronavirus. Even with mitigation measures in place, the report said, the epidemic “would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over.” The conclusions so alarmed Prime Minister Boris Johnson that he imposed a national quarantine.

Subsequent publication of the details of the computer model that the Imperial College team used to reach its conclusions raised eyebrows among epidemiologists and specialists in computational biology and presented some uncomfortable questions about model-driven decision-making. The Imperial College model itself appeared solid. As a spatial model, it divides the area of the U.K. into small cells, then simulates various processes of transmission, incubation, and recovery over each cell. It factors in a good deal of randomness. The model is typically run tens of thousands of times, and results are averaged—a technique commonly referred to as an ensemble model.

In a tweet sent in late March, Ferguson—then still one of the leading voices within the U.K.’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), tasked with handling the coronavirus crisis—stated that the model was implemented in “thousands of lines of undocumented” code written in C, a widely used and high-performing computing language. He refused to publish the original source code, and Imperial College has refused a Freedom of Information Act request for the original source, alleging that the public interest is not sufficiently compelling.

As Ferguson himself admits, the code was written 13 years ago, to model an influenza pandemic. This raises multiple questions: other than Ferguson’s reputation, what did the British government have at its disposal to assess the model and its implementation? How was the model validated, and what safeguards were implemented to ensure that it was correctly applied? The recent release of an improved version of the source code does not paint a favorable picture. The code is a tangled mess of undocumented steps, with no discernible overall structure. Even experienced developers would have to make a serious effort to understand it.

I’m a virologist, and modelling complex processes is part of my day-to-day work. It’s not uncommon to see long and complex code for predicting the movement of an infection in a population, but tools exist to structure and document code properly. The Imperial College effort suggests an incumbency effect: with their outstanding reputations, the college and Ferguson possessed an authority based solely on their own authority. The code on which they based their predictions would not pass a cursory review by a Ph.D. committee in computational epidemiology.

Related, Madison K-12 experiments:

English 10

Small Learning Communities

Reading Recovery

Connected Math

Discovery Math

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

Mckenna Kohlenberg:

For Black men in the contemporary age of mass incarceration, the consequences of functional illiteracy are devastating. 70% of America’s adult incarcerated population and 85% of juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate, which extends beyond the ability to read and includes the development of problem-solving and critical-thinking skills one needs to access knowledge, communicate, and participate effectively in political processes, the economy, higher education, and other 21st century exercises of democratic citizenship. Following decades of lawsuits seeking vindication of fundamental education rights through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the nation’s racialized illiteracy crisis persists and spurs little policy action. Mourning the dead horse but seeing no point in continuing to beat it, this Article argues that a different provision of the Fourteenth Amendment—the Citizenship Clause— authorizes and mandates Congress to guarantee a meaningful floor of adequate functional literacy instruction nationwide.

Coupled with Section 5 of the Amendment, the Citizenship Clause obligates the federal government to ensure that all national citizens have equal, full membership and the ability to participate in the national society. Grounding this inquiry into accountability, the case study of Madison, Wisconsin, demonstrates how the racialized illiteracy crisis precludes those without access to adequate functional literacy instruction from their constitutionally guaranteed national citizenship, particularly because early illiteracy leads to cyclical and accumulating negative outcomes that skyrocket the risk of incarceration and subsequently of disenfranchisement from voting and political processes.

This Article marries California State Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu’s account of “the social citizenship tradition in our constitutional heritage” with the seminal contemporary case Gary B. v. Snyder, wherein plaintiffs file federally and pick up the Equal Protection mantel to advance a fundamental right of access to functional literacy, and ultimately suggests that the country’s historic understanding of national citizenship and its substantive rights triggers a Congressional duty to ensure adequate access to functional literacy as a part of equal, national citizenship.

For in cities like Madison, reputationally progressive jewel of the state that denied Dred Scott his citizenship and citizen rights nearly two centuries ago, so too does the racialized illiteracy crisis lawfully disparage young Black men to non-citizen subjects and deny their access to democratic society today. If this academic year mirrors the past 12 in Madison, at least 85% of Black fourth graders currently attending the city’s public schools are four times more likely than their peers to drop out, and 2/3 will end up in prison or on welfare. If this academic year mirrors the past 12 in Madison, the vast majority of the 166 Black boys who began fourth grade in the city this past fall are now members of a discrete class that is more likely to spend time incarcerated than to become functionally literate in school. Coining this the age of the mass and disparate illiteracy-to-incarceration pipeline, this Article reinforces the reality that we have not ended the subjugation of Black men in America, we have merely found yet another away to disguise it.

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

Liz Mineo:

GAZETTE: Your article says that homeschooling in its current unregulated form represents a danger to both children and society. What evidence do you have to support that?

BARTHOLET: One is the danger of child maltreatment, and we have evidence that there is a strong connection between homeschooling and maltreatment, which I describe in my article. Other dangers are that children are simply not learning basic academic skills or learning about the most basic democratic values of our society or getting the kind of exposure to alternative views that enables them to exercise meaningful choice about their future lives. Many homeschooling parents are extreme ideologues, committed to raising their children within their belief systems isolated from any societal influence. Some believe that black people are inferior to white people and others that women should be subject to men and not educated for careers but instead raised to serve their fathers first and then their husbands. The danger is both to these children and to society. The children may not have the chance to choose for themselves whether to exit these ideological communities; society may not have the chance to teach them values important to the larger community, such as tolerance of other people’s views and values.

GAZETTE: Given the current circumstances, with schools canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, many parents are homeschooling their kids. Does this massive shift to homeschooling pose any risks for children?

“The homeschooling lobby may be even more powerful than the gun lobby today, because at least with the gun lobby we see a lot of pushback. When it comes to homeschooling, the victims are all children so it’s harder to mount a political movement.”

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

Public Counsel:

A historic agreement was reached today between the plaintiffs and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the Gary B. v. Whitmer literacy suit. The agreement will preserve a groundbreaking opinion by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals which held that a basic minimum education, including literacy, is a Constitutional right, and includes an immediate infusion of resources to improve literacy education for public school students in Detroit, with a long term commitment from Governor Whitmer to secure more funding.

Read the Settlement HERE. Second settlement link.

“This is what the force of history looks like. Almost 66 years to the day that Brown v. Board of Education was decided, the Detroit community and Governor Whitmer forged a historic settlement recognizing the constitutional right of access to literacy,” said Mark Rosenbaum, Director of Public Counsel Opportunity Under Law. “By accepting the Court’s decision that a minimum basic education is a foundational requirement for full participation in our democracy, Governor Whitmer is acknowledging that no child should be denied his or her right to fully pursue the American Dream based on the color of their skin or their family’s income. While there is much work left to be done, today’s settlement paves the way for the State of Michigan to fulfill its moral obligation to provide equal educational opportunities to children that have been denied a fair shake for far too long. This victory is their victory, and in this moment the children and their families and the teachers of Detroit have taught a nation what it means to fight for justice and win.”

Todd Spangler and Meredith Spelbring:

The State of Michigan has reached a settlement with a group of Detroit Public School students who argued they were denied basic literary skills and won a landmark federal appeals court ruling last month that found a “basic minimum education to be a fundamental right.”

As part of the settlement details announced Thursday afternoon, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said she would:

1. Propose legislation before her first term ends that would provide Detroit Public Schools with at least $94.4 million for literacy programs.
2. Provide $280,000 to the seven students, some of whom are no longer in school, to participate in what the governor’s office called high-quality literacy programs with the funds held for that purpose by the Detroit Public Schools Foundation.
3. Send an additional $2.7 million to Detroit schools to support literacy efforts.Have the state Department of Education advise school districts across the state on how best to access literacy programs to improve reading proficiency and reduce economic, racial and ethnic disparities.

HUGE. The Sixth Circuit Court of appeals has confirmed that students have a basic right literacy under the U.S. Constitution—and that Detroit children have plausibly alleged they were denied that right.

I’m beyond proud to have filed a brief for the @CityofDetroit in this case.

— Eli Savit (@EliNSavit) April 23, 2020

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

Seth Saavedra:

On a union blog, MTEA president Amy Mizialko writes that MTEA is using the COVID-19 crisis to “strip back what has been wrongly imposed on our students—relentless standardized testing, scripted curriculum, one-size-fits-all online interventions.”

When asked if the “union’s insistence that its members not be required to work during the first three weeks of the shutdown may have contributed to MPS’ delays” she did not address that criticism directly. Instead she demurred, “We were finding our way with our families and students in something that was unprecedented.”

Not lack of enthusiasm and optimism isn’t shared by all MPS teachers.

Angela Harris, a first-grade teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. School and member of the Black Educators Caucus is frustrated by the delay, “I’m not saying we should have transitioned on day one. The biggest concern was the lack of planning and direction moving forward. Teachers could have been encouraged in those first three weeks to start identifying families who might be in need (of technology).”

One thing to note: Angela is much more representative of MPS students than the MTEA as about 71 percent of MPS teachers are White. Many suspect this disparity is why, when music programs were being shut for African American students, the MTEA remained silent while the Black Caucus spoke out, as they are now.

WEAC: $1.57 Million for four Wisconsin Senators.

My question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on teacher mulligans and our disastrous reading results.

Max Eden:

This June, pandemic conditions permitting, Harvard University will host a conference—not open to the public—to discuss the purported dangers of homeschooling and strategies for legal reform. The co-organizer, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, believes that homeschooling should be banned, as it is “a realm of near-absolute parental power. . . . inconsistent with a proper understanding of the human rights of children.” The conference has caused a stir on social media, owing to a profile of Bartholet in Harvard magazine, accompanied by a cartoon of a forlorn-looking girl behind the barred windows of a house made out of books titled, “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Bible.”

Harvard claims, based on a Bartholet law review article, that as many as 90 percent of homeschoolers are “driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture.” But Bartholet’s research falls short of supporting this observation. In fact, we know strikingly little about homeschooling families. A 2013 review of the academic literature noted that, while academics assume that conservative Christians make up the largest subset of homeschoolers, “whether this percentage is two-thirds, one-half, or less is a matter of speculation.”

To support her claim that as many as 90 percent of homeschoolers are motivated by conservative Christian beliefs, Bartholet cites two primary sources. One is a survey by Cardus Education Group, which, she notes, “reveals 70 percent [of homeschoolers] in the religious category vs. the nonreligious category.” But that survey categorizes students as “religious homeschoolers” if their mother attends church once a month. Bartholet’s other source is a survey by the Department of Education, which asked parents about their motivation for homeschooling. Only 16 percent said religious considerations were of primary importance (compared with 34 percent who cited safety and 35 percent who listed academic or special-needs considerations). Fifty-one percent said that religion was important, while 80 percent said that safety was important. It’s reasonable to conclude from these data that most homeschool parents are religious—but empirically false to claim that as many as 90 percent are conservative Christians who wish to shield their children from mass culture.

Some, to be sure, fit this description. But before making judgments about them, academics might first try to understand them. Stanford University professor Mitchell Stevens, for example, published an inquiry into the culture of homeschooling that the New York Review of Books commended for taking readers beyond media-driven stereotypes. Bartholet does not cite Mitchell’s book. She does, however, manage to fit into a single footnote references to Gawker, Bitch Media, and an anonymous blog with a defunct URL. Her law review article contains several anecdotes about homeschooling families who teach female subservience or white supremacy, but she makes no effort to quantify this phenomenon, or to demonstrate her contention that “homeschooling to promote racist ideologies and avoid racial intermingling” is a common motivation, beyond the case of a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who homeschooled his son for that reason.

It would be useful to know how homeschooled students perform academically compared with their public school counterparts. A 2017 literature review, focusing only on peer-reviewed articles, found that the majority of studies showed positive academic, social and emotional, and long-term life outcomes. Bartholet dismisses much of this literature, noting that it tends to focus on a not necessarily representative sample of homeschoolers who “emerge from isolation to do things like take standardized tests.”

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.

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

Under your leadership, the Wisconsin d.p.i. granted Mulligan’s to thousands of elementary teachers who couldn’t pass a reading exam (that’s the “Foundations of Reading” elementary teacher reading content knowledge exam), yet our students lag Alabama, a state that spends less and has fewer teachers per students.

What message are we sending to parents, citizens, taxpayers and those students (who lack proficiency).

It is rather remarkable that Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results have remained litigation free.

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALSFOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT, via a kind reader:

“The recognition of a fundamental right is no small matter. This is particularly true when the right in question is something that the state must affirmatively provide. But just as this Court should not supplant the state’s policy judgments with its own, neither can we shrink from our obligation to recognize a right when it is foundational to our system of self-governance.

Access to literacy is such a right. Its ubiquitous presence and evolution through our history has led the American people universally to expect it. And education—at least in the minimum form discussed here—is essential to nearly every interaction between a citizen and her government. Education has long been viewed as a great equalizer, giving all children a chance to meet or outperform society’s expectations, even when faced with substantial disparities in wealth and with past and ongoing racial inequality.

Where, as Plaintiffs allege here, a group of children is relegated to a school system that does not provide even a plausible chance to attain literacy, we hold that the Constitution provides them with a remedy. Accordingly, while the current versions of Plaintiffs’ equal protection and compulsory attendance claims were appropriately dismissed, the district court erred in denying their central claim: that Plaintiffs have a fundamental right to a basic minimum education, meaning one that can provide them with a foundational level of literacy.”

Michigan Advance:

“We respect everything the Governor has, and is, trying to do for traditional public education throughout the state and in Detroit. However, it is time for her to stop listening to her attorneys and rely on her instincts. She knows the state was wrong,” Vitti said. 

Whitmer spokesperson Tiffany Brown said the office is reviewing the court’s decision.

“Although certain members of the State Board of Education challenged the lower court decision that students did not have a right to read, the Governor did not challenge that ruling on the merits,” Brown said in an email. “We’ve also regularly reinforced that the governor has a strong record on education and has always believed we have a responsibility to teach every child to read.”

Attorney General Dana Nessel has supported the students and filed an amicus brief stating that she believes basic education should be a fundamental right. However, the brief was rejected by the court, which noted attorneys from her office are representing the state. 

Nessel praised the court’s decision Thursday.  

“I am overjoyed with the Court’s decision recognizing that the Constitution guarantees a right to a basic minimum education,” Nessel said. “This recognition is the only way to guarantee that students who are required to attend school will actually have a teacher, adequate educational materials, and a physical environment that does not subject them to filth, unsafe drinking water and physical danger. Education is a gateway to exercising other fundamental rights such as free speech and the right to citizenship, it is essential in order to function in today’s complex society, and it is a necessary vehicle to empower individuals to rise above circumstances that have been foisted on them through no fault of their own.”

Detroit Mayor Duggan also praised the ruling, calling it a “major step forward.”

“Literacy is something every child should have a fair chance to attain. We hope instead of filing another appeal, the parties sit down and focus on how to make literacy available to every child in Michigan,” Duggan said. 

Helen Moore, a Detroit resident who has been vocal in her support for the plaintiffs, told the Advance Thursday, “It’s been a long time coming and finally, we may see justice for our Black and Brown children. The court was right.”

Appeals court finds Constitutional right to literacy for schoolchildren in Detroit case:

The ruling comes in a 2016 lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of students from some of Detroit’s lowest-performing public schools. The crux of their complaint was that without basic literacy, they cannot access other Constitutionally guaranteed rights such as voting, serving in the military and on juries.

“It’s a thrilling and just result,” said Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer who represents the students. “It’s an historic day for Detroit.”

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.

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

Under your leadership, the Wisconsin d.p.i. granted Mulligan’s to thousands of elementary teachers who couldn’t pass a reading exam (that’s the “Foundations of Reading” elementary teacher reading content knowledge exam), yet our students lag Alabama, a state that spends less and has fewer teachers per students.

What message are we sending to parents, citizens, taxpayers and those students (who lack proficiency).

It is rather remarkable that Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results have remained litigation free.

Riley Vetterkind:

The first case argues Evers violated the state Constitution by fundamentally altering the Legislature’s policies in the state budget, usurping a power not given to the governor in the Constitution. WILL contends Evers, in approving the state budget passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature with several partial vetoes, stripped the appropriation bill of integral language and therefore violated the principle in the state Constitution that “legislative power shall be vested in the Senate and Assembly.”

The four vetoes

WILL is targeting four of the 78 partial vetoes Evers made to the state budget when he signed it in early July. The vetoes:

Second case

The second case challenges two of Walker’s partial vetoes in the 2017-19 budget. The first was one that effectively suspended a law until 1,000 years later, in 3018, that would have allowed school districts to raise the legally imposed ceiling on how much revenue they can collect for spending on projects to increase energy efficiency. The budget bill the Legislature signed placed a one-year moratorium on the project until Dec. 31, 2018. Walker struck the “1” in December 31 and the comma and “2” following it and connected the remaining language together to arrive at “December 3018.”

Related: Volkswagen agrees to build massive US charging station network as part of the “dieselgate” settlement.

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

Luca Vebber:

For example, bureaucrats published an entirely new licensing scheme for “real estate appraisal management companies.”[2] That rule has been in the works for almost two years, did we really need to wait until the middle of a healthcare emergency to publish it? I am willing to make the bold prediction that our state would survive just fine without it for another month or two without this new license. This week, DATCP announced a 20% across the board fee increase on labs that test food, water and milk.[3] Their rationale? The fees had not been increased since 2008, so it was time to raise them. Why on earth would anyone think this is a good idea in the middle of the current emergency?

There are other reasons why Wisconsin should press “pause” on all non-essential regulatory changes. Mainly, the lack of transparency and oversight. As Wisconsinites worry about their families and ensuring they can put food on the table, they should not also be expected to maintain a robust oversight over an ever-growing regulatory behemoth.

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

Briana Reilly:

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers is calling on lawmakers to use $250 million in newly projected surplus dollars to bolster K-12 funding through school-based mental health services and special education aid in districts across the state.

The former state schools superintendent, who signed an executive order Thursday ordering a legislative special session to act on the sweeping plan, also aims to restore the state’s commitment to fund two-thirds of what’s required to educate students and direct $130 million of the funds for property tax relief through the state’s equalization aid formula. 

The push comes after recent revenue projections show Wisconsin is expected to see $452 million more in its general fund to end the biennium than previously anticipated, opening up a discussion about how the state should spend the extra money. 

Republicans have advocated for spending some of the funding on tax relief. But Evers in a state Capitol news conference Thursday said his proposal would both lower property taxes and “invest in our kids,” adding: “We can do both.” 

“We need to help around the issue of rising property taxes. We get that,” he said. “Investing in our schools will do that.”

Democratic leaders Sen. Jennifer Shilling and Rep. Gordon Hintz applauded the effort in a statement, saying the investment would give kids better opportunities and give a boost to Wisconsin’s education system. 

“We need to ensure we are retaining quality teachers, investing in modern facilities and meeting high education standards to give students the best chance at getting ahead,” Shilling, D-La Crosse, said. “We need to put our money where our mouth is if we want to re-establish Wisconsin’s reputation as a leader in K-12 education.” 

But GOP legislative leaders were skeptical of the idea, with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald taking to Twitter to knock the proposal as one driven by teachers’ unions that are “calling all the shots in the East Wing.” 

The Wisconsin DPI, long lead by Governor Tony Evers, has granted mulligans to thousands of teachers who failed to pass this reading content knowledge examination.

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

The Foundations of Reading, Wisconsin’s one elementary reading teacher content knowledge requirement is (was) an attempt to improve our K-12 students’ disastrous reading results.

Readers may find the Foundations of Reading results of interest (2.4MB xlsx). (3 February 2020: link updated to remove partial ss identifiers, via a kind DPI message).

The test is based on Massachusetts’ successful MTEL teacher content knowledge examination.

The Wisconsin DPI, long lead by Governor Tony Evers, has granted mulligans to thousands of teachers who failed to pass this reading content knowledge examination.

The information was obtained via an open records request to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

WILL:

Waukesha Circuit Court Judge Bohren issued a summary judgement order Tuesday in favor of School Choice Wisconsin Action (SCWA), a WILL client, that sued the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), the state education agency, for their unfair, illegal treatment of private schools in Wisconsin’s choice programs. WILL filed the lawsuit on behalf of SCWA in March after DPI denied private choice schools the opportunity to fully utilize online, virtual learning as part of classroom instruction.

Judge Bohren wrote in his decision, “There is not a legitimate government interest in denying Choice Schools the opportunity to use “virtual learning” as Public schools do. The denial is harmful to the Choice Schools and its students.”

The Quotes: Libby Sobic, Director of Education Policy at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty said, “Today, the Waukesha Circuit Court ruled that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction broke the law when it denied private schools in the choice program the opportunity to fully utilize online learning as part of classroom instruction. For too long, DPI has been unfair in their treatment of private schools in Wisconsin’s choice programs and today’s decision affirms that when they break the law, they will be held accountable.”

Terry Brown, Chair of School Choice Wisconsin Action said, “State statutes are created and changed by elected officials accountable directly to the public. State agencies run by unelected bureaucrats are not allowed to modify or interpret those laws without legislative oversight.”

Nygren and Thiesfeldt Call for Audit of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

Long overdue. An “emphasis on adult employment.”

The Wisconsin DPI, long lead by our new Governor, Tony Evers, has granted thousands of mulligans to elementary reading teachers unable to pass a content knowledge examination. This exam, the Foundations of Reading is identical to the highly successful Massachusetts’ MTEL teacher requirement.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Wisconsin Legislature:

–State Representative John Nygren (R-Marinette), Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on Finance and State Representative Jeremy (R-Fond du Lac), Chair of the Assembly Education Committee released the following statement calling for an audit of the Department of Public Instruction:

“Representing nearly one-fifth of the entire state budget, the Department of Public Instruction budget has increased by nearly $3 billion since 2012,” said Rep. Nygren. “Despite providing more resources than ever for public schools, student achievement in reading, unfortunately, continues to decline.”

“Wisconsin’s overall test scores are headed in the wrong direction. Especially concerning is the downward trend in reading scores, the core of education attainment,” said Rep. Thiesfeldt. “Recent Forward Exam results show that 60% of Wisconsin students cannot read or write at grade level. Taxpayers and students deserve better.”

The proposed audit would examine approaches to reading instruction and resulting student achievement. Specifically, LAB would examine methods of reading instruction utilized in Wisconsin’s schools, the impact of the Foundations of Reading Test on teacher licensure, and whether DPI consistently measures student achievement. A similar audit was conducted in 1998.

“Given the significant level of taxpayer resources dedicated to education, the need for oversight and accountability could not be clearer,” said Reps. Nygren and Thiesfeldt. “It is our hope that this audit will provide long overdue oversight of funding provided to DPI and help inform legislative action to improve student outcomes.”

Long overdue. An “emphasis on adult employment.”

The Wisconsin DPI, long lead by our new Governor, Tony Evers, has granted thousands of mulligans to elementary reading teachers unable to pass a content knowledge examination. This exam, the Foundations of Reading is identical to the highly successful Massachusetts’ MTEL teacher requirement.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:

State Superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor announced her decision today not to run in the 2021 election for state superintendent of public instruction. Gov. Tony Evers appointed Stanford Taylor to the office in January 2019, and her term ends July 2021.

“I am honored to have been appointed by Governor Evers to lead the Department of Public Instruction and will always be grateful to the governor for the trust he placed in naming me as his successor,” Stanford Taylor said. “I promised Governor Evers I would commit to completing the 2 1/2 years left in his term as state superintendent and to continue the work we had started together at the DPI, and I will maintain that commitment while I serve this office.”

Stanford Taylor says she is making her decision public at this time so others interested in being the state’s chief education officer and leading the department will have sufficient time to organize their campaigns. The state superintendent says she hopes her successor will continue to maintain a focus on educational equity and ensure all of Wisconsin’s students graduate college and career ready.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, long lead by our new Governor, Tony Evers, has granted thousands of mulligans to elementary reading teachers unable to pass the Foundations of Reading content knowledge examination (based on Massachusetts MTEL).

Mark Seidenberg:

Lucy Calkins has written a manifesto entitled “No One Gets To Own The Term ‘Science Of Reading’”. I am a scientist who studies reading.  Her document is not about the science that I know; it is about Lucy Calkins. Ms. Calkins is a prolific pedagogical entrepreneur who has published numerous curricula and supporting materials for teaching reading and writing to children. She is among the most successful, influential reading educators in this country. According to an EdWeek survey published this week, hers is among the 5 most commonly used reading curricula in the country.

The purpose of the document is to protect her brand, her market share, and her standing among her many followers.  Ms. Calkins is not interested in examining the educational implications of reading science.  She is interested in co-opting the term so that the science cannot be used to discredit her products.

Ms. Calkins has reason to be feeling defensive. As everyone knows, our schools routinely fail at teaching large numbers of children to become skilled readers. The 2019 NAEP scores released in October were even worse than usual: reading scores declined in more than half the states; the black-white achievement gap didn’t change because scores for both groups decreased in parallel. As on every round since 1992, fewer than half of 4th and 8th graders in the nationally-representative sample read above a basic level.  The story is the same on the most recent data from the PISA, the big international reading assessment.

The educational establishment is complicit in these outcomes. Teachers are underprepared for a difficult job. They learn grossly out of date information about how reading works and how children learn, stories that are contradicted by basic research in cognitive science and neuroscience.  They are encouraged to use ineffective practices that make it harder for children to become skilled readers, especially those at risk for other reasons such as poverty. This has been the situation for several decades. I documented this history in my book.

Many people–for example, the families of children who struggle with reading; teachers who don’t buy the party line; citizens who are concerned about whether there are enough literate people to run a democracy, distinguish facts from “alternative facts”, or save the planet–are fed up with the educational establishment’s chronic stone-walling. They’re angry, and they’re organizing.

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

Emily Hanford comments.

A Capitol conversation on Wisconsin’s reading challenges.

Emily Hanford:

“Thank God for Mississippi.”

That’s a phrase people would use when national education rankings came out because no matter how poorly your state performed, you could be sure things were worse in Mississippi.

Not anymore. New results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure fourth- and eighth-grade achievement in reading and math, show that Mississippi made more progress than any other state.

The state’s performance in reading was especially notable. Mississippi was the only state in the nation to post significant gains on the fourth-grade reading test. Fourth graders in Mississippi are now on par with the national average, reading as well or better than pupils in California, Texas, Michigan and 18 other states.

What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has granted thousands of mulligans to elementary reading teachers who cannot pass the “Foundations of Reading” content knowledge exam. The FORT is based on Massachusetts’ highly successful MTEL requirements.

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

Jenny Anderson:

In the US, 13.5% of 15-year-olds can distinguish between fact and opinion when trying to interpret a complex reading task. In the UK, it’s just 11.5%.

In the US, 13.5% of 15-year-olds can distinguish between fact and opinion when trying to interpret a complex reading task. In the UK, it’s just 11.5%.

Those results are both better than the OECD average of 9%, according to the latest results of PISA, or the Programme for International Student Assessment, an international test of math, science, and reading which is administered by the OECD every three years.

“The world continues to change but education systems have a hard time keeping up,” said Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD’s education unit.

Like in previous years, the top performers hailed from Asia. China 1 and Singapore scored significantly higher in reading than all the other places that participated in the latest test.

“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

Dana Goldstein:

The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe. 

And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. Although the top quarter of American students have improved their performance on the exam since 2012, the bottom 10th percentile lost ground, according to an analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency. 

The disappointing results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, were announced on Tuesday and follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an American test that recently showed that two-thirds of children were not proficient readers. 

Over all, American 15-year-olds who took the PISA test scored slightly above students from peer nations in reading but below the middle of the pack in math.

My question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and Our Disastrous Reading Results.

“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”

Daniel Willingham:

American students remain stumped by math. The 2019 scores for the National Assessment of Educational Progress test — known as NAEP — were published last month, showing that performance for fourth- and eighth-graders hasn’t budged since 2009. That’s a year after the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, convened by President George W. Bush, concluded that American math achievement was “mediocre.”

The panel offered dozens of ideas for improvement, leading with the common-sense suggestion to strengthen the elementary math curriculum, which it deemed diffuse, shallow and repetitious in many schools. But improved curricula won’t help unless we acknowledge another significant problem: Many elementary teachers don’t understand math very well, and teaching it makes them anxious.

Consider why American kids struggle. Mathematical competence depends on three types of knowledge: having memorized a small set of math facts (like the times table), knowing standard algorithms to solve standard problems (like long division), and understanding why algorithms work (knowing why the standard method of solving long division problems yields the correct answer).

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has granted thousands of mulligans to elementary reading teachers who cannot pass the “Foundations of Reading” content knowledge exam. The FORT is based on Massachusetts’ highly successful MTEL requirements.

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

Matthew Ladner:

While last week’s NAEP news was glum nationwide, Mississippi students performed relatively well. You have to dig into the details to see just how well.

First, a bit of backstory.

Mississippi is one of the nation’s poorest states and has the largest African-American student population in the country. The state has ranked at or near the bottom on NAEP scores for many years. Over the past decade, policymakers have adopted several K-12 policies familiar to Floridians: A-F letter grades for schools, a strong emphasis on early literacy, a charter school law and an education savings account program for students with disabilities.

The state’s choice sector went from non-existent to nascent in recent years, although it’s not yet at a scale where it can play more than a complimentary role to the public education system. Yet based on this year’s NAEP, as seen in this crosstab of student race/ethnicity on fourth-grade reading, something seems to have gone very right.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin continues to address its long term, disastrous reading results by granting thousands of mulligans to elementary reading teachers.

Wall Street Journal:

The highest-achieving students are doing better and the lowest are doing worse than a decade ago. That’s one depressing revelation from the latest Nation’s Report Card that details how America’s union-run public schools are flunking.

The results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is administered to students around the country every two years, were published on Wednesday. There isn’t much to cheer. Only 35% of fourth graders rated proficient in reading, which is about the same as in 2009. Worse, students have backslid in reading over the last two years.

While median math and reading scores have stayed about the same over the last decade, achievement gaps are increasing. Since 2009 scores for the lowest 10% of students fell by about as much as they improved for the top 10%. The 90th percentile of eighth graders in math scored about four points higher while the bottom tenth scored five points lower.

The teachers unions’ answer to every education deficit is more spending. But between 2012 and 2017—the last year of available Census Bureau data—average per-pupil education spending increased by 15%. Spending has been growing at an even faster clip over the last couple of years as government revenue has recovered from the recession.

States that are spending more haven’t shown improvement. In California annual K-12 spending has increased by more than half since 2013 to $102 billion. Yet student test scores have been flat since 2013. It’s a similar story in New York, Illinois and New Jersey where Democrats have raised taxes for schools.

THE PRICE OF WISCONSIN’S ELEMENTARY READING TEACHER MULLIGANS.

Wisconsin’s new Governor, Democrat Tony Evers, recently acknowledged his support for thousands of elementary reading teacher content knowledge exam mulligans.

Now comes Politifact:

As proof, Thiesfeldt’s staff pointed to the most recent Wisconsin Student Assessment System results. The annual tests include the Forward Exam for grades three to eight and ACT-related tests for grades nine to 11.

In the 2018-19 tests, 39.3% of students were rated as proficient or advanced in English Language Arts, and 40.1% reached those levels for math, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

For starters, calling 60% the “vast majority” is overstating things quite a bit.

But let’s focus on the “grade level” part of Thiesfeldt’s claim. Is it reasonable to say anyone below proficient is also below grade level?

Wisconsin Reading Coalition:

Politifact is correct to say that proficiency on state txams don not necessarily align with grade level performance, a nebulous term which means different things at different times in different contexts. This means Representative Jeremy Thiesfeldt was technically incorrect when he equated the two during a radio interview.

Technically.

But Thiesfeldt was not being technical. He was not having a conversation about psychometrics and cut-scores, how to set them and how to anchor them from one year to the next so scores can be compared over time. He was making the point that we’re not doing very well. He was pointing to the bar and making sure we know how few students get over it. We can forgive him If that complex story is hard to tell in the kind of one sentence sound bites the media both requires and then dissects.

It might help to know that before 2013, before we were required to set our categorical cut-scores for proficient. advanced, etc., at new, more rigorous levels aligned with national standards.

Wisconsin set them at laughably low levels. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel missed this part of the story when it reviewed

The Wisconsin Department of Public instruction, long lead by our new Governor, Tony Evers, has waived thousands of elementary teacher reading content knowledge requirements (Foundations of Reading, based on Massachusetts’ best in the States MTEL requirement)

“the majority of ALL 11th-grade students in Madison read and write below basic proficiency. Translated: they are functionally illiterate.

“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”.

More on our long term, disastrous reading results, here.

“an emphasis on adult employment”.

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

Alan Borsuk:

The council on teacher quality is clearly correct that there’s been a national retreat from once-touted ways of improving teachers. Is that good or bad? The answer might lie in states such as Wisconsin and in finding out whether easing up on high-stakes judging of teachers brings more cooperation and success — or not much real change.

Related: The Wisconsin DPI, long lead by our new Governor, Tony Evers, has granted thousands Of elementary reading teacher mulligans.

This, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Matthew Ladner:

Americans thus seem to see their public education system as falling short in a variety of ways and aren’t especially optimistic about future improvement. Republicans exhibited the greatest amount of optimism, with 24 percent forecasting that the American public school system would be a “model of excellence around the world” in 20 years. Only 13 percent of Democrats and 3 percent of Independents were similarly optimistic. You, as a regular RedefinED reader are more aware of looming challenges lying ahead in the next two decades than most.

Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the future of public education? Mixed results across states seems like the most likely outcome and “a model of excellence around the world” is not as far off as it may sound.

Massachusetts, the highest scoring state on NAEP, compares well to Asian and European systems on international exams. Stanford scholar Sean F. Reardon’s new data source, for instance, equates state scores to NAEP. When I ran the numbers for my home state of Arizona, I found far more variation within my state than between states. I also, however, found several Arizona districts (and the charter schools operating within their boundaries) that compare favorably to the average performance in Massachusetts:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, long lead by our new Governor, Tony Evers, has granted thousands of elementary reading teacher mulligans to those who failed to pass the “Foundations of Reading” content knowledge exam.

Based on Massachusetts’ successful MTEL teacher content knowledge requirements, the Foundations of Reading was intended to reverse our long term, disastrous reading results.

Associated Press:

MADISON – Democratic Gov. Tony Evers will kill a contentious plan to punish students who disrupt free speech on University of Wisconsin System campuses, his spokeswoman said Friday as system regents took another step toward implementing the policy.

The regents in 2017 adopted a Republican-backed policy declaring students who twice disrupt others’ free speech would be suspended for at least a semester. Three-time offenders would be expelled.

The policy mirrors a bill Republicans introduced that legislative session after protests disrupted conservative speakers on college campuses around the country, including conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s appearance at UW-Madison in November 2016.

The measure died in the Senate, but the regents pushed ahead with the concept as a policy. Evers, serving as a regent in 2017 due to his position then as state schools superintendent, cast the lone dissenting vote against the policy, warning it would have a chilling effect on free speech.

The policy hasn’t gone into effect because the regents haven’t updated system rules to incorporate it. The regents took a step closer on Friday, voting during a meeting at UW-Superior to authorize a scope statement outlining the changes. The move authorizes system staff to update the rules to incorporate the policy.

The final rule language likely won’t be ready until spring. The regents plan to hold a public hearing on the terminology before signing off and sending the language to Evers for his approval. The governor’s spokeswoman, Melissa Baldauff, said that the governor would kill the proposal and that there’s no mechanism for Republican legislators to override him.

“His position hasn’t changed on it,” Baldauff said. “He didn’t approve of it when he was on the Board of Regents, and he still disagrees with the policy.”

Related: Governor Evers on Wisconsin DPI Teacher Mulligans.

Molly Beck:

Less than half of Wisconsin students again this year are considered to be proficient in reading and math — a trend Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Thursday called “disturbing.”

The percentage of students in public and private voucher schools scoring well in reading and math on state tests dropped slightly during the 2018-19 school year, from 41% in both areas to 40% in math and 39% in reading.

“These test scores are a cause for concern for parents, educators and taxpayers,” Vos said, in a statement on the annual release of state test scores by the state Department of Public Instruction. “While standardized tests don’t reflect everything that’s happening in the classroom, these scores reveal a disturbing decline.”

Vos also questioned how recent increases in K-12 funding have been spent given students’ scores on state tests, which were crafted by an agency run by Gov. Tony Evers until January when he left his position as state superintendent.

“Wisconsin students deserve an excellent education no matter where they attend school,” he said. “With the repeated increases in funding for K-12 education, taxpayers deserve to know why we’re not seeing better results.”

Vos rejected a state budget proposal this year from Evers that included $1.4 billion in new funding for public and private voucher schools and changed the state funding formula to provide more money to schools with students who live in poverty — a characteristic of students who generally score poorly on state tests.

The Republican-backed budget ultimately included an increase in funding — $500 million in additional funds for schools. Evers then used his broad veto authority to add about $65 million more for schools.

Related: 2011: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges.

2012: Wisconsin Act 166.

2015: Foundations of Reading Teacher Exam Results 2017 update.

2019: Mulligans for Wisconsin Elementary Reading Teachers.

2019: A bill is circulating in both houses of the Wisconsin legislature that would permanently exempt special education teachers from having to pass the Foundations of Reading Test (FORT).

Sarah Kramer:

To that end, Tom does everything necessary to make sure the people that Harris Funeral Homes serves feel welcome. He sweeps the floors, plants flowers, shovels snow, and changes lightbulbs. Many times he will be the one to open the door and greet you with a smile as you walk into the funeral home.

Tom also follows up with each customer, calling to ask how they are doing and if he can help them in any way. And he really means it. At one point, a widow confided in Tom that she had no way to get to the grocery store. Tom promptly sent one of his employees to buy her groceries.

Tom is also continually looking for ways to improve the business and provide the best service possible. This includes everything from the smallest details, such as leaving a rose when a body is removed, to offering a grief counseling program for those who need it. Harris Funeral Homes also hosts an angel tree service every Christmas to honor those who died in the past year – which many families attend.

This level of service is what sets Harris Funeral Homes apart.

In 2011, Harris Funeral Homes was recognized by Preferred Funeral Directors International with the Parker Award for exemplary service. And in 2016, the Harris location in Livonia, Michigan was recognized as the best hometown funeral home in the local newspaper.

The Wisconsin DPI has waived thousands of elementary reading teacher content knowledge requirements. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Jenny Peek:

Mark Seidenberg, a UW-Madison professor and cognitive neuroscientist, has spent decades researching the way humans acquire language. He is blunt about Wisconsin’s schools’ ability to teach children to read: “If you want your kid to learn to read you can’t assume that the school’s going to take care of it. You have to take care of it outside of the school, if there’s someone in the home who can do it or if you have enough money to pay for a tutor or learning center.”

Theresa Morateck, literacy coordinator for the district, says the word “balanced” is one that’s been wrestled with for many years in the reading world.

“I think my perspective and the perspective of Madison currently is that balanced means that you’re providing time to explicitly teach those foundational skills, but also that’s not the end-all be-all of your program,” Morateck says.

According to the district, students in elementary school get 120 minutes of daily literacy instruction.

Lisa Kvistad, the district’s assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, lays out what those two hours look like for kindergarten, first and second grade. For 30 minutes, students focus on foundational skills including print awareness (the difference between letters, words and punctuation), phonemic awareness (the ability to hear, identify and make individual sounds), and phonics (correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters).

Then teachers move into a 15-minute group lesson on a topic the class is focusing on. That’s followed by a workshop in which students are broken up into different groups for 20 to 40 minutes.

In these workshops, says Kvistad, “students are in varying groups and approaching literacy acquisition through opportunities to work with the teacher, read independently, and engage in word study.”

That independent learning allows students to choose books at their assessed skill level, Kvistad says. The district also offers a supplemental online program called Lexia for students who want to work on phonics.

At the end of the workshop, teachers bring students together again to connect their independent or small group study with the mini-lesson they started with.

After reading, 30 to 50 minutes are dedicated to writing, which is also done in a workshop model. The 120 minutes are rounded out by about 20 minutes of “speaking, listening and handwriting.”

For third, fourth and fifth graders, the 120-minute block looks similar, except no time is spent on foundational skills — except for the continued ability to use Lexia.

Kvistad explains that getting the right balance of foundational skills and exposure to grade-level curriculum is an art.

“There’s always a temptation to do more phonics,” Kvistad says. But she says there are drawbacks to that: “Those little ones never get a chance to access grade level curriculum, to engage in rich dialogue with the students in class, to have experience with grade-level vocabulary.”

But for those who advocate for a purely science-based approach to teaching reading, children need to master foundational reading skills before they have any hope of progressing to the more advanced skills that are emphasized with balanced literacy.

Steven Dykstra of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, an organization that advocates for science-based reading instruction, pulls no punches, calling balanced literacy the “current name for the bad way to teach reading.” He says it evolved from “whole language,” a now-discredited type of instruction.

“In whole language you would have taught no phonics, and when you read books with kids you would have taught them to guess and use pictures,” Dykstra says. “In balanced literacy you teach some phonics, but when you sit and read a book you still give priority to guessing and pictures as a way to identify words. And you resort to phonics as a last resort.”

The UW’s Seidenberg explores the complex science of reading in his book Language at the Speed of Sight.

“What happens when you become a skilled reader is that your knowledge of print and your knowledge of spoken language become deeply integrated in behavior and in the brain,” he tells Isthmus. “So that when you are successful at becoming a reader you have this close, intimate relationship between print and sound.”

Related:

2018: “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”.

“Plenty of resources”. Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, between $18 to 20K per student, depending on the district documents one reviews.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

THE PRICE OF TEACHER MULLIGANS: “I DIDN’T STOP TO ASK MYSELF THEN WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO ALL THE KIDS WHO’D BEEN LEFT IN THE BASEMENT WITH THE TEACHER WHO COULDN’T TEACH”
– MICHELLE OBAMA.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has granted thousands of elementary teacher reading content knowledge waivers.

Wisconsin elementary teachers are, by law, required to pass the Foundations of Reading exam. This requirement – our only teacher content knowledge imperative – is based on Massachusetts’ highly successful MTEL initiative.

An emphasis on adult employment.

Kevin Currie-Knight:

Imagine a US state where locksmiths, pastoral counselors, home security companies, and acupuncturists do not have to be licensed by the government to do business. They could pursue certification with a private organization if they wanted to, but they could decide not to as well. Would chaos ensue?

Recently, the state legislature in my home state of North Carolina approved draft legislation that would undo licensing requirements for 15 professions, including locksmithing, pastoral counseling, and acupuncture. At present, practicing in these professions requires licensure by the state, but this bill would dissolve that requirement for these professions.

Related: The Price of Teacher Mulligans: “I didn’t stop to ask myself then what would happen to all the kids who’d been left in the basement with the teacher who couldn’t teach” – Michelle Obama

Corey DeAngelis:

Using Evers’ own publicly available Accountability Report Card data from the 2017-18 school year, I find that private schools participating in choice programs and independent charter schools tend to offer the citizens of Wisconsin more “bang for the buck” than district-run public schools.

Specifically, private schools deliver 2.27 more Accountability Report Card points for every $1,000 invested than district-run public schools, demonstrating a 36% cost-effectiveness advantage for private schools. Notably, private schools are 75% more cost-effective in Racine and 50% more cost-effective in Milwaukee, the cities with the highest proportions of students using school vouchers in the state.

The data reveal that Wisconsin’s independent charter schools also do more with less. Independent charter schools are 63% more cost-effective in Racine, and 50% more cost-effective in Milwaukee, than nearby district-run public schools.

This isn’t the only evidence that school choice is a good investment. In fact, a recent evaluation from researchers at the University of Arkansas finds that charter schools are around 40% more cost-effective than traditional public schools in Wisconsin. Another peer-reviewed study from 2017 finds that charter schools are more efficient than traditional public schools in Milwaukee.

But that’s not all.

The Price of Teacher Mulligans: “I didn’t stop to ask myself then what would happen to all the kids who’d been left in the basement with the teacher who couldn’t teach” – Michelle Obama

Christina Samuels

Employing experienced and fully-credentialed teachers is one of the major factors contributing to California school districts that are producing higher-than-expected academic achievement among their Hispanic, black, and white students, says a new report from the Learning Policy Institute.

In the report California’s Positive Outliers: Districts Beating the Odds, released Thursday, the Palo Alto-based think tank identified California school systems where students were outperforming on state tests their peers in other school districts who come from families with similar racial/ethnic backgrounds, income, and education levels. The study was limited to 435 districts that had at least 200 white students and 200 black or Hispanic students.

Teacher certification was strongly associated with achievement for students of all races and ethnicities. The higher the percentage of teachers in a district working under emergency permits, waivers or intern credentials, the lower the average achievement for all students‐with students of color facing a larger negative impact than white students. A teacher’s length of time in the profession was also positively associated with achievement for black and Hispanic students.

The Price of Teacher Mulligans: “I didn’t stop to ask myself then what would happen to all the kids who’d been left in the basement with the teacher who couldn’t teach” – Michelle Obama – Michelle Obama

National Education Association:

Points were tallied and converted into letter grades using a total of 100 potential points and a traditional A – F scale. Only six state statutes garnered enough points to avoid an “F,” and all of those were “D” grades except for Maryland (“B-“) and Tennessee (“C-“). To better distinguish among the statutes, the large majority of which simply failed to meet NEA’s standards, NEA divided states into sub-groups according to their overall score.2 By referring to these sub-group ratings, it is possible to better distinguish between, for exam- ple, the District of Columbia (“worst” with 20 out of 100 points) and Arkansas (“poor” with 59 out of 100 points), both of which received failing grades. NEA’s comprehensive review of all charter statutes in the country concluded on November 9, 2018. This Report reflects only laws in existence as of that date.

The Price of Teacher Mulligans: “I didn’t stop to ask myself then what would happen to all the kids who’d been left in the basement with the teacher who couldn’t teach” – Michelle Obama.

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.

David Blaska:

Just catching up with events in the Mad Madison school district, this time at Leopold elementary school. Thanks to Dylan Brogan of Isthmus, one of the finest reporters in town, we learn only this week of an incident four weeks ago, well before the Spring school board election.

Children lie about what happened at school? Who knew?

Parents turn a behavior issue into a racial incident? Forget it, Jake, it’s Madison.

Most disturbing, school district P.R. person urges the news media to spike the story? Of course.

Ten-year-old girl alleges principal smacked her in the face. Mother over-reacts.

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”, and

Mulligans for Wisconsin Elementary Reading Teachers.

Curiously, this document is NOT shared as part of the Madison School Board public documents. Chan Stroman obtained the April 4, 2019 70 page package via an open records request (!).

The April 4, 2019 document contains a number of interesting links and shares, including a summary of Governor Ever’s (Former long time Wisconsin DPI leader) proposed budget. I found no mention of DPI’s elementary reading teacher mulligan practice, yet noted this on page 16:

Teacher Shortage and Teacher Licensure Provisions
• Authorizes school districts to rehire a retired annuitant teacher if:

– at least 30 days have passed since the teacher left employment with a district;

– at the time of retirement, the teacher does not have an agreement with any school district to return to employment; and

– upon returning to work the teacher elects to not become a participating employee and continue receiving their annuity.

• Repeals the alternative education preparation licensure pathway through which teachers can become licensed without in-classroom teaching time.

• Provides $571,200 in 2019-20 and $652,900 in fiscal year 2020-21 to help recruit and retain high quality master educator and national board-certified teachers in high poverty schools. (This funding would triple the size of continuing grants to qualified teachers in high poverty urban schools and double the size of the continuing grant for teachers at high poverty schools elsewhere in (i.e., throughout) the state, and would incentivize an estimated 130 or more highly qualified teachers to continue teaching in schools with high levels of poverty.)

• Requires teachers at private schools participating in a private school choice (voucher) program to be licensed as of July 1, 2022. (This item also appears below under voucher programs.)

Related: Mulligans for Wisconsin Elementary Reading Teachers:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction “DPI”, lead for many years by new Governor Tony Evers, has waived thousands of elementary reading teacher content knowledge requirements. This, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Nick Wilson:

I am not interested in politics or controversy, and I derive no pleasure in creating difficulties for the UW out of personal resentment. But whenever family and friends ask me about graduate school, I have to explain that rather than an academic program centered around pedagogy and public policy, STEP is a 12-month immersion in doctrinaire social justice activism. This program is a bizarre political experiment, light on academic rigor, in which the faculty quite consciously whips up emotions in order to punch home its ideological message. As a consequence, the key components of teaching as a vocation—pedagogy and how best to disseminate knowledge—are fundamentally neglected. With little practical training or preparation, graduates of the program begin their teaching careers woefully unprepared. Even for the most ardent social justice activist, STEP’s lack of practical content is a serious shortcoming. I found the program so troubling that I have decided to write this first-hand account with specific examples of the daily experience to illustrate how social justice activism in the academy has a high opportunity cost.

To put this in context, STEP’s approach to education deserves some explanation. Public schools haven’t done a great job of bridging ugly chasms in American life, such as the racial academic achievement gap between black and white populations, which has hardly narrowed since the Civil Rights Act. Discrimination based on gender and sexuality remain impediments to equality of opportunity and the way children are currently treated in public schools is clearly a part of that. The statistics on these matters are appalling, and slow progress is no excuse for complacency. Additionally, teachers should work to cultivate catholic tastes, and in light of demographic changes, white Americans shouldn’t expect the literature and old-fashioned narrative history of Europe and the United States to be considered the normal curriculum, with a few token “diverse” authors alongside Shakespeare and Hemingway. Nonetheless, while these challenges exist, and although public education is a vital mechanism in the struggle to resolve inequality and to further the development of an open cosmopolitan culture, the program’s attempts to address these issues are deeply disturbing.

Organized according to the standard tenets of social justice theory, anyone in the graduate school class who does not identify as a straight white male is encouraged from the outset to present themselves as a victim of oppression in the social hierarchy of the United States. And so a culture emerges rapidly in the 60-student cohort in which words and phrases fall under constant scrutiny, and ideas thought to be inimical to social justice are pounced on as oppressive. Moreover, instead of imparting knowledge about the rudiments of pedagogy or how to develop curriculum content and plan for high school classes, the faculty and leadership declare that their essential mission is to combat the colonialism, misogyny and homophobia that is endemic in American society. The logic here is that if teachers are immersed in social justice ideology they will then impart these ideas to young people at all levels of K-12 and post-secondary education. This lofty aim explains why the program focuses so heavily on training students in the discourse of far-left identity politics and why it demands total intellectual acquiescence. When you consider that STEP’s ostensible purpose is to prepare graduates to become novice high school teachers, this approach in a public university is difficult to justify.

The first three of STEP’s four quarters address social constructivism, postmodernism, and identity politics through flimsy and subjective content. With a few notable exceptions, the content one might expect to study at graduate school is absent. Although the classes have names like “Teaching for Learning,” “Creating Classrooms for All,” “Teaching in Schools,” and “Adolescent Psychology,” the vast majority of their content is essentially political. These classes are difficult to distinguish from one another, each experienced as a variation on the theme of imploring students to interpret every organization and social structure through the paradigms of power and oppression via gender, race, and sexuality. Students are expected to demonstrate that the attributes of their personal identity (always reduced to race, sexuality and gender, and sometimes disability status) will shape their assumptions when they work as classroom teachers. Practically speaking, the purpose is to have teachers acknowledge and embrace a broad variety of behavioral norms and activities in the classroom and to explore a wider range of academic content than has traditionally been the case in American public schools. Above all, the program emphasizes that diversity and inclusion are the most important considerations in education, and that equity—equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity—ought to be the primary goal of public policy.

Related: Mulligans for Wisconsin Elementary Reading Teachers.

Claire McInerny:

Last year, only a third of the 557 students met grade level in all subjects, compared to 52 percent in the district overall. Nearly 65 percent of Overton students were English-language learners, and 93 percent came from low-income households. Only a handful of them were white.

A year ago, she stood in the middle of her fourth-grade classroom, breaking the students into small groups for a language arts lesson.

To prepare for an upcoming STAAR test, Wilson had the students practice reading comprehension. The kids in one group didn’t understand the phrase “well known,” so she walked them through some examples.

“Let’s think of Beyonce; she’s well known,” Wilson said. “What’s another word for that?”

“Famous,” a student responded.

Related: Mulligans for Wisconsin Elementary Reading Teachers.

Joe Nathan:

I agree with Scott Croonquist, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan School Districts, which represents more than 40 suburban and urban districts. Croonquist told me on March 13 his organization agrees with many others: “The new system has only been in effect for half a year. We have no data to support changes.”

Anoka-Hennepin teacher Drew Moldenhauer, who spent 11 years as a police officer in Ramsey and has earned a master’s degree, might lose his job under proposed revisions in the law because he does not have a teaching degree. He also teaches classes at Hennepin Technical College. If proposed changes are made, he believes, “It will be very difficult to attract good, professional police officers to teach due to career instability.” That’s because proposed revisions allow a state agency to decide whether he can keep teaching, even if the district wants to keep him.

Nicole Tuescher, Anoka-Hennepin district executive director of human resources, testified recently in a Minnesota House committee, “We need time to collect information on how the currently adopted structure serves our students.” She pointed out that “positions in our district’s robust career and tech education program … might go unfilled” if changes are made.

Tuescher also explained the new approaches “look promising toward statewide efforts to ensure a diverse teaching corps.”

Josh Crosson, senior policy director with Minneapolis-based EdAllies, agrees with Tuescher. He told legislators on March 13 that almost 900 “teachers of color” are in the categories that opponents want to restrict. While teachers of color and American Indian teachers represent about 5 percent of Minnesota’s public school teachers, they represent about 10 percent of the teachers in categories that opponents want to restrict.

Related: Mulligans for Wisconsin Elementary Reading Teachers.

Jessie Opoien:

WILL’s most likely battle with Evers, Esenberg said, is over administrative rules — a “fight that only a wonk could love.” As Evers seeks to implement policies with a Republican Legislature opposed to most of his goals, he could direct state agencies to implement administrative rules — most of which WILL would be likely to oppose.

“To the extent that there are more regulations enacted by a new administration, they would have more targets to shoot at, although they were not lacking for targets in the ‘old world,’” Tseytlin said.

As Evers seeks to freeze enrollment in the state’s taxpayer-funded voucher schools and halt the creation of new charter schools, WILL will push back.

Sobic contends those programs offer alternatives to improve student achievement, while Evers has said the freezes are needed so officials can reexamine the state’s education system and the way each portion of it is funded. Evers has argued the state currently has two parallel systems.

Related: Repeated Wisconsin DPI elementary reading teacher mulligans – this despite our long term, disastrous reading results.