Steven Elbow:

Last month the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council did something unexpected. Members voted to award one of its Openness Awards — or Opees — to Gov. Scott Walker.

That’s the same guy who has fought the disclosure of political donors, whose administration directed cabinet secretaries to avoid creating publicly accessible records while conducting official business and two years ago tried to gut the state’s open records law.

But in 2016, Walker issued directives ordering state agencies to step up their responses to public records requests. As a result, said FOIC president Bill Lueders, state agencies have responded to records requests more promptly.

Mark Sommerhauser:

The proposal also reignited questions about the value of higher education in an era of skyrocketing student debt and questions about U.S. worker productivity: Should universities cultivate niche specialties of academic subjects or offer a broad array of them? Should they teach students skills tied to specific occupations, or widen students’ worldview while honing broad skills of analysis, creativity and communication?

Critics say UW-Stevens Point is placing its bets on the first answers to both questions — at the risk of undermining educational quality and access.

Some, such as state Rep. Katrina Shankland, D-Stevens Point, say it’s part of a broader effort by Republican lawmakers and Gov. Scott Walker to transform the UW System.

Noel Radomski, who directs the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education at UW-Madison, said the plan could hurt the university’s reputation and hamper student and faculty recruitment. Few other universities that faced budget deficits took similar steps, he said, and for good reason.

Campus Reform:

In the University of Wisconsin system, student fees are known as segregated university fees (SUF), and fall into two categories: non-allocable and allocable, with the former constituting 83 percent of SUF and “support commitments for fixed financial obligations,” and the latter providing “substantial support for campus student activities.”

In 2017, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker proposed making allocable fees—which total $8,231,986.37—optional, though the proposal was ultimately nixed from his budget.

But student Jake Lubenow, chairman of both the Wisconsin Federation of College Republicans and the College Republicans chapter at UW Madison, told Campus Reform that the College Republicans organization “stands firm in its stance that allocable student fees should be made optional.”

The fees “force students to fund organizations they may find morally reprehensible,” Lubenow asserted, arguing that “compulsion is contrary to everything this country stands for.”

Although funding decisions must be made in a viewpoint neutral manner, in accordance with a 2000 Supreme Court ruling involving three UW Madison students who objected that the mandatory fees were used to fund groups they did not support, left-leaning organizations still wind up with more than 20 times the amount of funding allocated to conservative groups.

Dave Zweifel:

The MTI case was a narrow one. Like all public unions, thanks to Scott Walker’s infamous Act 10 MTI has to hold an annual certification election supervised by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to continue representing workers. But Act 10 requires approval of not the majority of those voting, but a majority of all members, whether they vote or not.

During a recent multiday election, the union had asked WERC for a list of members who had voted, but WERC turned down the request, claiming that it might open employees who hadn’t voted to intimidation from the union. MTI filed suit for the list under the state’s open records law and won in Dane County Circuit Court.

The state appealed to the high court, which quickly reversed the lower court’s decision. It shouldn’t, given the current control of the court, have come as a surprise.

What was a surprise, though, was the court’s cavalier dismissal of the open records argument, a dismissal that many openness advocates believe could spell huge problems for future records cases. In essence, the court ruled that it is more important to protect union members from the possibility they may be pressured to vote than to uphold the state’s historic openness laws.

Much more on Madison Teachers, Inc., here.

Molly Beck:

Six years after Gov. Scott Walker and state Republicans made labor unions’ ability to retain members much more difficult, fewer than half of the state’s 422 school districts have certified unions.

In the latest certification election — held in November and required by Walker’s signature 2011 legislation known as Act 10 — staff and teachers in 199 school districts voted to remain in a bargaining unit, or 47 percent, according to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.

Notes and links: Madison Teachers, Inc. and WEAC.

Molly Beck:

Children living in low-income households who are considered to be advanced learners will be eligible to receive a taxpayer-funded scholarship to use to pay for education expenses under a new program proposed by three lawmakers this week.

The scholarship program would provide $1,000 to families with “gifted and talented” students who are already eligible to receive free or reduced-price school lunches, which means the household’s annual income is at or below $45,510 annually for a family of four.

The program is proposed by Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, Rep. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, and Rep. Jason Fields, D-Milwaukee — lawmakers who have historically been strong supporters of private school voucher and charter schools — and will be open to 2,000 families beginning in the 2018-19 school year, if the bill passes and is signed by Gov. Scott Walker.

“These scholarships will provide students in families with low incomes the ability to access a wide range of educational opportunities that they may currently not have the resources to participate in,” the lawmakers wrote in a memo seeking support from other lawmakers.

“Who knows how many scientists, engineers, musicians, artists, and community leaders we are missing out on because their family can’t afford additional educational opportunities,” Darling said in a statement.

Jesse Opoien:

State Superintendent Tony Evers said Tuesday he is declining legal representation from the Wisconsin Department of Justice in a lawsuit brought by a conservative law firm. Attorney General Brad Schimel said he will not step aside.

Evers, a Democrat, is one of several candidates seeking to challenge Gov. Scott Walker in 2018. Both Walker and Schimel are Republicans.

The impasse could require the state Supreme Court to determine who represents Evers. The court has not yet agreed to hear the case in question in the first place.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

David Madland and Alex Rowell:

This issue brief examines the impact of the law on Wisconsin’s K-12 public education system and state economy. While this brief focuses on Act 10’s impact on Wisconsin teachers based on the data available, the same forces driving changes in the teaching workforce can also affect the broader public sector.3 Proponents of Act 10 insisted that reducing collective bargaining rights for teachers would improve education by eliminating job protections such as tenure and seniority-based salary increases. As Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) argued, “We no longer have seniority or tenure. That means we can hire and fire based on merit, we can pay based on performance. That means we can put the best and the brightest in our classrooms and we can pay them to be there.”4 However, the facts suggest that Act 10 has not had its promised positive impact on educational quality in the state.
The authors’ analysis using data collected by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) finds that since the passage of Act 10, teachers have received far lower compensation; turnover rates have increased; and teacher experience has dropped significantly. Importantly, the harms from Act 10 extend beyond public-sector workers to all Wisconsinites, as current research suggests that student outcomes could be negatively affected by the law as well. Rather than encouraging the best and brightest students to become teachers and to remain in the field throughout their career, the law appears to have had the opposite effect by devaluing teaching and driving many teachers out of Wisconsin’s public schools.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Todd Richmond:

The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents adopted sweeping changes Thursday that clear the way for non-academics to lead the state’s colleges.

Under the plan, campuses can’t block people who lack terminal degrees and tenure from serving as System president, chancellors or vice chancellors. The System must look to recruit applicants from the private sector as well.

System spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said every campus has required chancellor and vice chancellor applicants to hold a terminal degree or tenure either through policy or practice. The state budget Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed last month prohibits the Regents from adopting such policies; Thursday’s changes bring the System into compliance with those budget provisions.

C.J. Szafir and Libby Sobic , via a kind email:

Today state legislators all over the country are deciding how to comply with ESSA. When the last deadline for submitting proposals arrives this September, we may see a crop of promising plans for the future of K-12 education. Yet in Wisconsin, the planning process has been so flawed that Sen. Alexander’s vision of “innovation” and “ingenuity” seems like a pipe dream.

Wisconsin’s woes have little to do with ESSA itself, which largely delivers on the promise of greater flexibility. To receive funding from Washington, states must submit plans that comply with Titles I through IX of the federal education code. The requirements for these plans are basic: States must maintain a statewide report-card system for public schools, establish methods to measure teacher effectiveness, set policies to reform low-performing schools, and so forth. Each plan must be granted final approval by the Education Department.

The Badger State ought to be taking full advantage of the freedom ESSA provides to enact bold education reform. After all, Wisconsin already has a broad range of educational options, including successful voucher programs and charter schools. Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature have established a strong record on education.

The problem is that Wisconsin’s plan for complying with ESSA has fallen to the state’s education agency, the Department of Public Instruction. Its leader, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, is a notorious opponent of education reform. Mr. Evers’s greatest hits include calling the expansion of school vouchers “morally wrong” and routinely criticizing Gov. Walker’s Act 10 reforms of public-employee unions. It’s worth noting that in opposing the governor, Mr. Evers may have more than the students’ interest in mind. He recently filed paperwork to enter Wisconsin’s 2018 gubernatorial race, hoping to upset Mr. Walker’s shot at a third term.

So far, the department has cleverly worked to avoid any oversight of its ESSA plan by the legislature. To create the illusion of accountability, Mr. Evers formed the Equity in ESSA Council, an advisory board made up of legislators, school administrators, union leaders and education reformers. In truth, however, the council has no power to set the agenda or control the provisions of the state’s ESSA proposal.

Related:

Tony Evers

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison spends far more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Jason Stein

State schools superintendent Tony Evers will formally announce his gubernatorial run Wednesday, making him the third Democrat to commit to a bid and the first statewide office holder to challenge GOP Gov Scott Walker.

Evers, who heads the state Department of Public Instruction, will announce his run at a suburban Madison park for children, according to an email sent to supporters Sunday and obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The venue at McKee Farms Park in Fitchburg will highlight Evers’ main credential for voters – his years working on behalf of children as a local school leader and state education official.

“On Wednesday, Tony will officially announce his run for governor because we need a real change here in Wisconsin. That change starts with putting our kids first, investing in our schools, and rebuilding Wisconsin’s middle class,” according to an email sent from the personal account of Jeff Pertl, a top aide to Evers in the superintendent’s office.

The Evers campaign had no comment except to note that Pertl is a volunteer.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Will Flanders and Rick Esenberg:

Let’s look at the long run and the short run. Since 1993, per-pupil spending, after adjusting for inflation, has increased by 7.2%. Although measures of student performance have been flat over that time period, the long-term trend in spending has clearly been up.
And the short term is no different. Here is an oft-overlooked fact. Since Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2011, nominal per-student spending in Wisconsin has increased in every year but one. The one exception to annual per-student increases was 2012. In that year, the state began to feel the effects of the end of the federal stimulus package that had infused more than $700 million into the state’s education coffers, and cuts were required across state government.

Indeed, Act 10, which substantially reduced school personnel costs, was, in part, an attempt to manage that decline in revenue while minimizing a reduction in services. But revenue has rebounded and so has spending.

Madison K-12 spending is up significantly, now near $20k/student.

This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Diane Ravitch Blog, via a kind reader:

“The TEACHERS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE will never enter our schools through the dismantling process of deregulating the profession and intentionally lowering standards. The standards were put in place to guarantee a level of expertise.

“In summary,

“WE DON”T HAVE AN EMERGENCY THAT REQUIRES DUMBING DOWN THE PROFESSION OF TEACHING.

“WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY THAT REQUIRES COURAGEOUS LEADERSHIP!”

Tim Slekar testified to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction that the teacher shortage is a “manufactured crisis” and it will not be solved by lowering standards.

He is a one-man crusade, fighting for the integrity of the teaching profession in a state led by hostile actors. The people of Wisconsin deserve better leadership but they won’t get it until they vote Scott Walker and his malignant enablers out of office.

I recently read, with interest, Amy Goldstein’s book Janesville.

The work is a worthwhile look at Janesville’s history, including George Parker (Parker Pen) and Joseph A. Craig (brought GM to Janesville).

Goldstein revealed the workforce’s culture, opportunity and ultimate cost of the shutdown. She also dwelled quite a bit on Congressman Paul Ryan and Governor Scott Walker, with a bit on his predecessor, Jim Doyle.

If I have one criticism, it is Goldstein’s heavy emphasis on the politicians is, in my view an error.

Breann Schossow:

Workers Attend Blackhawk Technical College For Retraining

Goldstein: In this country, the notion of what to do when jobs go away often is, ‘Go back to school to learn to do something else.’ It’s just a very popular idea. So almost 2,000 people in Janesville went to Blackhawk Tech in the couple years after all this work went away.

The question of what is success, I thought, was a very interesting question as I was getting to know people in town, because, as I said, many people who went to Blackhawk didn’t finish what they were studying for a whole lot of reasons.

Either financial reasons or because they found that being a student, they weren’t cut out to do that. But even people who (were cut out for it) sometimes found that they just couldn’t find a decent job in what they had been studying.

… Blackhawk Tech tried very, very hard with their students.

I mean, they set up all kinds of programs to try to make it easier for factory workers to turn themselves into students, but I think it’s a hard situation when you don’t always have enough jobs of the right kind or enough jobs at all on the other end.

I don’t think it is an indictment of retraining programs broadly, but I think it does suggest that in a community that’s still having a hard time pulling enough jobs into itself, that retraining alone can’t solve everything.

I recently read, with interest, Amy Goldstein’s book: Janesville.

The work is a worthwhile look at Janesville’s history, including George Parker (Parker Pen) and Joseph A. Craig (brought GM to Janesville).

Goldstein revealed the workforce’s culture, opportunities and the shutdown’s ultimate cost. Further, she dwelled extensively on Congressman Paul Ryan and Governor Scott Walker, with a bit of time on his predecessor, Jim Doyle.

If I have one criticism, Goldstein’s heavy emphasis on the politicians is, in my view an error. Government in and of itself cannot create sustainable jobs on the scale of a large manufacturer and its supply chain. It (using taxpayer funds) can create – hopefully on our behalf – an environment conducive to sustainable entrepreneurs.

Goldstein’s look at the funds spent on retraining and the downstream effectiveness, or lack thereof, at Blackhawk Technical College is likely most interesting to readers.

Related: Amy Goldstein:

But even under such favorable circumstances, I wondered, how easily can a vocational college teach laid-off people a new identity, as well as new skills? What does it take for a campus to absorb droves of worried, angry factory workers who were out of school, in most cases, for a few decades and may not have liked school as kids? Most fundamentally, does retraining succeed in an environment in which work remains scarce—at least in places like Janesville, where, despite intense economic development efforts the past few years, the number of jobs remains about as low as at any time since the recent recession began?

These were questions that drew me to Wisconsin a year before a native son would bound onto the Republican presidential ticket. They led me to the kitchen tables and back decks of people struggling to regain their footing, to Blackhawk’s classrooms and counselors’ offices, to the United Auto Workers hall and the local job-placement agency. Finally, they led me into a Wisconsin agency, two blocks from the state capitol in Madison, in a quest for unemployment claims and wage records to bore into the most central question of all: How are laid-off people who went to Blackhawk to retrain faring at finding new work? What kind of pay are they getting?

In the end, I found certain successes. But from the many people I’ve met and from an analysis of the state records, most of what I discovered was sobering. It suggests that, even if the US economy as a whole is gradually reviving, the bruises to individual workers and individual communities can be deeper than job training can readily heal. “Retraining, yes,” Chris Pody, who directs Blackhawk’s Career Center, which helps students choose what to study and learn how best to look for jobs, told me the first time we met. “But the question has been—and hasn’t been answered—for what?”

Bob Borremans runs the Rock County Job Center in Janesville, which is the county seat. The warren of offices and cubicles that occupies a former K-Mart is part of the Southwest Wisconsin Workforce Development Board, a regional funnel for the federal job-hunting and job-training money that flows through every state and into communities around the country. With a white beard and a sly sense of humor, Borremans has a doctorate and the kind of independence of thought that can come with being within sight of retirement. For nearly two decades, he was a senior administrator at Blackhawk and, in his job now, has been instrumental in virtually every initiative in the past few years to try to bring jobs and assistance to town. “Looking back on it, we may have trained too many people, because there weren’t enough jobs,” Borremans told me one day. “People are experiencing a double whammy. They lost their jobs. They went to school to get skills, and they still can’t get jobs.”

Locally, Madison College’s spending has nearly doubled over the past decade.

Breann Schossow:

Workers Attend Blackhawk Technical College For Retraining

Goldstein: In this country, the notion of what to do when jobs go away often is, ‘Go back to school to learn to do something else.’ It’s just a very popular idea. So almost 2,000 people in Janesville went to Blackhawk Tech in the couple years after all this work went away.

The question of what is success, I thought, was a very interesting question as I was getting to know people in town, because, as I said, many people who went to Blackhawk didn’t finish what they were studying for a whole lot of reasons.

Either financial reasons or because they found that being a student, they weren’t cut out to do that. But even people who (were cut out for it) sometimes found that they just couldn’t find a decent job in what they had been studying.

… Blackhawk Tech tried very, very hard with their students.

I mean, they set up all kinds of programs to try to make it easier for factory workers to turn themselves into students, but I think it’s a hard situation when you don’t always have enough jobs of the right kind or enough jobs at all on the other end.

I don’t think it is an indictment of retraining programs broadly, but I think it does suggest that in a community that’s still having a hard time pulling enough jobs into itself, that retraining alone can’t solve everything.

Ideally, our increasingly expensive education system should focus on the essentials: reading, math and science. Madison continues to tolerate long term, disastrous reading results.

There has been some discussion about a reduction in our economy’s dynamism. Matt Stoller and Tyler Cowen are worth following. Cowen has written two books of note:

The Complacent Class

Average is Over

Stoller:

The Return of Monopoly.

A recent propublica report worth reading:

President Obama promised to fight corporate concentration. Eight years later, the airline industry is dominated by just four companies. And you’re paying for it..

Alyssa Shuman:

Television crews from as far away as the Netherlands and Japan had come to film this moment, when the oldest plant of the nation’s largest automaker turned out its last.

Janesville, Wis., lies three-fourths of the way from Chicago to Madison along Interstate 90. The county seat of 63,500 people is the home town of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R) — an old United Auto Workers town in a state led by a new generation of conservative, Gov. Scott Walker (R). It is a Democratic town still, though the economic blow that befell Janesville is the kind of reversal of fortune that drove many working-class Americans to support Donald Trump for president.

The assembly plant began turning out Chevrolets on Valentine’s Day 1923, and, for 8½ decades, the factory, like a mighty wizard, ordered the city’s rhythms. The radio station synchronized its news broadcasts to the shift change. Grocery prices went up along with GM raises. People timed their trips across town to the daily movements of freight trains hauling in parts and hauling away finished cars, trucks and SUVs.

And so, when the plant stopped in the midst of the Great Recession, the people of Janesville — even as they began to reinvent themselves and their town — clung to a faith that GM would reopen the plant so their future could be like their past. Over time, though, people began to confront a question they had not considered before: What choices to make when there were no more good choices left?

Will Flanders:

Governor Scott Walker’s budget proposal was big on money for K-12 public education – to the tune of more than $600 million over 2 years – but small on expanding education options for Wisconsin families. Fortunately the Governor isn’t the only one with a say on this matter. A day after Walker’s budget address, State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said lifting the caps on enrollment for the statewide school voucher program, Wisconsin Parental Choice Program was “absolutely” something the Senate Republicans would consider.

This is promising news. The current unfair enrollment caps and income limitations placed on the choice program are arbitrarily hindering growth and shutting the schoolhouse door on Green Bay families looking for education options.

The Green Bay Area Public School District is failing their most vulnerable students—those from economically disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. Only 19.7% of students from low-income families are proficient in English. A staggeringly low 11.4% of African American students are proficient in English. Even among the general student population, proficiency rates in these subjects are only in the low 30s. These problems are not unique to public schools in Green Bay but it is painfully obvious that something else needs to be tried.

Higher Ed Watch:

Following in the footsteps of Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, which in 2015 and 2016 weakened tenure protections for public university faculty, legislators in Iowa and Missouri have introduced bills to eliminate the practice in their states.

“I think the university should have the flexibility to hire and fire professors and then I don’t think that bad professors should have a lifetime position guaranteed at colleges,” Iowa State Senator Brad Zaun told the Des Moines Register. “It is as simple as that.”
State Representative Rick Brattin of Missouri offered similar reasoning in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Where else in any other industry do you have tenure, do you have a protection to where after you work somewhere for so long you’re basically immune?,” he asked. “That doesn’t exist anywhere except for our education system, and that’s just un-American. If you’re doing your due diligence as a professor or any profession, you shouldn’t have to worry about termination.”

Erin Richards:

With her deep ties to Wisconsin’s private-school choice movement and disdain for unions thwarting reforms, Betsy DeVos, president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Education Secretary, was a name that sent shock waves through the state’s education circles Wednesday.

“It is completely jazzing the entire school-choice community nationwide,” said Jim Bender, president of advocacy group School Choice Wisconsin. “It’s like, game on.”

Gov. Scott Walker congratulated DeVos, whom he called his friend, on Twitter while Democratic Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan tweeted the nomination was “really bad news for public schools.”

DeVos is married to Dick DeVos, and both are heirs to the fortune amassed by Michigan-based direct sales company Amway, which was co-founded by Dick’s father, Richard DeVos. Betsy DeVos was active in Republican politics and has focused on schools as board chair of her national advocacy group, American Federation for Children, based in Washington, D.C. The group has funneled millions of dollars into campaigns around the country to elect school choice friendly lawmakers and to lobby aggressively for school choice legislation.

John Thompson

Although probably not one of the main reasons for the 2016 Democratic defeat, education reform could have cost Clinton electoral votes in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Because it is the policy that I most fully understand, I will describe education reform as a metaphor for how “the Billionaires Boys Club” and the Obama administration pushed technocratic policies that helped open the door for Trump’s victory.

First, then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan staffed his agency with Gates Foundation wonks and imposed a set of Gov. Scott Walker-lite, anti-union, anti-teacher corporate school reforms. Second, the Democratic Party remained on the sidelines during the campaigns to resist Right to Work and recall Walker and Koch-funded legislators. As they should be, deep-pocket donors and the Ten Percent, are always quick to open their wallets in support of liberal social issues, however, they seemed oblivious to the need to support blue collar workers and teachers.

The Daily Beast

Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.

Lobbying data: AT&T contributions to Russ Feingold, Jim Doyle, Tammy Baldwin, Scott Walker and Ron Johnson.

Dave Zweifel:

Many in Wisconsin are convinced that the teacher shortage here stems from Gov. Scott Walker’s and the Republican Legislature’s Act 10, the 2011 legislation that not only made it illegal for teachers’ unions to bargain, but required them to shoulder part of the load for their benefits, which resulted in take home pay reductions of up to 17 percent.

Balderdash, counter Walker’s fans, who believe it’s perfectly fine to denude unions and make public employees pay more of the bills. Rightie talk radio host Jerry Bader wrote on Right Wisconsin a few days ago that the teacher shortage is a national phenomenon, not confined to Wisconsin and, therefore, has nothing to do with Act 10.

I’d dispute that cause and effect comparison since many of the other states experiencing teacher shortages have also adopted legislation that has hurt teachers, including Indiana, Ohio and Arizona, where Republicans of like mind rule the roost.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Peter Lawler

Last week, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson lashed out at what he called the “higher education cartel” of tenured professors for blocking reforms that could reduce ballooning tuition and fees: “We’ve got the Internet—you have so much information available. Why do you have to keep paying different lecturers to teach the same course? You get one solid lecturer and put it up online and have everybody available to that knowledge for a whole lot cheaper? But that doesn’t play very well to tenured professors in the higher education cartel. So again, we need disruptive technology for our higher education system.” Johnson went on to suggest that students could learn as much and more efficiently by watching Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War than by taking a history class.

It’s a common complaint among conservatives that many tenured professors “radicalize” students with Marx and gender theory while living royally off of state funding and federal student loans. Online and competency-based education will fix both, according to critics like Johnson and Scott Walker, by limiting professors’ unchecked power and improving efficiency with market-based solutions.

There’s just one problem, according to Peter Augustine Lawler, the Dana Professor of Government at Berry College and a regular contributor to National Review, Modern Age, and many other conservative publications: It won’t work.

The number of administrative staff it takes to provide the lifestyle students expect and oversee the increasing amount of paperwork for accreditation is huge. Lawler doesn’t provide any figures, but they are relatively well-known. To give just one example: The number of full-time faculty in the California State University system increased slightly between 1975 and 2008, from 11,614 to 12,019, while the number of administrators nearly quadrupled during the same period, from 3,800 to 12,183.

Nico Savidge:

Gov. Scott Walker says he wants to extend the freeze on University of Wisconsin System tuition for another two years. The Republican governor also told UW and most other state agencies they should not anticipate any new funding in his next budget.

UW officials and supporters have called for greater state funding for the system after years of budget cuts they say threaten the quality of public higher education in Wisconsin.

But in a letter the governor sent July 25 to the heads of state agencies, Walker indicated his budget proposal won’t include any new funding for UW or any but a few other departments.

Chris Rickert:

An increasingly diverse Madison School District student body will see at least 55 new teachers of color next year — a major increase in minority hiring from the year before.

If those concerned about the district’s long-standing racial achievement gaps are looking for people to thank for this improvement, they might as well put Gov. Scott Walker on their list.

Much more on Act 10.

Molly Beck:

More than 100 school districts have spent $138 million above their state-imposed revenue limits without voter approval since 2009, according to an analysis from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.

Since that year, school districts have been able to spend above their revenue caps without first going to voters if the money is being used for projects that are intended to improve energy efficiency in the district. In all, 147 school districts have used the exception.

According to the report, school districts rarely took advantage of the exception until 2012 — after Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers tightened revenue limits for districts.

Steven Walters:

The UW-Madison political science professor, an Ozaukee County native, was stunned by what northern Wisconsin residents told her in diners, coffee shops, back rooms and barns between 2007 and 2012.

“I did not expect to hear it, but many of the people I listened to in rural areas exhibited a multifaceted resentment toward urban areas,” Professor Katherine J. Cramer writes in her new book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

“That resentment was part of a perspective. I call it rural consciousness. It is a perspective rooted in place and class identities that convey a strong sense of distributive injustice.”

WHAT IS “rural consciousness”?
“First, rural consciousness was about perceptions of power, or who makes decisions and who decides what to even discuss. Second, it showed up with respect to perceptions of values and lifestyles. Third … it involved perceptions of resources or who gets what.”

Cramer listened over a period that spanned the end of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s second term, the first two years of controversial Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his Act 10, Walker’s survival of a recall vote, and the Great Recession. She left her UW office to bravely walk, often unannounced, into informal gatherings that bond rural residents and transmit gossip and perceptions.

Marc Eisen

The disharmony stems in part from the tensions of a generally liberal-minded university working with a decidedly conservative state government. Further exacerbating the relationship is the obliqueness of UW System bookkeeping and the Republican belief it hid a huge slush fund. (This became a key factor in the GOP-enforced tuition freeze and UW budget cut.) Add in the troubling geographic complaints that the UW System is Madison-centric and shorts the rest of the state and Milwaukee in particular.

UW advocates, in turn, are reeling from the $250 million UW budget cut, the four-year tuition freeze, the stripping of tenure protection from state statutes and Gov. Scott Walker’s surprise attempt in an earlier budget to bowdlerize the “Wisconsin Idea” that guides the UW’s mission to the citizenry.

All this makes for an unpleasant stew of missed signals, aggravation, suspicion and wheel spinning. Not to mention a nagging sense that the state as a whole is grievously hurt by the failure of the pols and profs to make nice.

Somewhat related: theriselinggroup.com/about-us

Colleen Flaherty:

Repeatedly during the meeting, Millner and other regents cited the need, in an era of tight budgets, for “flexibility” to close programs — and eliminate faculty jobs in the process. The votes here marked the near-end of two years of debate over a tenure policy that saw the university system’s tenured faculty go from having among the strongest protections in the nation (written into state law) to having a system that many professors fear will make it too easy to dismiss them and eliminate programs they believe should be preserved. When the idea of removing tenure from state statute first surfaced — at the behest of Governor Scott Walker, a Republican — he and others said that necessary protections for faculty members could all be preserved in system policy. But the system adopted Thursday differs in key ways from what was removed from state law — especially after a series of amendments were rejected.

Millner weighed in on an amendment proposed by Tony Evers, a fellow regent, that — if passed — would have addressed one of the biggest faculty concerns about the proposed policy regarding layoffs of tenured faculty: that it conflates financial and educational considerations in assessing programs for possible closure (and subsequent faculty job losses).

Chris Rickert:

The case heard by the state Supreme Court on Tuesday pits Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s administration against Evers and public education backers who object to the 2011 Act 21. That law gave the governor power to approve or reject the administrative rules state agencies create to implement statutes.

A court blocked the law from applying to Evers’ Department of Public Instruction in 2012, ruling that it unconstitutionally elevated the governor’s authority over the state superintendent’s. An appeals court agreed in February. Lawmakers continue to review rules as they did before the law was signed, but they have not had the power to reject them without passing a law to that effect.

As you might imagine, administrative rule-making doesn’t usually come with the high political drama that lawmaking does.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction brought us decades of low academic standards via the oft-criticized WKCE.

Molly Beck:

State education officials have tapped a former state lawmaker’s company to create a new exam for Wisconsin elementary and middle school students, replacing the problematic Badger Exam that students took for the first and last time this spring.

The state is negotiating a contract with Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corporation to build a test called the Wisconsin Forward Exam that will still be aligned to the Common Core State Standards in English and math, despite Gov. Scott Walker’s opposition to them.

Susan Engeleiter, chief executive officer and president of DRC, was the Republican Senate minority leader in the 1980s. She also ran an unsuccessful campaign against former U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl, a Democrat, in 1988.

Much more on DPI’s multi-million dollar WKCE disaster.

Molly Beck:

The number of students using vouchers to attend private schools grew from 22,439 during the 2011-12 school year to 29,609 last school year, according to the DPI. At the same time, 870,650 students attended public schools last year — which is about the same number that did in the 2011-12 school year. Enrollment grew to 873,531 in the 2013-14 school year before decreasing last school year.

Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers have created new voucher programs in Racine and statewide to join the program in Milwaukee, created in 1990 as the country’s first.

Milwaukee and Racine school districts are allowed to raise property taxes to offset their reductions in state aid.

Related: SIS

Ongoing education spending rhetoric often lacks facts, such as the recent Wisconsin State Journal Headline replaying annual school budget theatre (thankfully, the article did mention the planned 9(!) increase in healthcare spending).

I recently requested historic data on Wisconsin education spending and have posted the results below, along with the raw data. Tap the charts to view a larger version.

JOHN O. MCGINNIS And MAX SCHANZENBACH:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has come under fire from academics nationwide for calling on his state’s Board of Regents to reconsider the scope of tenure in its university system. Evaluations of faculty members “should be based on performance,” he said this summer, “they should be based on merit.”

With state universities struggling to keep up with rising costs and technological change, one would expect administrators and educators to at least consider proposals that would save money and encourage change.

Erin Richards

The state budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker last month gave Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele broad authority to oversee a special district in Milwaukee for the city’s most troubled public schools.

So, what happens now?

Abele must soon appoint a commissioner to oversee the Milwaukee schools selected for new management. But there’s no money to pay the commissioner, no engagement yet of the philanthropic community — or parents — in the project, and little talk of who will staff the schools selected for treatment, if not the employees in them already.

Abele, a lifelong Democrat, said he’s committed to giving the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program developed by Republican lawmakers and passed as part of the state budget a good-faith effort.

“What got passed is nowhere near the optimum, but it’s not the finish line, it’s the starting line,” Abele said in his first interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about his new role in the city’s education scene.

The program is designed to take some of the district’s lowest-performing schools from the control of the Milwaukee School Board and put them under the control of Abele and the commissioner he selects, or directly under MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver, if she chooses to use that authority.

Mike Antonucci:

changed nothing, and Scott Walker is running for President of the United States.

In June 2012, it didn’t require a crystal ball to write , “Now that the recalls are over, we’re likely to see a WEAC in a few years that’s no better than half what it was at its peak.”

That day is here. WEAC’s 2015 membership numbers show an organization with fewer than 50,000 total members, and fewer than 40,000 who are currently employed in Wisconsin’s public school system. The downward spiral is so pronounced the union cut dues by $60 , but it does not seem to have reversed its fortunes.

Despite the rosy picture NEA attempted to paint earlier this month , the union still faces enormous membership problems, with only a handful of state affiliates slowly returning to health. I will have the full story in today’s communiqué.

Related: $1.57m for four senators.

Karen Herzog:

An outspoken University Wisconsin-Madison professor has tweeted herself into a world of controversy.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is under fire for finding future Badgers on Twitter and essentially encouraging them to take their money elsewhere — as well as for comparing Gov. Scott Walker to Adolf Hitler.

College Republicans blasted her on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Goldrick-Rab was rebuked by UW-Madison’s faculty governing group in a withering statement that said she hurt both academic freedom and the university “with inaccurate statements and misrepresentations.”

Goldrick-Rab is a tenured professor of educational policy studies and sociology with a national profile in both her field of research and the ongoing debate over faculty tenure at Wisconsin public universities. She has openly that said she’s looking for another job because she believes academic freedom is in jeopardy in Wisconsin.

Goldrick-Rab acknowledges that she searched Twitter for future Badgers. The prolific Twitter-user says she just wanted to inform them of changes to faculty tenure and shared governance that were about to become part of state law — changes that she believes would hurt the quality of their education, but that the university wasn’t telling them about.

While some future Badgers thanked her, a group who had just graduated from a Kenosha high school took exception. One of them contacted the College Republicans of UW-Madison, who called on the university Wednesday to address it — more than a month after the Twitter contact occurred.

It’s fine to engage those with different viewpoints in a respectful way, when they are interested in having a discussion, Anthony Birch, chairman of the young Republicans group, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

What can or should be done?

Jagler is a Republican member of the state Assembly from Watertown. He said he got interested in this when he heard about students who graduated from high school in good standing, enrolled at a UW campus, took placement tests and were assigned to remedial courses. He said one parent asked him, “What happened? My kid has to take remedial math?”

Yup. In December 2013, UW officials released a report that showed that almost a quarter of students systemwide were required to take remedial courses. About 20% were assigned to math remediation and a bit under 10% to English remediation (the numbers overlap because some need both).

The math figure was at 20% in 1990, but it trended down to about 10% by 2000 before heading back up to the one-in-five mark by 2007. It stayed there in following years.

At some campuses, and for graduates of some high schools, the remedial percentage is surely lower. And for some it is much higher. The 2013 report showed the remedial rate at UW-Madison was less than 1%.For UW-Milwaukee, it was almost 37% and for UW-Parkside, it was over 65%.

Jagler has an additional question: How come so little is known about this? UW officials have compiled reports on remediation, and they have detailed their work dealing with it. But the issue gets little attention, the data is not widely known and results haven’t improved much. What this means and what can be done have been rather quiet issues.

Jagler became the lead sponsor of a little-noted bill that was approved by both houses of the Legislature and signed a few days ago by Gov. Scott Walker that calls for UW administrators to determine which public high schools (including charter schools, but not private schools) send into the UW system more than six graduates in any given year who need remedial math and/or English.

The new law calls for UW to send a report on what schools make that list to appropriate legislative committees and to the state superintendent of public instruction. (Department of Public Instruction officials asked during the legislative process to be included in the law since they, too, wanted to see the list.)

Karen Herzog:

Last week, two conservative educators — both University of Wisconsin-Madison professors — echoed much of what many of their liberal-leaning colleagues have been saying for weeks, albeit with a twist.

Changing tenure rules would put their viewpoints at risk, too, Donald Downs and John Sharpless wrote in a Politico piece.

“As far as college campuses go, we’re a rare, endangered species: two long-tenured professors who lean right and libertarian,” the political science professor and history professor, respectively, wrote. “But we’re increasingly worried that in trying to take up another conservative crusade, our governor, Scott Walker, is going to silence the very voices he claims to support.”

Without strong tenure protections, they wrote, “professors like us who fight for free speech and liberty — values Walker himself espouses — could be even more at risk of being targeted on college campuses for our beliefs.”

Sharpless was a Republican candidate for Congress in a tight race with Democrat Tammy Baldwin in 2000; Downs served on his campaign strategy and finance committees. Both were leaders of the free speech/academic freedom movement at UW-Madison in the 1990s, when conservative and liberal professors with tenure protection stood together against speech codes that were perceived as censorship.

The second assumption in the national debate is that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — a certain presidential candidate in 2016 — is the behind-the-scenes architect of the provisions in the GOP plan put forward by the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee on May 29.

It’s unclear what role the governor played, if any, in the layoff language that faculty are most upset about. Walker has been noticeably silent on the matter.

Christian Schneider:

It’s not nearly as funny, however, when real-world students demand a substandard education. Last week, students from South Division High School walked out of class to protest a legislative plan that would allow private school operators to take over five of the worst-performing schools in Milwaukee Public Schools. The protest combined two of teenagers’ favorite things — demonstrating unearned self-righteousness and getting a day off school.

In opposing the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program, the South Division students were sticking up for a status quo in which a scant 10.8% of them tested “proficient” or above in reading last year. If Gov. Scott Walker’s budget cuts had forced the school to eliminate the use of verbs, the reading scores could hardly be worse.

Of course, the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association would have us believe that the student walkout was a spontaneous demonstration — as if students at a school where 4.3% of students are proficient in math are intimately attuned to the arcane school finance details passed by the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee. Perhaps it was just coincidence that the kids just happened to be carrying around the same union signs that have popped up at other recent demonstrations around the city.

And the details of the OSPP plan are important. Under the proposal, the Milwaukee County executive would pick a commissioner to oversee the takeover of the city’s five worst-performing schools. Control of those schools would be transferred to current operators of either high-performing private schools or certain types of charter schools. The new operators would put in place systems that have proved effective in their existing schools.

Erin Richards:

The proposal comes amid continuing discussion over the rigor and selectivity of university teacher education programs.

Jon Bales, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, said there are issues in Wisconsin around the recruitment of would-be teachers and the quality of their preparation. But he said the provision championed by Czaja is shortsighted and wouldn’t solve the problem.

“This is characteristic of bad and ineffective policy,” Bales said. “We think this puts all kids at risk.”

Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the state teachers union, said teaching requires more than subject-matter expertise. Licensure, she said, provides some assurance that the person has received training in how to teach children.

“Children all across the state deserve to have teachers who have proven they can do the job,” Brey said.

In a 4-page letter this week to Assembly and Senate lawmakers, the Wisconsin Association of Colleges for Teacher Education said the changes would compromise the quality of adolescent education.

The association urged lawmakers to amend the budget, saying that putting unprepared teachers into classrooms was not only unwise and unfair, but “threatens the very foundation of a strong, competitive workforce.”

The state budget proposal is not final. It must be passed by both houses of the Legislature and signed by Gov. Scott Walker. Walker had proposed easing teacher certification provisions in his original budget request.

The quality of Wisconsin teacher licensing schools has been in question recently.

When “A” stands for average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education receive sky high grades. How smart is that?

Alan Borsuk:

Recently, Pledl, who has the title of “school to life coordinator” at Grafton High, also has put a lot of that energy and enthusiasm into an idea that could lead to more kids with substantial disabilities statewide having opportunities for transitioning from school to positive situations in life, particularly involving work.

In the enormous and complex work of creating a state budget for the next two years, the plan Pledl has been supporting is a relatively small matter. It’s a good example of the many programs and proposals that usually attract little, if any, attention, but which could have impact on people’s lives.

The budget process will move into a crucial stage in the next several days with the release of updated forecasts for state revenue. What gets put into and left out, what gets changed from Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal of three months ago, and who wins and loses in the end will be affected by how much money is forecast to be available. Indications last week were that the new estimate is not going to offer the rosy increases all sorts of people have been hoping for.

Where will that leave increased support for the idea Pledl is promoting?

Pledl has already accomplished a lot more than I would have bet. He’s been a car salesman and, yes, a football coach and he’s good at winning people over. As Mel Lightner, superintendent of the Grafton School District says, a lot of educators are not good sales people for ideas that open doors for their students. But as for Pledl, Lightner says, “He’s a salesman.” And he really wants to open doors for his students.

Alan Borsuk:

Every school day, more than 8,000 children who live in the city of Milwaukee head off to school in Milwaukee suburbs.

I think of that as the equivalent of, say, six high schools or 16 elementary schools that are serving Milwaukee kids outside the city lines. That has a lot of impact, even as the complex picture of city-suburban school choice continues to evolve.

This is one form of evolution that Gov. Scott Walker is, presumably, willing to speak his mind on because his proposed state budget calls for ending the voluntary racial integration program known as Chapter 220, which is the oldest of the city-suburban programs.

But the story of city kids going to suburban schools actually has three chapters. In addition to 220, there is extensive use of the state’s open enrollment law and growing use of a provision, now four years old, that allows city kids to attend suburban religious schools.

Here’s a primer on these three often-overlooked but important aspects of educating the children of Milwaukee.

Related: where have all the students gone?

Chris Rickert:

Talk about putting your best foot forward only to get it stomped on.

Last week, in response to an open records request from this newspaper, the UW System released internal emails that showed System President Ray Cross throwing UW-Eau Claire chancellor James Schmidt under the bus for sending him “candid” ideas for how to cope with Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to cut $300 million from the System’s state aid in exchange for giving the System more autonomy.

“Incredible logic!!” Cross writes in an email forwarding Schmidt’s ideas to two other System administrators. “I find this most troubling!!! I thought Jim was a bit more thoughtful than this.”

As a mere civilian, I thought Schmidt’s ideas had merit. And after spending 25 minutes talking to him on the phone, I think the System would do well to hire more people like him.

Schmidt laid out 10 suggestions in all, with five more concerning initiatives specific to his campus.

They range from seeking different employee health care insurers, to creating links between four-year campuses and their nearby two-year campuses, to cutting down on administrative overhead, to shrinking and decentralizing System administration.

Cross, who declined my interview request, was particularly irked by what he called Schmidt’s proposed “elimination of the System” and his call for even greater autonomy for System campuses.

Schmidt didn’t back down from the value of his ideas or from the importance of coming up with them, although he acknowledged that on second look, some, like combining administrative functions at four-year campuses and their nearby two-year feeder schools, might not provide as much savings as he initially thought.

A focus on “adult employment“.

Mitch Henck:

This is Madison. I learned that phrase when I moved here from Green Bay in 1992.
It means that the elites who drive the politics and the predominate culture are more liberal or “progressive” than backward places out state.

I knew I was in Madison as a reporter when parents and activists were fighting over whether to have “Sarah Has Two Mommies” posters in a grade school library. Concerned parents weakly stated at a public hearing that first-graders were too young to understand sexuality of any kind.

Activists at the public meeting said the children needed to understand tolerance. One conservative parent said: “Why don’t we vote by secret ballot?” An activist said, “No, we want a consensus.”

The Madison School District official who was presiding agreed, and the controversial posters stayed on the library walls. This is Madison.

Now we have the Madison School Board. It has been historically run by the teacher’s union. The same was true after Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 was passed, strictly limiting collective bargaining for public employees.

Three weeks before the state Supreme Court would rule on the constitutionality of the law, the union-owned School Board rushed through a teacher’s contract that largely ignored Act 10. Unlike any other school district in the state, the contract made sure Madison teachers were not required to share the cost of their health insurance premiums. Unlike any other school district, Madison collects union dues from teacher paychecks for its leader, John Matthews.

By the way, I would not want him in a dark alley with me.

The problem is the Madison School District has a projected budget shortfall for 2015-2016 of $12 million to $20 million, according to last week’s State Journal. About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward insurance premiums, renegotiating contracts with health care providers, and making plan changes. That’s according to Michael Barry, assistant superintendent of business services.

In fact, the district spends about $62 million on employee health care costs, which are expected to grow by 8.5 percent next school year. Shockingly, Madison School Board member Ed Hughes said: “If we’re talking about taking not a scalpel, but a machete to our programs given the cuts we’ll make because we’re the only school district in the state that’s unwilling to ask employees to contribute to their health insurance, I think that would be an impression that we would deservedly receive ridicule for.”

Even board member Mary Burke said: “We would be irresponsible to the community where basically 99 percent of the people pay contributions to health care” if the board made up the savings with cuts to staff and heath care.

So now what? The contract expires in June 2016. Conservative blogger David Blaska sued to force Madison to live under Act 10. A local judge ruled last week Blaska did have standing as a taxpayer to carry out his lawsuit as he is joined by The Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty.

Madison teacher’s union leader John Matthews said by making employees contribute to health care premiums, the district is effectively asking them to pay for iPads and administrators. Huh?

Todd Berry of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance told me 90 percent of state cuts to education were covered by savings offered to school districts under Act 10 by changing work rules, by employee contributions to retirement and health insurance premiums, and by altering health plans.

That might fly for the rest of the state, but then again, this is Madison.

Much more on benefits and the Madison School District and Act 10.

A focus on “adult employment“.

Molly Beck:

Madison school officials are weighing property tax increases, significant program cuts and requiring employees to pay a portion of health insurance premiums to help close a huge budget deficit.

About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive changes to employees’ health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward health insurance premiums, renegotiating contracts with health care providers, and making plan changes, Michael Barry, assistant superintendent of business services, told School Board members Monday.

Overall, the district spends about $62 million in employee health care costs, which are expected to grow by about 8.5 percent next school year.

The budget shortfall for the fiscal year that starts July 1 was estimated in January at $10.1 million with the use of all of the district’s taxing authority. But it could jump by $4.1 million if state lawmakers accept Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to cut a special $150 per student funding stream for next school year, and keep revenue limits and general state aid flat.

Now district officials say the deficit in the roughly $400 million budget could be as much as $20.8 million or as low as $12.2 million for the 2015-16 school year, depending on how much of the school district’s unused taxing authority the board agrees to use.

Much more on Madison’s benefit plans and conundrum, here.

Alan Borsuk:

Of course, Evers had a less sweet-spot-like reason for saying that. He went on to call for Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans in the Legislature not to mess things up with “divisive mandates” and “constrained revenue.”

Evers said, “I am very fearful that the balance will shift under the guise of school reform.”

I asked Walker, in a brief conversation Friday, about what Evers said. The governor praised local control — and, a hot theme for him, he emphasized the power parents should have to pick schools.

He said he was resisting proposals from Assembly Republicans for more state involvement in dealing with low-performing schools and said he was more in line with Senate Republicans whose accountability proposals call for less state involvement.

We’ll have plenty of opportunity over the next several months — hurray for the state budget process — to talk about these specific matters.

Let’s keep the focus here on the broader concept of local control of schools. It’s been the professed philosophy of Wisconsin education forever.

Everyone is in favor of it, at least at the slogan level. But as a practice?

So many of the shots are called these days from Washington or Madison that I got to wondering a few months ago what really was left of local control. That led me to write a piece for Marquette Lawyer magazine.

One of the people I interviewed was Michael Kirst, a Stanford-based expert on education policy who is now president of the California State Board of Education.

Molly Beck

Mary Burke, the incumbent Madison School Board member who unsuccessfully challenged Gov. Scott Walker last month, confirmed Friday she will seek re-election in April. But Arlene Silveira, the longest serving board member and in her second stint as president, will not seek another term.

And Anna Moffit, who has served on the district’s special education advisory council, announced Saturday she’ll seek the seat currently held by Silveira. Silveira confirmed in a text message to the State Journal on Sunday that she will not run again.

Only Burke’s and Silveira’s seats are up in 2015. School board members are elected as at-large members.
Silveira was first elected in 2006 when Art Rainwater was superintendent and has since helped hire two superintendents as well as an interim leader.
She oversaw some of the most dramatic events in the district’s recent history, including in 2011 when Walker successfully sought to limit collective bargaining for public school teachers — a move that the Madison teachers union fought in court until this year when the state Supreme Court upheld the law.

The same year, the board faced another polarizing debate after the Urban League of Greater Madison’s then-executive director Kaleem Caire proposed a charter school aimed at reducing the persistently low achievement levels of the district’s black students. The board ended up voting against the proposal after months of tense discussion.

Notes and links on Mary Burke, Arlene Silveira and Anna Moffit.

Molly Beck:

Mary Burke faces a key vote on the Madison School Board on Monday a week before the gubernatorial election: whether or not to back a $454 million budget that raises taxes and delivers a 1 percent base pay raise to teachers.

Burke, challenging incumbent Gov. Scott Walker in a tight race, declined Tuesday to say how she’d vote. But she pointed out to reporters that she voted against a preliminary version of the budget that included a smaller tax increase than the final proposal to be voted on Monday.
“We did have a preliminary budget earlier that had a similar type of tax increase and I voted against it because I thought it wasn’t being as responsible as we need to be to the taxpayers in Madison,” Burke said Tuesday before casting an early ballot for the Nov. 4 election. “Certainly that issue will come up Monday night.”

If she backs the budget, she risks giving ammunition to Walker and other Republicans in a race that is going down to the wire.

Much more, here.

2014-2015 Madison School District budget notes and links.

Pat Schneider:

The conservative legal group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has brought suit against Madison’s public schools through a plaintiff who does not have standing to bring the “scandalous” allegations of violations of teachers’ rights included in its complaint, school district officials claim in a court filing.

Plaintiff David Blaska, a conservative blogger, “is not a teacher in the district nor an employee of the District and he therefore lacks both standing and a factual basis on which to assert those allegations,” school officials say in their answer to a lawsuit brought last month against the Madison Metropolitan School District, the Madison School Board and labor union Madison Teachers, Inc.

In pleadings filed in Dane County Circuit Court last week, school officials and the union asked the court to strike portions of the complaint referring to union dues, fair share payments and other issues regarding employees, calling them “immaterial, impertinent and scandalous.”

WILL, not Blaska, is actually the “party in interest,” or entity that would benefit from the suit, Madison public school officials assert.

The lawsuit filed last month challenges the legality of labor contracts for Madison teachers and other school district employees that were negotiated and entered into after the 2011 enactment of Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker’s signature legislation curtailing the collective bargaining power of public employees.

Molly Beck:

Over the past 10 years, Wisconsin taxpayers have paid about $139 million to private schools that were subsequently barred from the state’s voucher system for failing to meet requirements related to finances, accreditation, student safety and auditing, a State Journal review has found.

More than two-thirds of the 50 schools terminated from the state’s voucher system since 2004 — all in Milwaukee — had stayed open for five years or less, according to the data provided by the state Department of Public Instruction. Eleven schools, paid a total of $4.1 million, were terminated from the voucher program after just one year.

Northside High School, for example, received $1.7 million in state vouchers for low-income students attending the private school before being terminated from the program in its first year in 2006 for failing to provide an adequate curriculum.

The data highlight the challenges the state faces in requiring accountability from private schools in the voucher program, which expanded from just Milwaukee and Racine to a statewide program last school year. The issue has emerged as a key area of disagreement between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic challenger Mary Burke, a Madison School Board member, in this year’s gubernatorial campaign.

Last school year, there were 108 schools and about 25,000 students participating in the Milwaukee voucher program, and 146 voucher schools total. The state has budgeted about $210 million for all voucher schools for the current school year, compared to around $4.4 billion in general aid for public schools.

Wisconsin spent $11,774 per student in 2011 [ballotpedia] or $10,256,390,270. So, let’s assume that Wisconsin spent on average $9Billion annually since 2004. That’s $90,000,000,000 over the past decade. The state paid $139,000,000 to “failed” voucher schools during that time, or 0.0015% of total K-12 spending…

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to further analyze the effectiveness of said 90,000,000,000… not to mention the present public school “accountability” models. After all, the oft criticized WKCE was used to evaluate schools for some time.d Astonishing.

Edmund Henschel & Russell Knetzger

In its Sept. 17 editorial about Gov. Scott Walker’s second term agenda, the Journal Sentinel Editorial Board said, “Act 10 was a mistake” (“Gov. Scott Walker’s second term? Same as the first,” Our View). Act 10 virtually ended collective bargaining for many, but not all, state and local public employees.

It was not a mistake and should be followed up with Act 10.2 and Act 10.3. One would address the expensive early retirement feature included in the Wisconsin pension plan for all state and local public employees, and the other would bring in police and fire personnel, left out in Act 10. Police and fire together amount to about 60% of most local budgets, leaving only 40% covered by Act 10.

Wisconsin was the first state in the Union to allow public employees to bargain collectively, and, by the 1970s, unionization was showing its worst feature. That feature was, and will always remain, that unions cannot resist the temptation to try to control both sides of the bargaining table. They do this by being politically active in electing union-sympathetic public officials and in de-electing taxpayer sympathizers. The state teachers union was the first to consistently apply this power both in local and state elections and was very effective at both levels.

Wisconsin, having first created public collective bargaining, rightfully should be the first state to remove it. Indiana was slightly earlier, but the Indiana public at referendum put it back in place. That action, and the current race for Wisconsin governor, shows just how much unions are fighting to regain this power.

Early public employee unions recognized that public employee strikes did not sit well with the public. In exchange for removing the right to strike, unions were given arbitration, a power that likely gained more for unions than striking. The problem with arbitration is it becomes an averaging of the surrounding lowest and highest wages.

As the wealthier tax bases raise their wages and benefits, over time the lower tax base communities rise to the previous average of the higher base. If they both can rise faster than inflation, which they have done by a ratio of 2.5-3 to 1, in only a few successive contract periods the lower tax base pay equals the former high base levels.

Much more on Wisconsin Act 10, here.

Patrick Marley:

Democrat Mary Burke told education officials Friday she would fight as governor to stop the expansion of voucher schools but would leave alone the long-standing program in Milwaukee.

“This is something that may sound like a good political sound bite, but it is bad public policy,” she said of expanding the voucher program.

“I think it is the thing that most threatens a vision of a public school system and an education for students in Wisconsin to be the leaders in our country.”

Her comments drew applause from her audience at a Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators conference at the Concourse Hotel in Madison.

For more than 20 years, the state has run a program in Milwaukee that allows certain students to attend religious schools and other private institutions at taxpayer expense.

In recent years, a similar program was created for eastern Racine County and a more limited one for the rest of the state. Republican Gov. Scott Walker has championed those programs and said he wants to expand the statewide one.

Burke said she would leave alone the Milwaukee program, but indicated she wanted to halt the statewide voucher program.

“For the rest of the state, vouchers have no place and they are a drain on our public school system at a point at which we have very, very limited resources,” she said. “So I do not see the research after 20 years in Milwaukee that says this is a way of improving student learning throughout the state.

Related:

Vouchers

Milwaukee Public Schools Spend More on a Vacant Building.

A focus on adult employment.

Dave Zweiful:

Last Sunday’s Wisconsin State Journal carried a front-page story about a new phenomenon in our public schools that’s a fallout from Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 — the teacher as “free agent.”

According to some, Act 10’s virtual destruction of teachers unions unleashed good teachers from the shackles of their union contracts so they can now peddle their expertise to districts that can come up with a better deal.

In fact, the story informed us, teachers with expertise in special disciplines like technology and engineering are being offered bonuses, higher salaries and better fringe benefits to jump ship — apparently sort of a mini-version of what Prince Fielder did to the Brewers a few years back.

Some districts are able to offer higher salaries to those with expertise in hard-to-fill positions because Act 10 has freed up money that had been going to teachers under union contract for pensions and health benefits.

Notes and links on Act 10, here.

Madison 2005 (reflecting 1998):

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
On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level”. We adopted this goal in response to recommendations from a citizen study group that believed that minority students who are not competent as readers by the end of the third grade fall behind in all academic areas after third grade.

As of 2013, the situation has not changed, unfortunately.

Madison, 2014, the view from Milwaukee:

The largest state teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, gave $1.3 million last month to the Greater Wisconsin Committee, a liberal group that has been running ads critical of Walker. Two of WEAC’s political action committees have given a total of $83,128 to Burke directly.

On the other side, the American Federation for Children said last year in a brochure that in the 2012 elections in Wisconsin, including the recalls that year, it had spent $2.4 million supporting pro-voucher candidates.

Along with family members, Dick and Betsy DeVos have given about $343,000 to Walker since 2009. The Grand Rapids, Mich., couple made their fortune in the marketing firm Amway and now support the voucher school movement.

The elections are critical because in general, each candidate’s stance on the issue of vouchers is largely dictated by their political party affiliation. If Republican candidates maintain control of both houses and the governor’s seat, voucher-friendly legislation is more likely to pass.

Democrats are trying to take control of the state Senate. Republicans hold the chamber 17-15, with one GOP-leaning seat vacant. Republicans have a stronger majority in the Assembly and the election is unlikely to change that.

Senate Democrats would oppose the expansion of voucher schools until standards and requirements are established that put those private schools on the same footing as public schools, Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said.

…….

Walker on Wednesday also challenged Burke’s record on the Madison School Board.

He noted that the graduation rate for black students in Madison is lower than the graduation rate for black students in MPS.

Walker said Burke has had a chance to use his Act 10 law to save the taxpayers millions in Madison, and put those dollars toward alleviating the achievement gap.

“She’s failed to do that,” Walker said.

Burke responded that Madison is a fiscally responsible district that is one of the few in the state operating under its levy cap.

Madison still has a contract because the teachers union there challenged the Act 10 law in court, and a circuit court judge ruling initially swung in its favor. The teachers union subsequently bargained a contract this year and next year with the district.

Then this summer, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Walker’s Act 10 law.

Madison 2014, gazing into the mirror:

Gov. Scott Walker took the campaign against Democratic opponent Mary Burke to her front door Wednesday, accusing the one-term Madison School Board member of not doing enough to improve black students’ graduation rates in Madison.

Walker argued that the Madison School Board could have put more money toward raising graduation rates and academic achievement if it had taken advantage of his controversial 2011 measure known as Act 10, which effectively ended collective bargaining for most public workers, instead of choosing to negotiate a contract with its teachers union for the 2015-16 school year earlier this summer.

“Voters may be shocked to learn that the African-American graduation rate in Madison (where Mary Burke is on the board) is worse than in MKE,” Walker tweeted Wednesday morning.

Burke shot back that Walker’s comments were “short sighted” and showed “a lack of knowledge” of how to improve student academic achievement.

In 2013, 53.7 percent of black students in Madison graduated in four years. In Milwaukee, the rate was 58.3 percent, according to state Department of Public Instruction data. That gap is smaller than it was in 2012, when the 4-year completion rate among black students was 55 percent in Madison and 62 percent in Milwaukee.

Overall, the 2013 graduation rates for the two largest school districts in Wisconsin was 78.3 percent in Madison and 60.6 percent in Milwaukee.

Under Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, the district has made progress in the last year toward improving overall student achievement, Burke said in a call with reporters. School Board president Arlene Silveira also said Wednesday the district has started to move the needle under Cheatham.

“Is it enough progress? No. We still have a lot of work to go, and whether you’re talking about African-American (graduation rates) in Madison or talking about (rates) in Milwaukee, they are too low,” Burke said. “But the key to improving student learning, that anyone who really looks at education knows, is the quality of the teacher in the classroom.”

Decades go by, yet the status quo reigns locally.

A few background links:

1. http://www.wisconsin2.org

2. Wisconsin K-12 Spending Dominates “Local Transfers”.

3. Mandarins vs. leaders The Economist:

Central to his thinking was a distinction between managers and leaders. Managers are people who like to do things right, he argued. Leaders are people who do the right thing. Managers have their eye on the bottom line. Leaders have their eye on the horizon. Managers help you to get to where you want to go. Leaders tell you what it is you want. He chastised business schools for focusing on the first at the expense of the second. People took MBAs, he said, not because they wanted to be middle managers but because they wanted to be chief executives. He argued that “failing organisations are usually over-managed and under-led”.

Mr Bennis believed leaders are made, not born. He taught that leadership is a skill—or, rather, a set of skills—that can be learned through hard work. He likened it to a performance. Leaders must inhabit their roles, as actors do. This means more than just learning to see yourself as others see you, though that matters, too. It means self-discovery. “The process of becoming a leader is similar, if not identical, to becoming a fully integrated human being,” he said in 2009. Mr Bennis knew whereof he spoke: he spent a small fortune on psychoanalysis as a graduate student, dabbled in “channelling” and astrology while a tenured professor and wrote a wonderful memoir, “Still Surprised”.

2009: The elimination of “revenue limits and economic conditions” from collective bargaining arbitration by Wisconsin’s Democratically controlled Assembly and Senate along with Democratic Governer Jim Doyle:

To make matters more dire, the long-term legislative proposal specifically exempts school district arbitrations from the requirement that arbitrators consider and give the greatest weight to revenue limits and local economic conditions. While arbitrators would continue to give these two factors paramount consideration when deciding cases for all other local governments, the importance of fiscal limits and local economic conditions would be specifically diminished for school district arbitration.

A political soundbyte example:

Candidate Burke’s “operating under its levy cap” soundbyte was a shrewd, easily overlooked comment, yet neglects to point out Madison’s property tax base wealth vs. Milwaukee, the District’s spending levels when state revenue limits were put in place and the local referendums that have approved additional expenditures (despite open questions on where the additional funds were spent).

I hope that she will be more detailed in future comments. We’ve had decades of soundbytes and routing around tough choices.

Madison’s challenges, while spending and staffing more than most, will continue to be under the political microscope.

I hope that we see a substantive discussion of K-12 spending, curriculum and our agrarian era structures.

The candidates on Education:

Mary Burke:

Education has always offered a way up to a good job and a better life. It’s the fabric of our communities, and it’s the key to a strong economy in the long term.

As co-founder of the AVID/TOPs program, a public-private partnership that is narrowing the achievement gap for low income students, Mary knows that every Wisconsin student prepared to work hard can realize their dreams if given the support they need. By bringing together area high schools, the Boys & Girls Club, technical colleges, businesses and the University, Mary made a real difference for students, many of whom are the first in their family to attend college. The first class graduated last spring, and in September, over 90% of those students enrolled in post-secondary education.

Mary believes Wisconsin schools should be among the best in the nation—and she knows that making historic cuts isn’t the way to do it. She’ll work every day to strengthen our public education system, from K-12 to our technical colleges and university system. Mary strongly opposed the statewide expansion of vouchers—as governor, she’ll work to stop any further expansion, and ensure that all private schools taking public dollars have real accountability measures in place.

Scott Walker:

“We trust teachers, counselors and administrators to provide our children world-class instruction, to motivate them and to keep them safe. In the vast majority of cases, education professionals are succeeding, but allowing some schools to fail means too many students being left behind. By ensuring students are learning a year’s worth of knowledge during each school year and giving schools the freedom to succeed, Wisconsin will once again become a model for the nation.” — Scott Walker

For years, Wisconsin had the distinction of being a national leader in educational reform. From the groundbreaking Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to policies aimed at expanding the role of charter schools in communities across the state, Wisconsin was viewed as a pioneer in educational innovation and creativity.

Wisconsin used to rank 3rd in fourth grade reading, now we’re in the middle of the pack at best with some of the worst achievement gaps in the nation.

Fortunately, Wisconsin has turned a corner and is once again becoming a leader in educational excellence by refocusing on success in the classroom. This has been done by pinpointing the following simple but effective reforms:

• Improving transparency
• Improving accountability
• Creating choice

We are working to restore Wisconsin’s rightful place as an education leader. Our students, our teachers, and our state’s future depend on our continued implementation of reform.

A look at District spending:

Per student spending: Milwaukee’s 2013-2014 budget: $948,345,675 for 78,461 students or $12,086/student. Budget details (PDF).

Madison plans to spend $402,464,374 for 27,186 students (some pre-k) this year or about $14,804/student, 22% more than Milwaukee. Details.

And, finally, 2010: WEAC: $1.57 million for four senators.

Janesville Gazette:

Is it good policy? Perhaps Act 10 was an overreach with its union-busting provisions, but it addressed a fiscal need in Wisconsin and the school districts and municipalities that receive state aid.

Public employee benefits had become overly generous and burdensome on employers, and Act 10 addressed that by requiring employees to contribute their fair shares. The result has saved the state and local governments millions of dollars. Those savings have helped those local governments address state aid cuts and ongoing budget challenges.

Now that the legal questions surrounding Act 10 are resolved, let’s move forward with a clear understanding that the law is here to stay and that public employers and employees still must work together to ensure that quality workers continue to provide quality services.

Sly Podcasts – Madison Teachers, Inc. Executive Director John Matthews.

Alan Borsuk:

With freedom comes responsibility.

This is one of the important lessons most parents hope their children learn, especially teenagers. OK, you got a driver’s license. You’re hot about all the things you can do. But there are an awful lot of things you shouldn’t do, and won’t do if you’re smart.

So what will teens learn from school leaders all across Wisconsin in the next few years? I’m hoping they’ll learn that with freedom comes responsibility, and I’m even somewhat optimistic that, overall, they will. That won’t be universally true. There are always the kids who just can’t resist flooring it when the light turns green.

But in most school districts, the freedom school boards and administrators were given in 2011, when Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans in the legislative majorities won the battle of Act 10, has been used with restraint and good judgment. A lot of superintendents and principals, and even teachers, are seeing pluses to life without the many provisions of union contracts.

I don’t want to overstate that — there are also a large number of teachers still feeling wounded from the hostility toward educators that was amped up by the polarizing events of 2011. Many teachers are anxious about how the greater freedoms their bosses now have to judge, punish and reward will be used. There also remain serious reasons to worry about who is leaving teaching and whether the best possible newcomers are being attracted to classrooms.

David Blaska:

More mystifying is why The Capital Times would do a story focusing solely and entirely on that minority dissent. (“Act 10 is ‘textbook’ example of unconstitutionality.”) Can’t expose its tender readers to the majority opinion, apparently.

Local government here in the Emerald City has done its best to evade the law, extending union contracts into 2016. County Exec Joe Parisi likes to say the union has saved the county money. At the very least, AFSME costs its members dues. There is nothing to prevent county managers from working cooperatively with employees to determine best practices. That is Management 101.

Ditto the teachers union, plaintiff in the just-decided Supreme Court case. The teachers union — as we argued in “Hold your meetings where there is beer” — runs the County Board. Now Mary Burke’s complicity with succoring MTI — she’s got their endorsement — becomes the lead issue in the governor’s race.

If you are a Madison public school teacher who doesn’t want to make fair share payments, let me know. We’ll bring suit. Post a private message on Facebook.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Alan Borsuk:

Here’s a suggestion for something to include in Wisconsin-specific education standards for Wisconsin children:

By the end of first grade, children will know that two Badgers plus two Badgers equals four Badgers.

You want Indiana-specific standards for Indiana kids? By the end of first grade, children will know that two Hoosiers plus two Hoosiers equals four Hoosiers.

North Carolina standards for North Carolina kids? You got it — two Tar Heels plus two Tar Heels equals four Tar Heels.

What kind of silliness is this? Best as I can see, it’s about the level of silliness the whole discussion of education expectations for our children is reaching, both in Wisconsin and across the nation.

With Gov. Scott Walker’s one-sentence statement on Thursday that he wants the Legislature to repeal Wisconsin’s involvement in the Common Core standards movement, we have crossed onto turf where chaos in education policy is likely to reign for the coming school year.

At the same time, I bet we’re also on the way, in the long run, to changing very little when it comes to state standards for what kids should learn. I say that because states that have announced they are going to set their own standards are generally coming up with new plans that actually change little. That’s for two reasons.

James Wigderson, via a kind reader:

We should not have been surprised when Democratic candidate for governor Mary Burke voted with the rest of the Madison school board to negotiate a contract extension with the teachers union. After all, it was just a month ago that Burke told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a video recorded interview that she believes she didn’t need Act 10 to get the same concessions from the unions. “I think it was only fair to ask for contributions to health care and to pensions, um, but I think those could have been negotiated, ah certainly firmly but fairly.”

Let’s set aside that negotiating a contract extension with the union is likely a violation of the law, as attorney Rick Esenberg of WILL informed the school board. Okay, that’s a little bit like saying to the dinosaurs, “setting aside that giant meteor head towards Earth…”

But setting the issue with the law aside, we’re about to about to see whether Burke’s claim is correct that she is capable of achieving the benefits of Act 10 without having to rely upon the powers granted by Act 10 to local government bodies. If we’re to use upon history as our guide, Burke is unlikely to prove anything except that the passage of Act 10 by Governor Scott Walker and the legislature was necessary.

After the passage of Act 10, Madison teachers staged a massive “sick out” in order to protest Walker’s reforms. Despite a public statement from then-WEAC President Mary Bell to go back to work and a request by the Madison Metropolitan School District to cancel a scheduled day off, Madison’s teachers continued to stay out of work to continue the protest. In fact, a MacIver investigation discovered that John Matthews of Madison Teachers, Inc. lied about the union’s involvement in planning the protest.

Against that background, and a determination not to be bound by the terms of Act 10, the Madison teachers union and the school district negotiated the first contract extension into 2013. Instead of the 12.6 percent health care contribution called for under Act 10 and even supported by Bell, the district was only able to negotiate a 5 percent health care contribution. The agreement did allow an increase to 10 percent the following year.

Related:

Teacher Union Collective Bargaining Continues in Madison, Parent Bargaining “like any other union” in Los Angeles.

Act 10.

Mary Burke.

Matthew DeFour on Madison School Board Member and Gubernatorial Candidate Mary Burke:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said Tuesday that if elected, she would eliminate the new statewide voucher program and private school tax deduction in the next budget.

Burke, a Madison School Board member, previously said she didn’t support the statewide voucher program.

In response to a question at a Wispolitics.com luncheon at the Madison Club about what she would cut in the next state budget, Burke went further, calling statewide vouchers “a new entitlement program we frankly don’t need.” She also identified the private school tax deduction as something she would cut.

“I respect people’s choice in making that, but I don’t think we should be subsidizing that choice,” Burke said, referring to sending children to private schools.

Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign issued a statement in response to Burke’s comment.

“Gov. Walker believes every child, regardless of ZIP code, deserves access to a great education, and parents should have the right to choose the best educational environment for their children, whether it’s a public, private, charter or home school,” spokeswoman Alleigh Marre wrote in an email.

Both the tax deduction and the statewide voucher program were introduced in the 2013-15 budget signed by Walker.

Uppity Wisconsin on Mary Burke (October 2013):

o, yesterday, when Mary Burke finally made a promise and told the Wisconsin State Journal that, although she opposed Walker’s statewide expansion of vouchers, she nonetheless would do nothing to remove the statewide voucher program, jaws dropped throughout Wisconsin’s progressive community:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said Monday she wouldn’t have expanded private school vouchers statewide, which Gov. Scott Walker did in this year’s state budget.

However, Burke said if elected she would keep the statewide program in place with a cap of 1,000 students and seek accountability for private schools receiving public funds in Milwaukee.

Vouchers a conservative entitlement program — John Skille

Elizabeth Warren’s Quiet Support for Public School Vouchers by Carrie Lucas:

If all goes right for Massachusetts Democrats in November, they will fill the seat once held by liberal lion Sen. Ted Kennedy with a school voucher supporter who has proposed radically reforming public education in America.

You won’t find a call for school vouchers on Elizabeth Warren’s campaign website. Education is listed first among the candidate’s top priorities, but the website sticks to safe, poll tested platitudes calling for “good public schools, good public universities, and good technical training” as the key to a having a competitive workforce.

Yet in her 2003 book, The Two Income Trap, Warren and co-author Amelia Warren Tyagi cite the traditional public schools system, in which children are assigned to a school based on their residence, as a key source of economic pressure for families with children. Warren and Tyagi call for system-wide reforms to break the link between where a child lives and where they go to school, and specifically make the case for a fully-funded voucher program that would enable children to attend any public school.

Sweden’s School Choice: Vouchers for All and “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….”.

Erin Richards & Kevin Crowe:

Reading and math proficiency for students attending private, mostly religious schools in Milwaukee with the help of taxpayer-funded vouchers ticked up in 2013 from 2012, according to the latest state standardized test score results.

On average, students in Milwaukee’s private-school voucher program still performed lower than students in the city’s traditional public school system.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released fall test score data for the taxpayer-funded private voucher schools on Tuesday, one day after allowing media to review the fall 2013 state test score results for public schools.

In all, reading and math achievement on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination for both the public and private voucher schools, especially in Milwaukee, continued to be low. That’s due in part to the state raising the bar for what’s considered a proficient score on the state test.

The WKCE will be replaced next year by a new, computer-based assessment in reading and math that is aligned to national standards and will allow for better comparisons of achievement between states.

Another issue that has cropped up is an increasing number of voucher-school families opting their children out of taking the state exams altogether — a legal option, but one seemingly at odds with the statewide push toward more transparency for schools.

Gov. Scott Walker signed two bills into law Tuesday that will bring more accountability to the private schools receiving taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, the latest state test results showed:

About 16% of Milwaukee voucher students who took the state test met or exceeded the bar for proficiency in math, and about 12% did the same in reading.

Much more on the oft criticized WKCE, here.

The Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

The following links provide a lot of additional details on the legislation that would replace the Common Core State Standards within 12 months with model academic standards created in Wisconsin. Please stay informed and contact your legislators with your thoughts.

2013 Senate Bill 619.
Assembly Substitute Amendment 1 to Assembly Bill 617 (ASA1/AB617)
.
Video message from Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Tony Evers.
Related:
Governor Scott Walker staff drafted bill aimed at Common Core State Standards.
A Critique of the Wisconsin DPI and Proposed School Choice Changes.

Wisconsin State Journal:

The school accountability bill still boils down to what Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, said last fall:
“If you get a check, you get a checkup,” the chairman of the Senate Education Committee succinctly stated.
It’s taken awhile, but consensus on this point has emerged at the state Capitol.
Gov. Scott Walker has expressed similar sentiments for a long time. So did Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, last week during a meeting with the State Journal editorial board.
So let’s get it done.
Sen. Paul Farrow, R-Pewaukee, appears to have the simplest idea that’s easiest to pass. He plans to introduce a bill this week to ensure all traditional public, charter and private voucher schools are reporting student information to the state, including results of a new state test in spring 2015.
Farrow is willing to add consequences for low-performing schools through subsequent legislation next session. That would be in time for state report cards in 2015, which seems reasonable.

Alan Borsuk:

“Our Schools! Our Solutions!”
In eye-catching orange and white, banners and buttons proclaiming that slogan have been showing up in the last several weeks, generally in the hands or on the clothes of members and allies of the Milwaukee teachers union.
It is their four-word proclamation of opposition to plans floated (but so far, not going forward) in Milwaukee and Madison that would make it likely that some low-performing schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system would be turned over to non-MPS charter school operators.
I find the slogan intriguing on several levels.
Level One: It is part of the energetic work leaders of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association and the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which has been involved in the campaign, are doing to try to remain relevant. Act 10, the 2011 legislation spurred by Gov. Scott Walker, stripped public employee unions of almost all their power over money and benefits, work conditions and school policies.
What’s left? That’s a challenging question for union leaders. Membership has fallen, political influence has fallen. Leaders of many school districts statewide are working with what remains of unions in more cooperative ways than I expected three years ago, but it is clear who has the upper hand.
In Milwaukee, the MTEA has reduced its staff and spending, but remains visible, active, and, in some cases, influential. The majority of the School Board is generally inclined toward the union.

Alan Borsuk:

Whatever appeared to be coming together a week ago seemed to be reduced to splinters in the last few days when it came to pursuit of ideas for low performing schools in Milwaukee.
I think it’s contagious and my brain has splintered into thoughts about the fairly tumultuous recent developments. So instead of a single column, I offer fragments.
Fragment 1: Last week was a good one for fans of the status quo. Plans for Republicans in the Legislature to push through new and fairly dramatic steps came to a halt when the lead author said he couldn’t get enough votes.
Milwaukee School Board members went through much rhetoric on what to do in meetings two weeks in a row — and sent the whole issue back to committee. Maybe doing nothing is better than doing the things being suggested. In any case, “doing nothing” is ahead at the moment.
Fragment 2: It’s all about counting to 17. There’s a big roster of education ideas up for action in the Legislature — school accountability, including public and voucher schools; charter school expansion statewide; dealing with the future of the Common Core initiative.
But if 17 of the 18 Republican state senators don’t agree to get behind any of these, nothing will result, at least this year. So far, no one has counted to 17 on any of these fronts. What could change that? Maybe concerted involvement by Gov. Scott Walker. Maybe not. The Senate Republicans are not easy to unite.
Fragment 3: The hostility was strong in the large audiences at the two recent meetings of Milwaukee School Board members focused on low performing schools.
Much of it was aimed at anything to do with charter schools. At one point, mention by Superintendent Gregory Thornton of Teach for America, City Year and especially Schools That Can Milwaukee drew audible rumbling from the crowd.
These organizations are controversial to some folks, but I think they each are bringing positive, good energy and commitment to helping kids in Milwaukee. It’s one thing to disagree on approaches. It’s another to add so much anger to the environment.

Erin Richards:

Starting in 2015’16, every school that receives taxpayer money would receive an A-F rating based on their performance in the following areas:
Achievement on state tests.
Achievement growth on state tests, based on a statistical analysis called value-added that estimates the impact schools and teachers have on student progress.
The progress in closing achievement gaps between white students and subgroups of students who are poor, of minority races or who have disabilities.
Graduation and attendance rate status and improvement.
The current school report card system went into effect two years ago and took the place of the widely disliked sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Gov. Scott Walker once pushed for using A through F grades, but a task force on school accountability had opted for a five-tiered system placing schools in categories from “significantly exceeds expectations” to “fails to meet expectations.”
The 2012-’13 report cards placed 58 schools statewide into the “fails” category. That included 49 in MPS — one is closed, so now there’s 48 — two independent charter schools authorized by the City of Milwaukee, four public schools in Racine and three public schools in Green Bay.

Matthew DeFour & Molly Beck:

Wisconsin’s lowest-performing public schools would be forced to close or reopen as charter schools and the state’s 2-year-old accountability report card would be revamped under a bill unveiled Monday.
The proposal also would require testing for taxpayer-subsidized students at private voucher schools while barring the lowest-performing schools from enrolling new voucher students. Participating private schools also could test all students for accountability purposes.
“We’re going to start holding anybody who gets public money accountable for getting results. That is the bottom line,” said Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, which plans to vote on the amended bill Thursday.
The bill makes several changes to the state’s K-12 school accountability system — including assigning schools letter grades — which itself recently replaced a decade-old system under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Erin Richards

A proposal to allow special-needs students to attend private schools at taxpayer expense is being revived, the latest effort by Republicans in the Legislature to give parents more options outside traditional public schools.
The proposal is a revamped version of a measure that failed in Gov. Scott Walker’s 2013-’15 budget.
That measure would have allowed 5% of students with disabilities to attend schools outside their home districts with the help of a taxpayer-funded voucher. As part of a broader compromise, the portion on students with disabilities was dropped in favor of a limited expansion of private school vouchers statewide.
The revived Wisconsin Special Needs Scholarship bill is scheduled to be introduced Tuesday by State Sens. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa) and Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), and Reps. John Jagler (R-Watertown) and Dean Knudson (R-Hudson).
The primary concern of those who oppose special-needs vouchers is that private schools are not obligated to follow federal disability laws. They point to examples in other states where — in their eyes — underqualified operators have declared themselves experts, opened schools and started tapping taxpayer money.

Alan Borsuk:

Did not much happen? Consider the waves of flat data on how kids are doing.
It may take a while to sort out this year. But that won’t stop me from offering a few awards for, um, distinguished something or other.
Most jaw-dropping moment of the year: Adding into the state budget a statewide private school voucher program. Literally in the middle of the night, with no public hearings or advance word, this emerged from a backroom deal by key Republicans and voucher lobbyists. It is limited to a small number of students now. But if Gov. Scott Walker wins re-election in November and Republicans keep control of the Assembly and Senate, there is a strong possibility vouchers will become available widely in Wisconsin.
Education person of the year: Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Gregory Thornton. In his fourth year, Thornton and his powerful behind-the-scenes chief of staff, Naomi Gubernick, are at the center of so much. Thornton is both tough and a nice guy, each an asset in his work. He is good at spreading optimism. He’s got plans and goals that sound good and, in many ways, are. And he’s politically adept. But he is a perplexing figure who seems eager not to be challenged by subordinates or pesky people like reporters. A “gotcha” style of management by bosses seems to be pretty common in MPS, undermining morale.
The Same Old Same Old Award: Waves of test data and a second round of the new statewide school report cards told us that the Have kids are doing OK in Wisconsin and the Have Not kids are not. As for the Haves, they’re not doing so well that we shouldn’t be talking about how to give their schools a fresh burst of energy, and that seems to be happening in some places. As for the Have Nots, so little has changed, despite so much effort. There are a few bright spots on the scene, and we need to do more to grow them. Overall, we’ve got to find paths that are better than the ones we’ve been on.
The Gone-At-Last Award (Hopefully To Stay): Dr. Brenda Noach Choice School. This was one of a handful of voucher schools that was a model of what’s wrong with oversight of Milwaukee’s nationally important program to pay for children in private schools. The school was “an abomination,” as one strongly pro-voucher leader told me recently. But for years, it fended off attempts to cut off its funding. Finally, this year, after receiving $7,299,749 in public money over a dozen years, the Brenda Noach school ran out of options — it couldn’t find anyone to accredit it. But that doesn’t mean the school leaders aren’t shopping for accreditation to re-open for next year.

The Capital Times:

Candidates who lose a race for public office face a choice. They can give up on campaigning and step back to the sidelines of the American experiment. Or they can wade back into the competition — better prepared and more determined to prevail.
Gaylord Nelson lost his first race for the state Legislature.
So did Scott Walker.
Robert M. La Follette lost and lost before he won the governorship.
Bill Proxmire lost statewide race after statewide race before he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Paul Soglin lost his first race for mayor of Madison.
And Madison firefighter and paramedic Michael Flores lost his first race for the Madison School Board in 2012.

Much more on the 2014 Madison School Board election, here.

Matthew DeFour:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke launched a new, more detailed website Tuesday with one notable omission: her only experience in elective office, as a Madison School Board member.
But after the State Journal inquired about it, the campaign said it would update the site to include her role on the board.
A campaign spokesman called the omission an “oversight.” However, the website in several places downplays Burke’s ties to the city where she lives.
The website focuses on Burke’s experience as a top executive at Waterloo-based Trek Bicycle, which her father founded, and her time as Commerce secretary in the Gov. Jim Doyle administration.
Burke, the only Democrat so far who announced plans to run against Gov. Scott Walker next fall, launched burkeforwisconsin.com in October with a video announcement and ways for supporters to provide an email and donate to the campaign.

Madison schools’ academic challenges and above average spending & taxes will likely receive greater scrutiny during the upcoming gubernatorial election.
That said, a healthy debate on Madison’s long time, agrarian era governance model vs the more dynamic school choices available in most urban areas would be welcome.
– Phil Hands

Tom Kertscher:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke shared some of her views on school vouchers in a lengthy interview she did over the weekend with blogger Heather DuBois Bourenane, a prominent critic of Gov. Scott Walker.
Some of Burke’s remarks, based on a transcript:
Q. “What do you really think you can you do to move past this sort of toxic and divisive rhetoric without seeming like you’re not willing to take a stand on the issues that really matter the most to preserving Wisconsin values and to standing up for Wisconsin workers and students and educators?”
“I talk about jobs a lot because I do believe that there are a lot of people who are unemployed and really struggling to get by and we do have to emphasize what’s going to get jobs growing here in Wisconsin. But also I think that the direction that we’re headed in terms of education is really frightening to me. The statewide voucher expansion we’re talking about, I actively fought against and I think that I am very worried about what will happen in the next four years with regards to taking the caps off and funding them through a continued siphoning of funds that should be going to public education.”
Q.”If you don’t support a full repeal of the voucher system, how exactly do you plan to improve their performance and accountability without draining more taxpayer funds from the public school budget?”
“Sure. Well, first, in the interview I gave regarding the voucher, statewide voucher expansion, the emphasis I definitely placed is in not taking off the caps or letting the voucher expand. Then in terms of rolling back that statewide voucher expansion, you know, as governor I would have to work with the Legislature and certainly would do that, but it would be obviously only in conjunction with the Legislature that could happen.

Chris Rickert:

Despite all this, Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers seem paralyzed in the face of potential bipartisan agreement.
Walker has said as far back as August that he’s open to changing the voucher program to give preference to public school students. The Republican chairmen of the Senate and Assembly education committees have made similar noises. Yet none responded to messages from me saying essentially: Well, OK, so are you introducing legislation to do that?
Similarly, Gillian Drummond, spokeswoman for Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson, said “I have not heard of anything” on possible Democratic legislation on the issue in the Senate.
Speaking on background, a staffer for Rep. Sondy Pope, who has been outspoken in her criticism of underwriting private school tuition with vouchers, said “our caucus as a whole is looking” to do something even more stringent than in Racine, but was less than optimistic about Republicans going along.

Molly Beck:

Property taxes in the Madison School District will increase by about $67 for the average homeowner as part of the final $392 million 2013-14 budget approved by the school board on Monday.
The board voted 6-1 to approve this year’s amended budget and also to set the levy at $257.7 million, a 3.38 percent increase over last year.
That increase is about 1 percentage point less than originally projected in July, before Gov. Scott Walker unveiled his two-year $100 million property tax relief bill that sent an additional $2.5 million in state aid to Madison schools.
Total property taxes will increase by $66.74 on average. That’s $39.24 less of an increase than originally expected earlier this year, according to district budget documents. A property tax bill for the average $231,000 Madison home is now estimated to be $2,739.66 for school purposes.
School board member Mary Burke, a candidate for governor, cast the lone votes against the final amended budget and against the levy, citing the desire to see a better balance between the needs of the district and the needs of taxpayers.
“Next year, as we look at this, we really need to look at how many people are struggling to make ends meet,” Burke said about the levy increase, noting the district and board should consider whether salary increases among district families are not keeping pace with property tax increases.

Much more on the 2013-2014 budget, here.
The City of Madison’s portion of local property tax will grow 2.2%.
Middleton’s property taxes are 16% less than Madison’s on a comparable home.

Jason Stein:

Seeking to counter a recent trial judge’s ruling in a public labor lawsuit, a Milwaukee teacher and four others from Wisconsin are suing to force the union elections called for under Gov. Scott Walker’s signature legislation.
With teachers from La Crosse, Waukesha, Brookfield and Racine, Nicholas Johnson of Milwaukee Public Schools filed the lawsuit in Waukesha County Circuit Court with legal help from union opponents at the National Right to Work Foundation and the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.
The lawsuit seeks to force the state Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to hold recertification elections to determine whether the unions in their districts can officially represent school employees. The rules for the recertification elections make them difficult for unions to win, and many labor groups faced with them have chosen not even to hold them.
Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colás last year found Act 10 was unconstitutional for teachers and local government workers, saying it violated their guarantee of equal protection under the law and infringed on their freedom-of-association rights.

Ruth Conniff:

When Dane Country Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas held officials in Gov. Scott Walker’s administration in contempt this week, he was pushing back against a level of unchecked lawlessness by this administration that is “practically seditious,” says attorney Lester Pines.
Colas had already ruled a year ago that parts of Act 10 — the law that ended most collective bargaining rights for most public employees — were unconstitutional. This included Act 10’s requirement that unions hold annual recertification elections. But commissioners at the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission decided to ignore that decision. They went ahead and prepared for recertification elections for more than 400 school district and worker unions in November.
“The commissioners knew full well” they were flouting the court, Colas said, despite their cute argument that the word “unconstitutional” applied only to the specific plaintiffs in the case — teachers in Madison and city workers in Milwaukee.
As John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., put it, Colas’ decision “is one of the most important decisions not only in public-sector labor history, but also in democracy.”
The principle here is simple. If a law is unconstitutional on its face, it’s unconstitutional in every case. That has always been understood in Wisconsin courts. And, Judge Colas pointed out, the Walker officials understood it, too.

Matthew DeFour:

Public schools will receive $4.26 billion in general state aid this school year, up $87.5 million or 2.1 percent from last year, the Department of Public Instruction announced Wednesday.
The aid figures are a revision from those released Oct. 15. Gov. Scott Walker signed a bill Sunday to increase aid by $100 million over two years. The bill did not include an increase in state-imposed limits on school district revenues, so school boards are expected to use the additional aid to lower property taxes.
The aid figures were marginally different than estimates released by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau last week as part of the discussion of the property tax relief bill. The Madison School District, for example, will receive $12,680 less than reported last week, a change of 0.02 percent.
Over all, Madison will get $52.2 million in state aid, a 10.7 percent decrease.

Madison received an increase of $11,800,000 in redistributed state tax dollars last year…



Madison Schools’ 2013-2014 Budget Charts, Documents, Links, Background & Missing Numbers.

Andrea Anderson:

Under the new contracts clerical and technical employees will be able to work 40-hour work weeks compared to the current 38.75, and based on the recommendation of principals, employees who serve on school-based leadership teams will be paid $20 per hour.
Additionally, six joint committees will be created to give employees a say in workplace issues and address topics such as planning time, professional collaboration and the design of parent-teacher conferences.
Kerry Motoviloff, a district instructional resource teacher and MTI member, spoke at the beginning of the meeting thanking School Board members for their collective bargaining and work in creating the committees that are “getting the right people at the right table to do the right work.”
Cheatham described the negotiations with the union as “both respectful and enormously productive,” adding that based on conversations with district employees the contract negotiations “accomplished the goal they set out to accomplish.”

Pat Schneider:

“Madison is in the minority. Very few teachers are still under contract,” said Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council. Fewer than 10 of 424 school districts in the state have labor contracts with teachers for the current school year, she said Wednesday.
And while Brey said WEAC’s significance is not undermined by the slashed number of teacher contracts, at least one state legislator believes the state teacher’s union is much less effective as a resource than it once was.
Many school districts in the state extended teacher contracts through the 2011-2012 school year after Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker’s law gutting collective bargaining powers of most public employees, was implemented in 2011. The Madison Metropolitan School District extended its teacher contract for two years — through the 2013-2014 school year — after Dane County Judge Juan Colas struck down key provisions of Act 10 in September 2012.
The contract ratified by the members Monday will be in effect until June 30, 2015.

Andrea Anderson:

On Thursday, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty emailed a letter to Cheatham and the School Board warning that a contract extension could be in violation of Act 10.
Richard Esenberg, WILL president, said he sent the letter because “we think there are people who believe, in Wisconsin, that there is somehow a window of opportunity to pass collective bargaining agreements in violation of Act 10, and we don’t think that.”
If the Supreme Court rules Act 10 is constitutional all contracts signed will be in violation of the law, according to Esenberg.
Esenberg said he has not read the contract and does not know if the district and union contracts have violated collective bargaining agreements. But, he said, “I suspect this agreement does.”

Pat Schneider:

The contract does not “take back” any benefits, Matthews says. However, it calls for a comprehensive analysis of benefits that could include a provision to require employees to pay some or more toward health insurance premiums if they do not get health care check-ups or participate in a wellness program.
Ed Hughes, president of the Madison School Board, said that entering into labor contracts while the legal issues surrounding Act 10 play out in the courts was “the responsible thing to do. It provides some stability to do the important work we need to do in terms of getting better results for our students.”
Hughes pointed out that the contract establishes a half-dozen joint committees of union and school district representatives that will take up issues including teacher evaluations, planning time and assignments. The contract calls for mediation on several of the issues if the joint committees cannot reach agreement.
“Hopefully this will be a precursor of the way we will work together in years to come, whatever the legal framework is,” Hughes said.
Matthews, too, was positive about the potential of the joint committees.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

WILL President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg warns, “The Madison School Board is entering a legally-gray area. Judge Colas’ decision has no effect on anyone outside of the parties involved. The Madison School Board and Superintendent Cheatham – in addition to the many teachers in the district – were not parties to the lawsuit. As we have continued to say, circuit court cases have no precedential value, and Judge Colas never ordered anyone to do anything.”
He continued, “If the Madison School District were to collectively bargain in a way that violates Act 10, it could be exposed to litigation by taxpayers or teachers who do not wish to be bound to an illegal contract or to be forced to contribute to an organization that they do not support.” The risk is not theoretical. Last spring, WILL filed a lawsuit against the Milwaukee Area Technical College alleging such a violation.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s letter to Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF).
The essential question, how does Madison’s non-diverse K-12 governance model perform academically? Presumably, student achievement is job one for our $15k/student district.
Worth a re-read: Then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Chris Rickert

There’s a pretty good chance Scott Walker doesn’t know much about Common Core, the new set of education standards for kindergarten through high school being adopted by states and school districts across the country.
It’s not surprising, then, that when his spokesman was asked Tuesday to explain what his boss meant when he said the standards might be too weak, this newspaper got no response. It’s likely that Walker doesn’t know what he meant.
He’s not alone — a poll recently found that two-thirds of Americans hadn’t even heard of Common Core — and that’s unfortunate because it leaves the door open for those at the extreme ends of the political spectrum to step into the vacuum.
In May, state tea party groups sent a letter to Walker and the Legislature accusing the Common Core of being all sorts of bad things, including an “educational fraud” and something of a federal takeover of education.

Ryan Ekvall:

A controversial art lesson in the Madison Metropolitan School District draws similarities from a 2012 incident in which a Louisiana middle school teacher was fired after displaying his student’s anti-President Obama drawings.
Kati Walsh, an elementary art teacher in Madison, published anti-Gov. Scott Walker political cartoons drawn by her kindergarten, first- and second-grade students. One drawing depicts Walker in jail, and another in which he appears to be in jail and engulfed in flames. Walsh said the orange in that drawing actually represented a prison jumpsuit.
Robert Duncan, a former Slidell, La., middle school social studies teacher at St. Tammany Parish School District, was fired after an internal investigation found he acted incompetently in displaying several student drawings depicting harm to Obama. The incident was first brought to light after a parent leaked photos of the drawings to WDSU, a local TV news outlet.

After learning to read well, critical thinking would certainly be a useful topic for all students.

Pat Schneider:

isconsin State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Evers used the platform of his annual State of Education speech Thursday to respond to skeptics of Common Core standards, whose ranks Republican Gov. Scott Walker joined just a few days earlier.
“We cannot go back to a time when our standards were a mile wide and an inch deep, leaving too many kids ill prepared for the demands of college and a career. We cannot pull the rug out from under thousands of kids, parents and educators who have spent the past three years working to reach these new, higher expectations that we have set for them. To do so would have deep and far reaching consequences for our kids, and for our state,” Evers said in remarks at the State Capitol that also touched on accountability for voucher schools. “We must put our kids above our politics. And we owe it to them to stay the course.”
Evers signed on to national Common Core curriculum standards for reading and math in 2010, making Wisconsin one of the first states to adopt them. School districts across the state, including Madison Metropolitan School District, are in the process of implementing them. Madison schools Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham has called Common Core standards “pretty wonderful,” and says they are about critical thinking and applying skills to practical tasks.
Walker had been pretty low-key about Common Core until a few days ago, when he issued a statement calling for separate, more rigorous state standards. Republican leaders of both houses of the state Legislature quickly announced special committees to weigh the Common Core standards, and public hearings on not-yet-adopted science and social studies standards will be held, according to one report.

Related: Wisconsin’s oft-criticized WKCE assessment and wisconsin2.org

Dylan Matthews:

A couple years ago, Rutgers historian David Greenberg noticed a defect endemic to books about social, political and economic problems: The last chapter always sucks. “Practically every example of that genre, no matter how shrewd or rich its survey of the question at hand, finishes with an obligatory prescription that is utopian, banal, unhelpful or out of tune with the rest of the book,” Greenberg noted.
And it’s not just books. I’ll be the first to admit that the possible fixes with which I finished off my series on the alarming rise in college tuition were pretty vague and utopian. But helpfully, the good folks at Third Way have noticed that the conversation about how to reign in tuition has gotten a little too small-minded. “For both parties, in particular Democrats, our solution to the problem of rising cost of college has been to subsidize the rising cost,” the think tank’s president, Jonathan Cowan, says. “That’s been our official policy, to subsidize the rising cost, and that has to be seen as a fairly intellectually bankrupt approach. We need a dramatically different approach that is about driving down the rising price.”
To that end, Third Way is publishing a new report by Anya Kamenetz, one of the most interesting writers on higher ed innovation in the game, that lays out a detailed plan for pushing the total cost of a public bachelor’s degree down to $10,000. Not $10,000 a year, mind you: $10,000 total. She’s not the first to have this idea, as Govs. Rick Perry (R-Tex.), Scott Walker (R-Wis.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) have all proposed $10,000 degrees.

Ryan Ekvall, via a kind reader email:

Some kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders in Madison public schools are apparently preparing for futures in either political cartooning or time on a psychiatrist’s couch.
Kati Walsh, an elementary art teacher at the Madison Metropolitan School District in July posted some of her students’ drawings of Gov. Scott Walker in jail. Walsh suggests her young Rembrandts’ ideas for their sketches popped up out of thin air.
“One student said something to the effect of ‘Scott Walker wants to close all the public schools’… So the rest of the class started drawing their own cartoons and they turned very political. They have very strong feelings about Scott Walker,” the teacher wrote on her blog.

Remarkable. I am in favor of a wide ranging, free thinking education for our future generations, after they have mastered reading….. Some teachers deal with ideology very well, others not so much.

Alan Borsuk

A recovery school district for low-performing schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system? The news that a group of civic leaders convened last week at the initiative of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce to consider such an idea gave me an instant trip to the land of MPS Structural Reform Ideas Past.
Start with the 1970s, when then-State Rep. Dennis Conta and others proposed redoing school districts in the Milwaukee area so there would be a small number of districts shaped like slices of pie, each including parts of the central city and parts of the suburbs. Caused a big stir, but, of course, it didn’t happen. (I wonder what would have resulted if it had come to pass.)
Jump to the late 1990s: Then-Gov. Tommy Thompson announced he was setting several goals for Milwaukee Public Schools, including test score and attendance improvement, and if they weren’t met, he was going to have the state take over MPS. My assumption is that he thought about it a little more, asking himself, why would I want to take on that mountainous headache? MPS, of course, didn’t meet the goals, but Thompson didn’t pursue the idea.
In 2009, then-Gov. Jim Doyle said he wanted to put MPS under the control of a board appointed by the mayor of Milwaukee. Mayor Tom Barrett kind of seemed to go along. But Doyle and Barrett didn’t do a good job of making the case, community opposition was effective and the idea came to nothing.
In 2010, then-candidate for governor Scott Walker said he thought MPS should be broken up into a set of smaller districts the size of, oh, say, Wauwatosa, where his kids went to school. Never heard any more about that idea, perhaps because Walker realized it was not doable.

Jason Stein:

All schools funded by state taxpayers — including private voucher schools — would be held to new standards and Milwaukee’s public schools would still face state intervention, under long-expected legislation offered Wednesday by two key GOP lawmakers.
Work has been under way for two years on the measure, which would establish the first-ever rating for private voucher schools based on their student performance data. It comes a month and a half after lawmakers and Gov. Scott Walker expanded Wisconsin’s voucher program for private schools statewide.
The measure would not change the status of Milwaukee Public Schools, which under the state’s current accountability system is the only district in Wisconsin so far to face corrective action.
The new standards were proposed Wednesday by the chairmen of the Senate and Assembly education committees, Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon) and Rep. Steve Kestell (R-Elkhart Lake).
“We want parents to have the best information possible while at the same time making sure all of their choices are quality options,” Kestell said in a statement.
The bill would cover all schools receiving tax dollars, from traditional public schools to public charter schools and voucher schools. Work on it began two years ago with a task force chaired by Walker and state schools Superintendent Tony Evers, an ally to Democrats, along with Olsen and Kestell.
But passage of the complex measure through the Republican-held Legislature is by no means guaranteed. Both Olsen and Kestell have sometimes taken more aggressive postures on overseeing vouchers than some other Republican colleagues, particularly those in the Assembly.

By Morris Andrews former Executive Secretary Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) 1972-1992
Lost in the two-month maelstrom at the state Capitol is the role of teachers and their union, WEAC, as the chief advocates for school quality in Wisconsin. Scott Walker and the Fitzgeraids paint WEAC as a destroyer. They say eradicate WEAC, an organization they know almost nothing about except that it opposes their antisteacher agenda. Should they succeed in killing the voice of organized teachers, the real loser wilt be our public schools.
Teachers have fought hard to make schools better over the past four decades. And it was Republican and Democratic votes in support of WEAC issues that resulted in the passage of pro-education bills. Such bipartisanship is but one casualty of today’s polarized politics.
Beginning in the 1970s WEAC became a political force, mainly by deciding to start backing legislative candidates. To receive WE/C’s endorsement, a candidate had to support a list of education-related issues. Many Republicans did support these school improvement issues. And WEAC members consequently worked to help them win election or reelection. One Republican who received a WEAC endorsement was Tommy Thompson when he was in the Assembly.
Today it seems unbelievable that the 1977 collective bargaining bill now reviled by the governor passed with Republican support. At the time, there were 11 Republicans in the Senate; five of them supported the bill. When the law’s three-year trial period was about to expire, a group of Senate Republicans voted to extend it–despite a veto by Republican Governor Lee Dreyfus. Notably, Mike Ellis (then in the Assembly) was among a group of Republicans who jumped party lines on procedural votes that saved it.
Our members then also reflected views across the spectrum. They identified themselves this way: Independents, 37%; Democrats, 35%; and Republicans, 27%. This spectrum was reflected at the annual WEAC convention, held a few days before the 1976 presidential election, when Gerald Ford and Walter Mondale both spoke to the huge assembly. Today, these numbers have changed as the Republicans shift further and further to the extremes.
Did WEAC work to improve teacher pay and benefits? Yes, of course. But we were also committed to changing the wide variation in school quality from district to district.
At the top of WEAC’s school improvement list was getting a set of minimum educational standards that applied to every school district. In 1974, with Republican support, we succeeded. Today these standards are taken for granted. Among the many changes were requirements that every district must:
establish a remedial reading program for underachieving Ke3 student
offer music art, health, and physical education.
have a kindergarten for five-year olds.
ensure that school facilities are safe. (Many aging buildings were crumbling)
provide emergency nursing services.
require teachers in Wisconsin to go through continuing education and to have their licenses renewed once every five years. (Prior to enactment of minimum standards. districts were empbying unlicensed teachers for whom they secured an emergency license that they would hold year after year).
On this foundation of programs Wisconsin students rose to the top of the national ACT scores for decades.
The state Department of Public instruction (DPI), headed by State Superintendent Barbara Thompson, was charged with implementing the minimum standards. She accepted most of WEAC’s recommendations. WEAC backed Thompson, a Republican with strong GOP support for her reelection in 1977.
We sought common ground with Republicans. When Democratic Governer Pat Lucey proposed strict cost controls on school budgets in 1975, it was Republicans and Democrats in the Senate 110 coalesced with WEAC and school boards against Democrats on the Joint Finance Committee to ease the restrictions. Years later, when Republican Governor lee Dreyfus vetoed a measure to raise the cost control ceiling, the WEAC-supported override succeeded with the votes of 23 Assembly Republicans and eight Senate Republicans against the Republican governor.
As late as 1984, Wisconsin had no uniform high school graduation requirements. WEAC supported Gov. Tony Earl’s efforts requiring graduates to have a specified number of credits in English, maths science, social studies, physical education, health, and computer science.
To curb underage drinking, WEAC Joined with a coalition of organizations on a bill that gave teachers and administrators legal protection to remove students suspected of drinking from school premises and events. All Assembly Democrats and all but three Republicans voted for the bill. In the Senate all Republicans voted for it and all but two Democrats voted for it.
WEAC allied with Republicans and Democrats to repeal a longestanding provision that gave city councils in 41 of our largest cities veto power over their school boards’ budgets.
The fate of students with special needs also concerned WEAC in 1973, four years before Congress passed the federal special education law, WEAC successfully lobbied the Wisconsin Legislature for a state special education law that required every district to have a special education program. The chief sponsor was James Devitt, a Republican state senator.
In 1976, the Legislature approved WEAC-backed bills to require tests of newborns for signs of mental retardation, and require children under age five to undergo a test for visual impairment. During this time WEAC successfully supported a bill that required teachers to report suspected child abuse, which has helped protect children across the state from life-altering harm.
In the 1970s, sex discrimination in school athletics was a major issue. In most school districts many sports were for boys only. This changed after WEAC joined with women’s groups to ensure that girls who wanted to play in sports have the same opportunity as boys. There were less than half as many WIAA-sponsored statewide tournaments for girls as there were for boys 14 for boys, six for girls. WEAC filed sex discrimination lawsuits against both the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletics Association (WIAA) and the DPI that helped correct this inequality. WEAC also convinced the Legislature to budget the additional state funding needed to add programs for girls.
Working with the Great Lakes lnter-Tribal Council, which represents Native Americans on ten reservations, WEAC successfully lobbied for a bill that provided state aid to districts that employed home/school coordinators for Native American students. And for passage of a law allowing Native Americans without certification to teach native culture and endangered native languages.
Citizens who wanted to add new or replace old school buildings asked WEAC to help them pass local bond referendums. Monroe was one district where WEAC’s help resulted in passage of a school bond for a much needed elementary school. The measure had failed in four previous elections. With WEAC help it won by a huge margin on the fifth attempt.
Property taxes are a major source of school funding. VVEAC recognized that tax increases place a burden on low income homeowners, especially retirees on fixed incomes. To help these people, we backed an expanded homestead tax-relief program. Another action in support of low income citizens was creation of the Citizens Utility Board (CUB). CUB fights for affordable electricity and telephone service on behalf of Wisconsin customers before regulatory agencies, the Legislature, and the courts. Two organizations that fought hardest for CUB were WEAC and the United Auto Workers. All Wisconsin utilities opposed it.
The key to these achievements in the 1970s and ’80s was the cooperative spirit between WEAC and politicians of both parties. People from different sides of the aisle respected and listened to one another. We socialized outside of the Capitol. We grew to like each other, even if we disagreed on political issues.
Today there is no middle ground. Compromise is deemed “caving in.” Winning is not enough for the extremists. The “enemy must be completely destroyed. But if teacher unions are silenced, who will replace them as effective advocates for students?

Jason Stein:

In just two years, spending by the state’s public employee unions on lobbyists has plummeted from the summit of Wisconsin politics, leaving business interests uncontested at the pinnacle of Capitol lobbying, a new report shows.
The figures show the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teacher union, spent nearly $2.1 million in the first six months of 2011 and $1 million in the first half of 2009, but a mere $84,000 in the first six months of this year. The union is spending less than one-tenth of what it once did.
The preliminary lobbying figures from the Government Accountability Board released this week are just the latest sign of the deep impact of Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker’s 2011 law repealing most collective bargaining for most public employees. The new figures on who’s lobbying state lawmakers follow a recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report showing that this same law had crushed the membership and finances of government labor unions as well as eliminating most of their former duties.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council was first or second in spending on lobbying in legislative sessions over the past four years and reached the height of its lobbying efforts in the first six months of 2011, as labor leaders tried feverishly but unsuccessfully to block Walker’s legislation.
But for the first six months of 2013, a critical period in which Republicans sharply expanded taxpayer-financed private voucher schools, WEAC’s lobbying spending was nothing special when compared with the other groups that have filed their lobbying reports with state officials. The once heavyweight contender now ranks 40th in the total spending at the Capitol, with its lobbying so far this year almost exactly matching the spending by two other middleweight interests: Marquette University and a conservation group.

Related:
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.

Bill Lueders:

Newly released data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction show that staffing levels at state public schools held steady last year, despite fears that changes initiated by Gov. Scott Walker would prompt additional losses.
The number of employees did drop in some program areas and in some districts, according to the DPI’s summary report. And overall staffing remains significantly lower than five years ago.
“District job losses as the result of budget cuts have stabilized, and in some cases become one-year positive readjusts,” DPI spokesman John Johnson said. Despite this rebound, he said, many districts are still hurting for staff, “and student services programs have been cut dramatically.”
The data, released this week, tally staff levels for the 2012-13 school year as they existed on the third Friday in September.
They show that the state’s 424 school districts had 99,265 full-time equivalent positions in 2012-13. That’s up 25 positions from 2011-12, but down a total of 5,200 FTE positions since 2008-09.

Matthew DeFour

A Democratic poll testing gubernatorial candidates asks respondents their opinions about Madison School Board member Mary Burke, a complaint with state regulators says.
In one of the strongest signs yet that Madison School Board member Mary Burke is considering a run against Gov. Scott Walker in November 2014, a polling firm is apparently testing her favorability rating among potential voters.
The poll came to light Tuesday after the Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Board regarding a telephone poll that included questions about the former Trek Bicycle executive and Commerce Secretary under Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle.
The Associated Press also reported Tuesday that online records show that on June 12, the day before the poll was conducted, six Internet domain names that point toward a Burke candidacy were registered anonymously, including: Burkeforwisconsin.org, Burkeforwisconsin.com, Maryburke.org, Burkeforgovernor.com, and Burkeforgovernor.org.
Burke did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
The GOP complaint, filed against Burke and the state Democratic Party, alleges a telephone pollster asked questions about Burke and whether certain statements would influence the respondent’s vote.

The PDF complaint (1.2MB).
Not much, if anything has changed within our public schools over the past year that Mary has been on the Board. There is plenty to do, starting with the District’s long-term, disastrous reading scores.

Alan Borsuk:

I usually give awards for special distinction for work on kindergarten through 12th-grade matters only at year’s end. But we’re having bonus presentations now to mark completion of the work of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee on the state budget for the next two years.
The budget still has to go to the Assembly, Senate and Gov. Scott Walker, but Republican leaders are determined to kibosh any substantial changes, so it’s a strong bet this is basically the final version. Without further ado, the awards:
The Surprise! Surprise! Award:
Intense competition for this, given all that happened after a 10-hour, closed-door session of Republicans led to an all-nighter for the committee. The prize goes to tax credits for private school tuition. Never put forth earlier as a proposal, never subject to public input, it was introduced and approved around dawn Wednesday. Starting in 2014, taxpayers could deduct as much as $10,000 from their income for state tax purposes to offset private school tuition. That translates into as much as $600-plus in actual money for some families and probably somewhat of a boost to the appeal of private schools.