Erin Richards:

Sen. Paul Farrow (R-Pewaukee), chairman of the Senate Committee on Education Reform and Government Operations and a supporter of charter schools, indicated some of the ideas might need to be corralled.

“I think we might be over-chartering ourselves and not developing a cohesive picture for what charter schools should look like,” he said in an interview.

Independent charter schools are public schools run by nonprofit companies instead of school districts.They have to report all the same data as traditional public schools, but get freedom from some other state rules — such as employing unionized teachers — in exchange for meeting performance goals in a contract with a state-approved authorizing agency. Failure to meet the targets means the agency can close the school.

Republicans often like independent charter schools because they’re run like small businesses, often with nonunion staff on one-year contracts. Many Democrats dislike charters because they can deplete enrollment at traditional public schools, often don’t employ unionized teachers and may not be able to serve children with the most significant special needs.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

We had a great time at our campaign kick-off event for One City Early Learning Centers at the CUNA Mutual Conference Center on March 6! More than 350 friends and champions for children joined us on a Friday night to learn about our plans to raise $1.4 million to establish a new type of preschool in the Madison area.

One City will take a two-generation community impact approach to providing young children with the learning and developmental experiences they need to become compassionate and high potential learners, leaders and students in school and life, and to be reading-ready by the time they reach kindergarten.

Attendees learned about our three strategic priorities:

1. Empowered and Happy Children
2. Strong and Happy Families, and
3. Healthy and Resource-Filled Neighborhoods

We shared our educational approach and plans for establishing One City’s Parent University and Family Resource Network. We highlighted the partnerships we are developing to support strong families and cultivate talented and successful children. We also shared how One City will be an active partner in efforts to continue the revitalization of South Madison. We want to ensure that children in our neighborhood and preschool are raised in safe, sustainable and enriching environments, and that parents have access to high quality, affordable and accessible early education opportunities for their children while they work and continue their education.

Additionally, Forward Community Investments announced their purchase of the South Madison Day Care facility for One City. This marks the first time FCI has purchased property and made such an investment in their 19-year history. The details of this unique partnership inspired everyone in attendance and we raised $40,126 towards our goal that night!

Thank you for your support, encouragement and partnership. We appreciate you! We also thank and appreciate CUNA Mutual Group Foundation, Forward Community Investments and Urban Assets Consulting for hosting and supporting the event, and supporting the launch of One City.

Building the Bridge to a Bright Future for Kids.

Onward.

Kaleem Caire
Founder, President & CEO
kcaire@onecityearlylearning.org
Phone: 608.268.8004

LEARN MORE

To take a virtual tour of our preschool (pre-renovation), which is located at 2012 Fisher Street on Madison’s South Side, click here.

To view photographs of our kick-off event, click here. As Dr. Frank Byrne, the recently retired president of St. Mary’s Hospital noted, “One City was here in this room this evening. It was beautiful.”

To review and download the PowerPoint presentation we gave at the kick-off event, and that many in attendance expressed an interest in obtaining, click here. To arrange a presentation, please contact Quinn Heneghan at quinn@urbanassetsconsulting.com or 608.819.6566.

To view a list of our early supporters, our Bridge Builders, click here.

Give what you can. We’ve had investors contribute $10, $10,000 and $50,000. We want as many people, businesses and institutions to contribute as possible so we can (a) achieve our fundraising goal, (b) get our school opened by September 1, 2015 and (c) live out the meaning and intent of our name – One City coming together to invest in the potential and future of its children.

To make your tax-deductible investment in One City and join our list of Bridge Builders – click here. You can also download and complete our pledge form by clicking here and mailing it along with your contribution (payable to One City Early Learning) to:

One City Early Learning Centers
c/o Scholz Nonprofit Law
16 North Carroll Street, Suite 530
Madison, WI 53703
Phone: 608.268.0076

Related:

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Kaleem Caire attempted to create the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School. Unfortunately, it was rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.

The Economist:

“IT’S not enough to have a dream”, reads a banner over the whiteboard in Nancy Sarmiento’s Baltimore classroom. Most of her 12-year-old pupils qualify for a free or cheap lunch. About 70% of the school’s new arrivals last September had reading and mathematical skills below the minimum expected for their grade. Americans call such schools “disadvantaged”. Whatever the label, most countries have schools where most children are from poor families, expectations are low, and teachers are hard to recruit. And in most, the falling prestige of the teaching profession makes matters worse.

But Ms Sarmiento, who graduated from a four-year biology degree course a year early, had to see off fierce competition to win her teaching spot. Teach for America (TfA), the scheme that placed her, accepts just one in six applicants. It looks for a stellar academic record and evidence of traits that distinguish the best teachers in tough schools, including leadership, resilience and motivation to help the poor. Recruits get five weeks’ training and pledge to work for two years in a disadvantaged school.

Emily Badger:

Robert Putnam wants a show of hands of everyone in the room with a parent who graduated from college. In a packed Swarthmore College auditorium where the students have spilled onto the floor next to their backpacks, about 200 arms rise.

“Whenever I say ‘rich kids,’ think you,” Putnam says. “And me. And my offspring.”

The Harvard political scientist, famous for his book “Bowling Alone” that warned of the decline of American community, has returned to his alma mater to talk, this time, about inequality. Not between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, but between two groups that have also fallen further apart: children born to educated parents who are more likely to read to them as babies, to drive them to dance class, to nudge them into college themselves — and children whose parents live at the edge of economic survival.

Li Zhou:

For children with autism, math problems are a lot easier if images are involved. Addition, for example, becomes significantly more clear if the equation and answer are accompanied by physical pictures representing the math taking place. Two cars plus three cars is logically depicted with images of five physical cars. Reinforcing every question with a visual reference helps make it more concrete and accessible.

Katie Hench, Christopher Flint and Lally Daley, all of whom have worked with autistic students as special education teachers or therapists, were inspired by their firsthand experiences to establish Infiniteach, a Chicago-based startup building mobile apps that cater to the specific ways that kids with autism learn. Their current app, Skill Champ, teaches ten vital skills, including number matching and object sorting, using approaches proven to resonate with autistic students.

Christian Schneider:

When the Madison Metropolitan School District School Board met in October of last year, members listened to teachers tell stories of being hit, bitten and kicked by students. The teachers were objecting to a new school district plan that sought to both allay the wide racial disparity in student suspensions and keep children in school for more instruction days. But teachers said the plan, which lessened punishment for many offenses that previously earned students out-of-school suspensions, was nothing short of a catastrophe.

Racial disparity in suspensions is an issue that has long plagued Wisconsin. According to a report released last week, Wisconsin ranks first in the nation in the rate of black secondary school students suspended. Previous studies have shown that in Milwaukee schools, black students represented 56% of the district’s total enrollment but made up 85% of the students who were given multiple out-of-school suspensions.

In Madison, however, the racial disparity is far more pronounced. Last year, black students made up only 18% of enrollment but comprised 59% of out-of-school suspensions. And the plan to lessen this disparity only seems to have made it worse; this year, while the total number of suspensions is down 41%, the rate of black students who earn out-of-school suspensions has risen to 64%. Further, teachers and parents alike argue that it leaves disruptive students in classrooms where they can lessen the quality of education for well-behaved students.

The Madison experiment’s problems are notable given the district’s proud status as a progressive stronghold. It would be difficult to find a district more sensitive to charges of racial insensitivity; and yet the district’s track record in dealing with black children is a near-scandal. In the 2013-’14 school year, 10% of the district’s black students were proficient in reading — that’s lower than the district’s special education students (14%) and students who speak English as a second language (19%). And this is occurring in one of the state’s wealthiest school districts.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

Jill Tatge-Rozell, via a kind reader:

Kenosha parents whose autistic child was not admitted into Paris Consolidated School through open enrollment have joined a lawsuit that claims Wisconsin’s open enrollment rules violate federal disability law.

Specifically, the suit claims open enrollment violates the Americans with Disabilities Act because it denies students with disabilities the benefits of a government program on the basis of disability.

“We view the open enrollment process as a government benefit,” said C.J. Szafir, education policy director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. “Since the program is out there, all children should have equal access.”

Wisconsin law allows a school district to establish how many students with disabilities it will accept through open enrollment. In some cases, such as at Paris, districts do not accept any students with disabilities.

WILL is representing six children with disabilities from five families whose applications to attend schools outside their resident district were denied. The identities of the parents and the children are protected at this point in the proceedings.

However, Szafir said far more children with disabilities have had their open enrollment applications denied since the program started. For the 2013-14 school year alone, he said, more than 1,000 disabled children had their applications for open enrollment rejected solely on the basis of their disability.

Hannah Rosin:

In December, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv had let their 10-year-old son Rafi and his 6-year-old sister Dvorah walk one mile home through Silver Spring alone. The kids got picked up by the police, who then turned the case over to child protective services. The Meitivs, as it happens, are “free-range parents” who have a very coherent philosophy about giving children more independence. They had let their children walk home alone that day only after practicing, and felt the kids were ready.

Banish Ahmed:

After the shootings, Mughal said her parents called her from Arizona to implore her to avoid public transportation, to get home early, and to refuse to open her front door for anyone.

Some Muslims I spoke to for this article described getting some form of that advice from their parents this week, but many more said discussions about avoiding conflict and concealing their religious beliefs were recurring ones in their families. Fourteen of 21 Muslims who responded to an informal survey I sent out to various Muslim listservs had been given a talk on personal safety by their parents and issued some version to their own children.

“I personally have been physically attacked while praying in public,” Mohammad Jehad Ahmad, a student at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, told me.

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“.

Robert Verbruggen::

The challenges involved in balancing work and family lead to some of the most difficult decisions any family faces. Decades of “women’s empowerment,” the rise of the working mother, and the economic pressures of modern family life have forced families to make difficult compromises. The implications of those compromises for children have led to highly controversial and emotionally charged debates that make all parents — regardless of their work and child-care choices — question whether they’ve done the right thing.

Most Americans have never really made their peace with the idea of full-time working motherhood. Pew recently found that 60% of Americans say children are better off with a parent at home, while 35% say that kids are just as well off either way. Another survey conducted last year gave respondents the option of a mother who works part-time, and, given this option, 42% said part-time work was best while another third opted for staying at home. Only 16% of respondents told Pew that it’s best for children if mothers work full-time.

Likely in part because of these beliefs (in addition to a multitude of other factors), more mothers have been choosing to stay at home in recent years. According to a recent Pew report, the percentage of mothers who stay at home with their children (a statistic that includes non-working single mothers) fell from 49% in the late 1960s to a low of 23% in 1999, but then rose to 29% by 2012. A more traditional measure of stay-at-home motherhood — the proportion of all mothers who are married, do not work, and have working husbands — has risen a bit, too, from about 17% in the mid-1990s to 20% in the early 2000s, with some minor fluctuations thereafter, indicating that the proportion of stay-at-home parents has roughly stabilized for now. (Stay-at-home fathers are becoming more common as well, though they remain a small fraction of all stay-at-home parents.)

Hamilton Nolan:

The 1%-vs-99% inequality dynamic that plagues America’s economy as a whole extends to the world of higher education. And the richest universities in America had a great year last year.

This is not all that surprising, considering the fact that prestigious universities play a key role in the creation and perpetuation of America’s ever-more-entrenched class system. It is only right that those catapulted to great wealth and power by elite universities would give something back, so that their own children might also be able to achieve outsize wealth and power one day. Last year was a record one for donations to colleges: a total of $37.5 billion, up nearly 11% from the year before. Of course, most of that was not going to your local community college. Inside Higher Ed notes that “The top 20 colleges in fund-raising brought in more than $10 billion. That means that 28.6 percent of the total was given to fewer than 2 percent” of schools.

The biggest recipient of all: Harvard, with $1.16 billion in donations. Stanford was second, with about $930 million, followed by USC, Northwestern, and Johns Hopkins. “Meanwhile,” the Wall Street Journal says, “schools in the middle of the pack are getting a smaller slice of the philanthropic pie, as they may not have such active, wealthy or well-connected alums.”

Robert P. George and Yuval Levin, via Will Fitzhugh:

“If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.”

This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear in our Spring 2015 issue to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (generally referred to as the Moynihan Report).

As a general rule, assistant secretaries in the Labor Department do not produce lasting historical documents. The so-called Moynihan Report, produced by Assistant Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the winter of 1965 and published under the title “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” is surely the only exception to that rule. But it is quite an exception.

The Moynihan Report gained notice and notoriety almost immediately. Its statistical analysis was cited, and its call to action was repeated, by President Lyndon Johnson within a few months of its publication—again, an uncommon fate for a Labor Department report. But its analysis was just as quickly resisted and disputed in the government and in the academy. Moynihan was accused of arguing that low-income black families were simply causing their own problems and of trying to undermine the civil rights movement. The social psychologist William Ryan actually coined the now-common phrase “blaming the victim” (which he used as a title for a 1971 book) specifically to describe the Moynihan Report.

Of course, Moynihan did no such thing. To the extent that he attributed blame at all, it was to the long and ugly legacy of slavery and to the persistence of racism in American life. Both, he argued, had worked to undermine the standing of black men, and thereby their roles in their own families, and to deform the structure of family life in the black community.

But Moynihan’s aim was in any case less to assign blame than to describe a peculiar problem. The problem first presented itself to Moynihan and his team in the form of a surprising divergence in the black community between unemployment rates and welfare application rates (which coincided with rates of single motherhood, since essentially only unmarried mothers could apply for the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program). Until the late 1950s, the two indexes had risen and fallen together. But starting in the late ’50s, welfare rolls increased even when unemployment was low and the economy was strong.

Moynihan came to understand that he was seeing something new and deeply troubling. Most impressive in retrospect is that he understood that this emerging pattern was troubling above all not for economic reasons, but for deeper and more significant reasons—reasons that are ultimately cultural. “The fundamental problem,” he wrote, “is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.” Communities affected, he worried, faced “massive deterioration of the fabric of society and its institutions.” Such deterioration, should it prove in fact to be occurring, would constitute “the single most important social fact of the United States today.”

In the decades since Moynihan wrote those words, his work has been held up as an example of prophetic social science, and of constructive policy analysis. And his case has served as the foundation for efforts to focus attention and resources on strengthening family formation among the poor. But both the controversy surrounding the report and the continued attention devoted to it have acted to obscure somewhat the key achievement of Moynihan’s work and so, too, its foremost lesson for our own time.

The strength of the report was not in its analysis of the causes underlying the collapse of the family among lower-income African Americans. Moynihan was convinced that what he was witnessing was fundamentally a phenomenon of the black community, and so could be explained by the tragic history of African Americans, which rendered black families uniquely vulnerable to the kind of social and economic pressures many faced in poor urban environments.

There is of course no question that the savage inhumanity to which African Americans were subjected in our country for much of its history and the racism that has persisted far longer have had detrimental effects on the black community and on its families. But the particular pattern Moynihan began to observe in the 1960s has not in fact been limited to the black community. In the half century since he wrote, the pattern has shown itself in the lives of poor Americans of all races. The problems remain worst in the black community, and the history and realities of racism that Moynihan pointed to are surely important contributing factors, but the challenge of family disintegration plainly runs deeper and broader than that. Family breakdown appears to be a prevailing feature of modern American poverty. In this sense, Moynihan’s analysis of causes was not quite on target.

Focus on the Problem

The report is also notable for not proposing solutions to the disturbing set of problems it laid out, although the author did suggest policy prescriptions elsewhere. Indeed, Moynihan specifically committed the report to stick to diagnosis. “The object of this study has been to define a problem, rather than propose solutions to it,” he wrote. And the chief reason for doing so, he argued, was that “there are many persons, within and without the Government, who do not feel the problem exists, at least in any serious degree. These persons feel that, with the legal obstacles to assimilation out of the way, matters will take care of themselves in the normal course of events.”

And here we find the true core of Moynihan’s contribution. It was, simply put, to tell the truth, both about what emerging facts seemed to suggest about a troubling social trend and about the foreseeable implications of that trend for the lives of the people involved. The family appeared to be breaking down among lower-income black Americans, and to Moynihan broken families meant broken communities and broken lives. Both elements of that diagnosis were crucial, and both were hard pills to swallow.

The latter element in particular—the importance of the family to the health and flourishing of society—has been controversial in the half century that followed Moynihan’s report. Roughly halfway through that period, in 1992, Moynihan himself took up that controversy in a speech delivered at the University of Chicago (and later reprinted in the Public Interest). He was blunt. Despite President Johnson’s personal interest in his arguments, Moynihan said, the years that immediately followed his report—the era of the Great Society—brought an approach to social science and to public policy that made the problem he had diagnosed much more difficult to address effectively, and even to talk about honestly. Simply put, he said, the Great Society era “gave great influence in social policy to viewpoints that rejected the proposition that family structure might be a social issue.”

That was an understatement. The most striking, even shocking, feature of the sociological (and to some degree economic) literature in the several decades following Moynihan’s report is the sheer lack of interest in the question of what the breakdown of the family among the poor, which no one could deny was occurring, might mean in the lives of those involved. The few exceptions acted merely to prove the rule.

Those exceptions included the work of Moynihan himself during his academic career; most of the other people responsible for exceptional attention to this problem followed a path similar to his. “Think, for example, of the writing in the early editions of the Public Interest,” Moynihan noted in that 1992 lecture. “Almost without exception, the authors were political liberals who had stumbled upon things that weren’t entirely pleasing to them but which, as the song goes, could not be denied.” Many people, of course, did deny them. But ultimately, Moynihan suggested, facts were facts and their consequences could not help but follow.

Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Moynihan secured a seat on the Senate Finance Committee during his first term and served as its chairman
from 1993 to 1995.

When he delivered the lecture, reflecting on his report some 27 years after its publication, Moynihan might have had some reason to suppose that his small band of truth tellers was finally getting heard. In retrospect, those early years of the 1990s seem like they might have been the apex of that band’s influence and stature in the public square. Moynihan was chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, with jurisdiction over welfare and entitlement policy, among much else. James Q. Wilson and James S. Coleman, both members of that original Public Interest circle, were, respectively, president of the American Political Science Association and president of the American Sociological Association. The Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1992 spoke about family breakdown and welfare in terms that even some Republicans had not always been comfortable with. And the academic wall of silence seemed to be cracking just a little, perhaps especially after William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) was released and sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur’s book Growing Up with a Single Parent (1994) powerfully documented the detrimental effects of family breakdown on children. It could well have appeared as though the tide was finally turning, and the vital importance of family structure would finally find its place in public policy and the public debate. Moynihan, in that moment, seemed almost optimistic.

But it was not to be. Family structure would remain off-limits, even as the underlying trends evolved to encompass more of the populace. Since the early 1990s, the fact that births out of wedlock are not fundamentally a matter of race has become far clearer. In 2010, 72 percent of African American births were to unwed mothers, but so were 53 percent of Hispanic births and 36 percent of white births—all far higher figures than those Moynihan saw in the black community in 1965, when he described a 25 percent rate as a social disaster. In our nation as a whole, 41 percent of children born in 2010 were born to unmarried mothers.

And the rate is growing faster among whites than among other groups: between 1992 (when Moynihan delivered his mildly hopeful lecture) and 2010, births to unwed black mothers rose modestly from 68 to 72 percentage points, but births to unwed white mothers saw a dramatic jump from 23 to 36 percent, an increase of more than 50 percent (see “Was Moynihan Right?” features, Spring 2015, Figure 2).

And what is more, the academy has not in fact grown much more hospitable to the notion that family structure is an essential social concern. Although some ground was surely gained in the 1980s and ’90s, much of it has been lost since, as taboos about studying and discussing the implications of family structure have again been hardening. Indeed, even many Republican politicians now shy away from arguments about the importance of marriage for fear of veering into the debate over same-sex marriage.

But as Moynihan noted half a century ago, one cannot deny either the data about family formation or the centrality of the family to the flourishing of society and its members. And today, far more than when Moynihan penned his report, the implications of these facts are grim and essential to understand.

Mapping the Consequences

It is customary to describe the consequences of social trends in economic terms, and that is surely one useful way to illustrate their costs. Some 40 percent of children raised by single mothers are living in poverty, according to the Census Bureau, while roughly 8 percent of children raised by married parents are poor (see “Was Moynihan Right?” features, Spring 2015, Figure 4).

Another way to think about the consequences of these trends is to look at the sociological and psychological effects. Children who grow up in single-parent families are significantly more likely to exhibit behavioral problems, to drop out of school, to experience mental-health problems, to attempt suicide, and to be out of the workforce as young adults. And as Brookings Institution scholar Ron Haskins has argued, this appears to be very much connected to the challenges that single parents face. “Married parents—in part simply because there are two of them—have an easier time being better parents,” Haskins argues. They can share the burdens and responsibilities of parenthood and can combine their efforts to set clear rules and reinforce them with consequences. Clearly, they have more time and energy.

If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.

None of this, of course, is to downplay the extraordinary and often heroic efforts of many single mothers to help their children avert negative consequences. On the contrary, findings like these help us see just how daunting the challenges faced by mothers raising children alone can be.

But describing the crisis of the family among low-income Americans in these economic and sociological terms may itself be a way of avoiding the deeper problem of which these are but symptoms. The family is the core character-forming institution of every human society. It is the source of the most basic order, structure, discipline, support, and loving guidance that every human being requires. It is essential to human flourishing, and its weakening puts at risk the very possibility of a society worthy of the name. It is hard to imagine how any of the social problems that take up the time and efforts of policymakers—problems of economic mobility, educational attainment, employment, inequality, and on and on—could be seriously mitigated without some significant reversal of the trends in family breakdown. These are ultimately human problems, problems of the soul, at least as much as they are economic and social problems. And the first step toward seriously taking them on must be a reinvigoration of our commitment to the family.

Exceptions to the traditional form of the family can of course be successful—guided by the traditional model. But if that norm itself is undone, if broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered. And this is precisely what is now happening across wide swaths of American society.

The Future of the Family

The facts about the collapse of the family among America’s poor are deeply discomfiting for the Left and the Right alike. They are uncomfortable for the Left because liberals don’t want to acknowledge what they show us about the importance of the family structure and about the need to reinforce it. And they are uncomfortable for the Right because conservatives don’t want to acknowledge what they show us about the destructive effects of persistent poverty, and about the difficulty of helping people rise out of it. These are facts that suggest both the importance of the family and the need for public action, and so they are perfectly suited to being ignored by everyone in our politics.

Moynihan could see that danger half a century ago, and his report was meant to warn of it. His concluding words, although shaped by his sense that race was at the core of the phenomena he had discerned, still ring through the decades. He wrote,

“The policy of the United States is to bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship. To this end, the programs of the Federal government bearing on this objective shall be designed to have the effect, directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.”

The promise of America, Moynihan understood, is unreachable in the absence of strong and stable families. That call should now be generalized into a case for making the strength of the family a key national priority. The lessons of the past half century, and especially of the Great Society’s mostly failed experiments in social policy, can help us think more clearly about the means by which this end could be pursued. But the end was well laid out by Moynihan’s prescient words. The end should be the reinforcement and recovery of the core institution of our society, and every society.

Putting that end at the center of our politics must begin by stating plainly that the future of the family will determine the future of the country. That may seem like a simple and straightforward fact. But as Daniel Patrick Moynihan showed half a century ago, responsible and constructive social science often consists of simply stating such facts, and making it difficult for people to deny or ignore them. His report offers a model of truth telling from which we all could stand to learn.

Robert George is professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

It has been a long, well-planned attack. In 1993, in an action against their own philosophy; i.e. decisions by government should be made at the lowest possible level, the Republican Governor and Legislature began actions to control local school boards. They passed Revenue Controls on school boards to limit how much they can increase taxes. This in itself caused harm by instructional materials and textbooks becoming out-dated. School Boards had to make choices between providing “current” materials and texts, or small class sizes to enable optimum learning. Eventually, the legislated revenue controls caused a double-whammy – out-dated texts & materials and an increase in class size, because of layoffs caused by the legislated revenue controls.

Next, the Governor & Legislature enabled vouchers so those who choose to send their children to private or religious schools can use “vouchers” which cause the public school, where the child could attend, to forfeit public/tax funds to pay for the child to attend the private or parochial school.

With revenue controls crippling the means to provide the best quality education and adequate financial reward for school district employees; and vouchers taking another big chunk, Wisconsin’s Governor and Legislature say of the schools that they have been starving to cause their failure, now, because of your failure, we will close your schools and convert them to for-profit private charter schools. This plan is to appease the Koch Brothers and others, who provide large sums to buy the elections of those promoting these privatization schemes.

Assembly Bill 1, in the 2015 Wisconsin legislative session, is designed just to do what is described above, and it is on the fast-track for approval, just as Act 10 was a few years ago. If it is not stopped, it will rip the heart out of every community – the pubic school will be gone, as will quality public education for all of Wisconsin’s children. The smaller the community, the bigger the harmful impact on Wisconsin’s towns and villages because of AB 1.

Madison spends about double the national average per student.

Madison Teachers, Inc. 26 January, 2015 newsletter can be found here (PDF).

Sean Kirby:

While the District’s first annual report showed some academic improvement overall, it also identified “subgroups”—African American and Latino students and students with disabilities—as part of a more targeted effort to ramp up and enrich the education experience.

To reach them, the district is working with community leaders and groups, such as Madison Partners for Inclusive Education, a support and advocacy group founded more than a decade ago for parents who have children who attend Madison public schools and who receive special education services. Beth Moss, whose son recently left the district after receiving special education until he was twenty-one, is a member of the group.

“Our mantra is that students with disabilities should be included in the classroom with their peers as much as possible, and probably even more than what most people consider possible,” Moss says. “I think the district embraces that philosophy, but it’s not always consistently implemented in every school.”

Moss describes her experience with the schools as mostly positive but over the years as a roller coaster. She says the new strategic framework, now firmly in place and in its second academic year, aims to bring more consistency throughout the district to address the issues. Anna Moffit agrees. She has a second grader and a third grader at Thoreau Elementary, and a first grader at Midvale. All of her children receive special education services through the district. “It’s kind of like you get one thing accomplished, and then three weeks later it’s another thing,” Moffit says. “For me personally, and I can’t speak for all parents, I’m advocating all the time. In fact, I probably spend ten hours a week minimum talking with the schools, going over documents, going to meetings.”

As interim CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, which develops and supports educational and employment opportunities for African Americans and other community members, Edward Lee says the school district’s efforts to bridge the achievement gap for black and Latino students are encouraging.

While the district has begun diversifying the workforce at both the administration and the principal level, building leadership that is more reflective of the student body, he says it has a long way to go to ensure that its staff and teachers better reflect the diversity of the student body. Alex Gee, pastor at the Fountain of Life Covenant Church and the founder and president of the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development, agrees.

“When we don’t have the right kind of diversity that we want to have, then it limits the exposure that white students have to black, Latino, Asian teachers,” Gee says. “Then it limits the role models that kids have.”

Madison Teachers, Inc., via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Buoyed by the election which provided Republican majorities in both the Assembly (+27 majority) and the Senate (+5 majority), conservative anti-worker/anti-union legislators have announced that they will introduce Right to Work legislation when the January session begins. Right to Work laws limit collective bargaining, make it easier to outsource jobs and cut wages and benefits. Their plan was to do this in 2012, but legislators were worried that it was too soon after the 2011 protests against Act 10, and would cause public backlash. On average, workers in Right to Work states earn $7,030 a year less, according to the Congressional Research Service (6/20/12), and the rate of workplace deaths is 52.9% higher. Workers in Right to Work states are even more likely to be uninsured (16.8%, compared with 13.1% overall).

Governor Walker’s Act 10 has already done great damage to Wisconsin’s public sector workers and the economy. Act 10 has been described as “Right to Work on Steroids.” But now, the far-right is coming after the 13% of Wisconsin’s private sector workers who have the benefit of union representation. And it is because CEOs and company owners care more about big business and profits than they do about workers who create them. And, middle class families become struggling families. Right to Work will surely shrink the middle class.

Despite its misleading name, such a law does not guarantee anyone a job and it does not protect against unfair firing, i.e. it provides NO “right to work”. Rather, a Right to Work law prohibits employers and employees from negotiating an agreement – also known as a union security clause – that requires all workers who receive the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement to pay their share of the costs of the Union in representing them. A Right to Work law mandates that unions represent every employee, whether or not he or she pays Union dues. In other words, such laws enable workers to pay nothing and still get the benefits of union membership. Imagine if a Madison resident, who sends their children to MMSD schools, but can opt out of paying property taxes to finance the schools.

A Right to Work law compels dues-paying members to subsidize the cost of representation for those who opt not to pay. If a worker who is represented by a union and doesn’t pay dues is fired illegally, the Union must use resources from dues-paying members to defend the non-member even if that requires going through a costly, time-consuming litigation.

In 2013, Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said “What will be different, this time“? The Superintendent further cited Long Beach and Boston as beacons in her Rotary speech.

However, based on recently released 2015-2016 budget slides (PDF) and Molly Beck’s summary, it appears that the same service, status quo governance model continues, unabated.

A focus on Adult Employment:

“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 situatio

Are Administrators Golden?

The Single Best Idea for Reforming K-12 Education; ” Stop Running the system for the sake of the system.

Dirty little secret of US ed spending: Since 1950, “US schools increased their non-teaching positions by 702%.”; Ranks #2 in world on non teacher staff spending.

“Reverting to the mean“.

Via a kind reader’s email.

Despite spending double the national average per student and delivering disastrous reading results – for years – Madison’s Superintendent pushes back on school accountability:

The Wheeler Report (PDF):

Dear Legislators:

Thank you for your efforts to work on school accountability. We all agree that real accountability, focused on getting the best outcomes for all children, is important. From our first review of the bill introduced today, it is clear there is a lot of work to be done before a school accountability bill can be passed.

There are several parts of this bill that need more thoughtful consideration to be the type of real accountability that our students and families deserve:

– using multiple tests that would not fairly compare public and private schools

– requiring charter conversion rather than creating a true path to improvement

– assigning letter grades that do not accurately communicate how a school is performing

– removing control from locally elected school boards.

We need an accountability bill that supports our efforts to produce the best results for all children rather than a flawed one that is rushed to pass in order to make a political point.

I would urge you to work with districts to develop a true accountability system that holds all schools to the same standards and supports them in getting the best results for children. We have not yet been given the opportunity to work with you but we would welcome it. I would be happy to answer any questions, give input or discuss with you more.

Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely,

Jennifer Cheatham, Ed.D.
Superintendent, Madison Metropolitan School District

A further example, try to find total spending in this 2015-2016 Madison Schools’ Budget slideware document (PDF).

Auto-pilot spending and governance practices continue:

General Fund expenditures will increase by approximately 4.8%, based on existing wage and salary commitments and an estimated health insurance rate increase of 9%, unless budget actions are taken to intervene

A Budget Gap of 2.8% (2% Revenue vs. 4.8% Expenditures) or $9-$10 million will occur unless budget actions are taken to intervene

Note the use of “General Fund”. The document neglects to mention total spending, or recent increases in redistributed state tax dollars to the Madison Schools.

A party insider recently mentioned that the “days of Dane County Democrats harvesting tax dollars from around the state and spending them here, are over”.

I further recall lunch a few years ago with a long time Madison elected official: “Always blame the State”.

Wolfram: Reverting to the mean.

Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Buoyed by the election which provided Republican majorities in both the Assembly (+27 majority) and the Senate (+5 majority), conservative anti-worker/anti-union legislators have announced that they will introduce Right to Work legislation when the January session begins. Right to Work laws limit collective bargaining, make it easier to outsource jobs and cut wages and benefits. Their plan was to do this in 2012, but legislators were worried that it was too soon after the 2011 protests against Act 10, and would cause public backlash. On average, workers in Right to Work states earn $7,030 a year less, according to the Congressional Research Service (6/20/12), and the rate of workplace deaths is 52.9% higher. Workers in Right to Work states are even more likely to be uninsured (16.8%, compared with 13.1% overall).

Governor Walker’s Act 10 has already done great damage to Wisconsin’s public sector workers and the economy. Act 10 has been described as “Right to Work on Steroids.” But now, the far-right is coming after the 13% of Wisconsin’s private sector workers who have the benefit of union representation. And it is because CEOs and company owners care more about big business and profits than they do about workers who create them. And, middle class families become struggling families. Right to Work will surely shrink the middle class.

Despite its misleading name, such a law does not guarantee anyone a job and it does not protect against unfair firing, i.e. it provides NO “right to work”.

Rather, a Right to Work law prohibits employers and employees from negotiating an agreement – also known as a union security clause – that requires all workers who receive the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement to pay their share of the costs of the Union in representing them. A Right to Work law mandates that unions represent every employee, whether or not he or she pays Union dues. In other words, such laws enable workers to pay nothing and still get the benefits of union membership. Imagine if a Madison resident, who sends their children to MMSD schools, but can opt out of paying property taxes to finance the schools.

The Economist:

DR BOB SEARS, a paediatrician from Orange County, California, does not like to call his patients “free-riders”. True, he specialises in treating vaccine-sceptics, those families who resent being told to immunise their children against nasty diseases, from measles to whooping cough. It is also the case that, as a trained doctor, he believes that immunisation works. He agrees that some scary illnesses have almost vanished in America because more than 90% of children are inoculated against them, creating a herd immunity that leaves diseases with few places to lurk. Yet he differs from many doctors in the conclusion that he draws from that success.

Precisely because most children are immunised, he tells parents that it is probably safe to skip or delay jabs for their offspring. This strategy amounts to “hiding in the herd”, he says delicately, as he sips a late-afternoon coffee near his surgery. Put another way, his patients worry more than most about possible side-effects from vaccinations, above all the (thoroughly discredited) claim that vaccines cause autism. Dr Bob—as he is known to fans of “The Vaccine Book”, his best-selling guide to “selective” immunisation—does not say that worried parents are right. He just thinks that, on balance, they can safely indulge their anxieties by “taking advantage of the herd all around them.” When pushed, he makes “no claim” that the alternative vaccine plans that he offers (involving fewer jabs, or jabs administered over a longer period than most doctors recommend) are safer. He concedes that if everyone refused vaccinations, some diseases would roar back.

Stephanie Simon:

New data out from the Education Department find sizable — and in some states, huge — disparities in children’s access to fully qualified and experienced teachers.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, more than 20 percent of teachers are unlicensed in the schools with the largest concentration of minority students. In largely white schools, just 0.2 percent of teachers lack a license, the data show.

Or consider Louisiana: Nearly 20 percent of classes in the most impoverished schools are taught by teachers who don’t meet the federal definition of “highly qualified” — which generally means they lack a bachelor’s degree, are unlicensed or don’t have a strong academic background in the subject they’re teaching. In the wealthier schools, fewer than 8 percent of classes are led by a teacher who’s not highly qualified.

Ashley Jochim, Michael DeArmond, Betheny Gross, Robin Lake:

• Parents are taking advantage of choice, but they want more good options.

Parents’ optimism about whether schools are improving varies widely.

Parents with less education, minority parents, and parents of children with special needs are more likely to report challenges navigating choice.

Some parents are forced to make difficult trade-offs between academics, safety, and location.

Some cities have done much more to support parent choice. Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, DC, have made the most progress on transportation, fair enrollment, and information systems. However, all cities have work to do to ensure choice works for all families.

The authors recommend that civic leaders:

Expand the supply of high-quality schools.

Recognize that different families have different needs.

Guarantee free and safe passage to schools.

Invest much more heavily in information systems
This report is the second in CRPE’s Making School Choice Work series.

Alan Borsuk:

everal years ago, I was writing about how the most significant debates in approaches to improving education didn’t pit Republicans against Democrats. They pitted Democrats against Democrats.

Now, the dynamic to watch is between Republicans and Republicans. Both in Washington and Madison, they have so much power now — and they have some pretty big differences within their ranks.

Early in the Obama administration, the Democratic battles could be summed as education “reformers” vs. the education establishment, including teachers unions. For Republicans, I’d call it the smaller government people vs. the demand-quality-and-results people.

For Democrats, the differences included whether to push creation of charter schools, whether to evaluate teachers in ways that include student progress measured by test scores and, in general, what to think of a rising number of schools with high demands on students when it comes to both academics and behavior.

For Republicans, the differences include whether there should be a nationwide requirement that students take standardized tests in language and math, whether the goals for what students should learn should be a matter of broad agreement or left to each state or school district (the Common Core issue) and, in general, the ways federal or state power should be used to deal with low performing schools. In Wisconsin, but not really in Washington, you can add the question of the future of private school choice.

For context, start 13 years ago, when President George W. Bush and Congress, with sweeping bipartisan support, approved the No Child Left Behind education law. The law was scheduled to be revised by Congress in 2007. And it set the goal that by the end of 2014, all children in America would be on grade level in reading and math.

It is now the end of 2014. Not only are millions of children not on grade level — it was a ridiculous goal in the first place — but Congress has never agreed on how to fix No Child Left Behind. Seven years late and no action! Also ridiculous, right?

Sarah Yatsko:

For over a decade, my job was to craft alternatives to incarceration for juvenile offenders. In the early 1990s, soon after I began this work, the juvenile crime rate soared and, along with it, a “tough on crime” increase in punishment for both the most severe and the most minor offenses. I remember visiting two clients who were cellmates: one was there for exchanging gunfire with a rival gang, and the other for a snowball fight on the school playground. Juvenile courts had always taken seriously children who wielded guns, and appropriately so. My caseload now included children who wielded snowballs, snatched Halloween candy, or got into shoving matches.

This same wide net of harsh punishment was cast in school discipline leading up to and in the wake of rare but widely reported school shootings—especially the horrifying Columbine High School incident. As with “tough on crime” laws, the new “zero tolerance” policies didn’t change how schools treated students who assaulted teachers or brought guns to school: they continued to get expelled and referred to law enforcement just as they always had. However, there was a sharp increase in the number of students caught in the highly discretionary zero tolerance zone, an unintended result of trying to prevent another Columbine. Unfortunately, these new policies have failed to show any corresponding increase in school safety.

Ashley Jochim, Michael DeArmond, Betheny Gross, Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

• Parents are taking advantage of choice, but they want more good options.

Parents’ optimism about whether schools are improving varies widely.

Parents with less education, minority parents, and parents of children with special needs are more likely to report challenges navigating choice.

Some parents are forced to make difficult trade-offs between academics, safety, and location.

Some cities have done much more to support parent choice. Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, DC, have made the most progress on transportation, fair enrollment, and information systems. However, all cities have work to do to ensure choice works for all families. The authors recommend that civic leaders:

Expand the supply of high-quality schools.

Recognize that different families have different needs.

Guarantee free and safe passage to schools.

Invest much more heavily in information systems

Kristine Guerra:

The Internet is bringing an end to snow days for some Indiana schoolchildren.

Northwestern Consolidated Schools in Shelby County is among 29 public school systems and eight private schools that have received approval from the Indiana Department of Education to use a virtual learning option on days when students have to stay home from school due to inclement weather.

On those days, Northwestern students at Triton Central, Triton Middle and Triton Elementary schools will use their school-issued iPads and Chromebooks to do their homework, work through lessons and communicate with their teachers.

Southern Hancock County schools in New Palestine, Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School and Hasten Hebrew Academy of Indianapolis are among other Central Indiana schools approved to use a similar approach, state officials said.

The idea gained traction last year when record snow fall caused many schools to lose several days of instruction, forcing them to shorten spring break to make up the difference. Indiana requires each school to provide 180 days of instruction each school year.

Jennifer McNamee

Smarick said Catholic leaders have a choice: “Keep doing the things we’ve been doing that have led to our slow demise consistently for half a century. Or open your minds and do thing differently. We’re starting to see on the horizon sunlight for the very first time.”

He said some church leaders are too resistant to change. “It was time for the milkman to go away. It was time for trains to get replaced by airplanes. Progress sometimes is progress,” he said. “And that means breaking eggs sometimes to make omelets. So I’m bullish about the possibility of young entrepreneurs and related laity in these systems saying we have to try things differently, and that means replacing yesterday’s Catholic schools with a new breed of Catholic schools.”

Smarick offered three areas that need to change: ”Straight up transparency and accountability” that makes very clear how a school is doing when it comes to outcomes for students; an understanding of the changing landscape of educational options for parents so that Catholic schools are ones more parents choose for their children; and unleashing more “entrepreneurialism” among those who want to run or work in Catholic schools.

Smarick and Porter-Magee both said that many talented young Catholic educators are going to work in charter schools rather than Catholic schools because their freedom to pursue fresh ways to get better results was much greater. Smarick said he was encouraged by what is unfolding in cities around the country where an “analog” to charter schools is arising for Catholic education.

From the “Conference on the future of Catholic K-12 education“.

Kristen Graham:

The number couldn’t possibly be right, Marc Gosselin thought: $160.

That was the total discretionary budget he was handed as the brand-new principal of Anna Lane Lingelbach Elementary, a public school in Germantown.

That’s all he’d have to pay for a whole year’s books, supplies, staff training, after-school activities, and incidentals — small but important items like postage and pizza parties.

“You can’t even buy groceries for $160, let alone run a school for 400 kids for a year,” Gosselin said.

For many, Tom Wolf’s election as governor is a turning point, a change that could finally address years of Philadelphia School District cuts so deep that a school has just 40 cents to spend on each needy student.

And though Lingelbach’s situation is the extreme, public schools around the city grapple with similar problems.

On a recent day at Lingelbach, it was plain how much some schools have been left to their own devices.

Coming into the year, Gosselin zeroed in on students’ reading levels — just 42 percent were meeting state standards. He wanted to administer short tests to gauge children’s reading fluency.

Josh Dawsey & Sharon Terlep:

Inside the Sayreville War Memorial High School locker room where prosecutors say younger football players were sexually abused as part of hazing rituals, older students ran the show. Adults rarely visited, according to former and current players.

At high schools across the country, adult-free locker rooms aren’t uncommon. And Sayreville’s is far from the first to become an alleged crime scene. From Vermont and California to New York and Indiana, largely unsupervised athletes have allegedly engaged in incidents of locker-room impropriety serious enough to result in criminal charges.

But the solution isn’t as simple as it may sound. In many cases, lack of adult supervision reflects administrative fear that grown-ups in the locker room could prey on children or face accusations to that effect, say some coaches and experts. Stationing adults in kids’ locker rooms “could bring a different set of issues or accusations,” said Chris Sampson, superintendent of an Indianapolis-area district embroiled in its own locker-room-related scandal.

In the wake of cases such as Sayreville, where seven older students face juvenile criminal charges of assaulting younger students, some victims, experts and school administrators are calling for rules requiring stricter supervision. The locker room is where students are most vulnerable, they say, making it the last place that supervisors ought to ignore.

Madison School District Administration (PDF):

MMSD received a total of 3,081 responses to the online survey. However, only Question #1 received the maximum number of responses; Questions #2-13 averaged around 2,200 respondents. Normally, a response rate is calculated by dividing the number of responses by the number of invitations to complete the survey. However, it is difficult to estimate an exact response rate to this survey, given that there was not a set number of invitations. The denominator, or number of possible respondents, could be calculated in a variety of ways, and that the survey allowed for an individual or family to take the survey multiple times. However, we have provided a couple possibilities for calculating a response rate, which should be considered very coarse estimates:

Per Housing Unit in MMSD Boundaries – According to ACS data, MMSD has about 100,000 occupied housing units, so about 3% of households within MMSD boundaries responded to any portion of the survey.

Per Households of MMSD Students – About 1,600 respondents reported having children in MMSD, and MMSD’s students as of October 2014 live in about 17,000 different households, so about 9% of households with MMSD students responded.

These response rates are high enough to be relatively certain about the survey results; the 2,200 responses to most questions out of 100,000 households would lead to a margin of error of about 2% with 95% confidence, and the margin of error relative to MMSD households would be similar.

Madison’s 2014/2015 budget includes a 4.2% property tax increase while spending between $15,000 and 16,000 per student – double the national average.

Related:

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

Substantial questions have been raised about the District’s last maintenance referendum. Unfortunately, we’ve not seen any additional information.

K-12 taxes and spending have increased substantially over the years, with little change in academic outcome.

Chris Rickert:

It’s no surprise Democratic nominee for governor and Madison School Board member Mary Burke isn’t saying how she plans to vote Monday on a proposed school district budget that includes a $100 tax increase for the average homeowner.
For purely political reasons, dropping that particular dime would be a pretty dumb thing to do.

Budgets are way more than just their impact on taxpayers/voters, though. They also reflect a school district’s priorities and approach to educating children and compensating teachers.

Burke hasn’t released an education plan in her campaign for governor, so it might be nice to know how she feels about some of those details before they start counting the votes nine days from now.

Specifically, I asked her about:

$4.1 million in spending on technology upgrades, including a plan to eventually put tablet computers in the hands of most students.

$1.5 million for a new behavior plan that de-emphasizes punishment in favor of teaching positive behavior skills.

$250,000 for a new staff evaluation system.

$150,000 for a “grow your own” system for recruiting employees, including ones that — in a district with an ethnically diverse student body but an almost all-white teaching staff — are “culturally responsive.”

Continuing to provide union staff with automatic raises for seniority and degree attainment.

Burke’s response was brief, emailed, unrevealing and on-message: “They all have merits but need to be considered in light of whether we can fund them while being responsible to the taxpayers.”

A scouring of the video recordings and available minutes of this year’s budget meetings also didn’t shed much light on where she stands.

She rarely offered an opinion during the meetings, but when she did it was usually as a voice of fiscal restraint, questioning the size of the tax levy and highlighting the need to take into account the current year budget’s effect on future years’ budgets.

Of course, it’s pretty safe to assume that Burke will vote against any budget that includes a tax increase. She has reminded reporters that’s what she did back in June when the preliminary budget was before the board. And she was the lone “no” vote on the final 2013-14 budget in November 2013, 27 days after she announced her run for governor.

Props to Rickert for diving into the details…. A no vote is rather easy, but this annual exercise simply perpetuates Madison’s monolithic K-12 governance model, despite its long term, disastrous reading results.

Robert Reich:

Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working class and the poor.

You can stop imagining. That’s the American system right now.

Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them. In economic terms a tax deduction is the same as government spending. It has to be made up by other taxpayers.

These tax subsidies are on the rise because in recent years a relatively few very rich people have had far more money than they can possibly spend or even give away to their children. So they’re donating it to causes they believe in, such as the elite private universities that educated them or that they want their children to attend.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

We’ve been quiet because we’ve been building. We have some exciting updates to share with you as we move forward to establish One City Early Learning Centers on Madison’s South Side. Since August, we have:

Established a 15-member Board of Directors
Filed for nonprofit recognition with the IRS
Identified a site for our preschool on Fisher Street
Selected our logo mark (see above)
Identified an exceptional Director for our school
Recruited some wonderful volunteers
Secured the support, guidance and encouragement of key stakeholders in early childhood education, the Greater Madison community and the State of Wisconsin

Now, the heavy push to secure partnerships and financial support to get this preschool open begins. We would love to hear from you if you can help. Please email or contact us at our information below.

We hope to share the details of our plans and our excitement about this preschool with every single person we know, because this is that important. We’d love to share our plans with you, your friends and your colleagues at your home, office, service group, place of worship or community organization. To download the one page summary on One City, click here. We’ve also placed two short videos below that speak to the critical need for communities to nurture and support children early. Watch. Learn. Be inspired. We are!

Our mission: To prepare young children from birth to age 5 for success in school and life, and ensure they enter grade school reading-ready.

Our vision: A Greater Madison where every child is reading and succeeding at grade level by the time they complete third grade.

Our philosophy: A child’s ecosystem of support and the environments in which they are educated and raised must be healthy, safe, inspiring and provide adequate resources and stability in order for them to reach their full potential.

Our focus: Strong children, families and neighborhoods. Wherever we develop a One City preschool, we will also work to strengthen families, build community and partner with residents to develop the neighborhood. If the family and the village are healthy, the children will be, too.

We hope you will join us on this journey. Thank you.

Much more on Kaleem Caire’s relentless drive to improve rigor and opportunity in Madison.

Alan Borsuk:

The service counter guy at the hardware store understood what he was looking at as soon as he saw the screw. “This is from some old, special chair,” he told my wife when she stopped in on Monday.

Right. A chair with a special story that, I suggest, speaks to some of the core aspects of what can lead a child to a successful life.

My father was a very talented pianist as a child. In his early teens, he soloed with the Madison symphony, playing Gershwin’s Concerto in F. He loved piano and he had great potential.

My grandparents ran a corner grocery store near the University of Wisconsin campus. They and their five children lived in a small apartment over the store. This was the mid-1930s, the height of the Depression, so you know they didn’t have much.

One afternoon, my father came home from high school, climbed the stairs, and, as he tells the story, nearly fell to the floor. A Steinway grand piano was sitting in the living room.

Can you imagine the sacrifice my grandparents made to get that piano? That’s how important their children were to them. That’s how much they wanted to do all they could to help their children reach their potential and have a good life.

And those children did have good lives. They graduated from high school. They went to college. They worked, they married, and they were good citizens of communities as big as New York City, as small as Two Rivers. Each in his or her own way did well.

Sue Shellenbarger:

It’s one of the most dreaded rites of child-rearing—teaching a teenager to drive.

Many parents are riding shotgun with their teens for 40 hours or more to provide the supervised practice required to get a driver’s license in most states. Most do a good job of teaching steering, parking and controlling the car. Parents are not so good, however, at teaching the skills young drivers need to actually avoid accidents, according to new research. Now, there are new techniques and even guides that have grown out of new scientific research into the parent-child dynamic in the car.

Suzy Hoyle of Wallingford, Pa., has taught two of her three children to drive. “It’s a scary ride,” she says, “but I think it’s very important they gain confidence and learn that they can do it.” She has picked up tips from friends (have your teen drive on snow, stash the cellphone in the glove compartment) and refrained from criticizing her daughter Ashley, now 18, when she hugged the right shoulder, uncomfortably close to several trees.

Gary Fields & John Emshwiller:

A generation ago, schoolchildren caught fighting in the corridors, sassing a teacher or skipping class might have ended up in detention. Today, there’s a good chance they will end up in police custody.

Stephen Perry, now 18 years old, was trying to avoid a water balloon fight in 2013 when he was swept up by police at his Wake County, N.C., high school; he revealed he had a small pocketknife and was charged with weapons possession. Rashe France was a 12-year-old seventh-grader when he was arrested in Southaven, Miss., charged with disturbing the peace on school property after a minor hallway altercation.

In Texas, a student got a misdemeanor ticket for wearing too much perfume. In Wisconsin, a teen was charged with theft after sharing the chicken nuggets from a classmate’s meal—the classmate was on lunch assistance and sharing it meant the teen had violated the law, authorities said. In Florida, a student conducted a science experiment before the authorization of her teacher; when it went awry she received a felony weapons charge.

Alice Woodhouse:

Almost 50 years ago, two-week-old Serena Sussex was found abandoned in a cardboard box in a Sai Ying Pun stairwell.

Last week Sussex, now a 49-year-old artist, visited the building on Hing Hon Road where she was found and said she wanted to reassure local birth mothers that their children could lead happy lives.

“I want to let mums that were forced or had to abandon [their children] due to their circumstances know that a lot of adoptees are very happy. If they wanted to get in touch there is an opportunity for them to find us,” Sussex said.

“I would have liked to have known my birth mother, who she was and what she is doing now.”

Sussex was 2½ years old when a British family adopted her and moved to the United Kingdom. She is now an award-winning artist based in Brighton, southern England, whose oil paintings are in exhibitions and collections across the world.

She spent her early years at the Chuk Yuen Children’s Reception in Wong Tai Sin, East Kowloon, where she believes there was little stimulation. She said her new parents had to teach her to cry and her speech was impaired.

The Economist:

CALLIGRAPHY has been a revered art form in China for centuries. Children are taught to write with brushes; endless copying of characters is a rite of passage in their schooling. Writing is a feat of memory. Mastery requires learning thousands of unique characters. Despite these ordeals, literacy rates have increased from around 20% in 1949 to over 95% now. But computers, smartphones and tablets are posing a new obstacle to progress. Penmanship is on the decline. Reading skills may follow.

Pundits the world over blame a reliance on computers for shoddy handwriting and spelling. In China the problem is particularly acute. The number of primary schoolchildren with severe reading difficulties is rising, according to a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy

The Economist:

FOR decades vocational education has suffered from the twin curses of low status and limited innovation. Politicians have equated higher education with traditional universities of the sort that they themselves attended. Parents have steered children away from “shop class”. And vocational studies have been left to languish: the detritus of an industrial era rather than the handmaiden of a new economy.

A recent report from a management consultancy, McKinsey, called “Education to Employment: Getting Europe’s Youth into Work”, paints a dismal picture of the state of vocational education. In four of the seven countries surveyed, more than half of young people taking an academic course said they would have preferred a vocational one. But they had been put off by disorganisation and lack of prestige. Britain has more than 20,000 vocational qualifications offered by 150 different bodies. In America responsibility is scattered among government departments.

The great exception to this has always been Germany, of course. But now there are signs that other countries are trying to turn a back road into an Autobahn. Politicians are banging the drum for vocational education. Australia, for example, has created a Workforce and Productivity Agency. Educational innovators are flooding into the vocational market.

The Economist:

LIKE many rural teenagers, Yan Jingtao, the lanky son of a watermelon farmer, did not have quite the stuff for a standard upper-secondary school. Last September, encouraged by his teacher, he and three classmates enrolled instead at a vocational school on the edge of the central city of Kaifeng to study computer animation. By November, he had quit; one of 23 dropouts in less than two months from a class that had started with 57. The students had often got into brawls and skipped school in order to play games at an internet café.

Now 18, Mr Yan has landed a decent short-term job as a guard at a local military airport. “My job is better than what my friends have,” he says. But he yearns to learn a skill and get a proper career. He will have too much company in that pursuit, and not much help.

In the past three decades China has made impressive gains in sending rural children to school. This has helped fuel its rise as a low-end manufacturing power. But the easy gains have been achieved. If the country is to create the “knowledge economy” it says it wants, the government will have to change the way rural teenagers are educated and schools in the countryside are funded.

Robin Lake:

here is a backlash against accountability. Critics have legitimate concerns about imperfect measurement and unintended consequences. But the demand to drop performance measurement and remedies in case of school failure is unrealistic: Americans can’t be compelled to send their children to schools that don’t have to demonstrate results. That’s why we (CRPE and Fordham) put together a group of people who agreed on the necessity of accountability but had different ideas on how it should work.

We landed on a pretty broad set of principles, which in my view imply that state agencies have to give up on the idea that they can regulate all schools into improvement. Instead, school districts and charter authorizers have critical roles to play and should be held accountable by the state for starting, overseeing, and closing schools based on performance. States should focus on providing good data and transparency for school staff, but keep testing to a minimum. And they should facilitate a healthy public school choice and parent information system to give parents options when government agencies fail to improve or close ineffective schools. Instead of trying to drive teacher evaluation from the state level, states should allow school principals to decide how to manage and staff their schools and hold the school accountable for results.

Jenny Stepanski:

One year ago, retired Watertown Riverside Middle School teacher, Frances Milburn, wrote a children’s story that was featured in the Daily Times for Newspapers in Education use. Since then, Newspapers in Education newspapers around the country have chosen to publish her story, allowing teachers and children to benefit at no cost. Now she is at it again.

Starting Thursday, Milburn’s latest serial story, “Roscoe’s Treasure,” will be featured in the Daily Times. The story will be released in sections, with parts in the paper on Thursday and Oct. 7, 9, 14, 16, 21, 23, 27 and 28. Local teachers who wished to participate were invited to sign-up with the Times and will receive up to 20 copies of each paper in which the story is featured. Teachers are also provided with a lesson guide also written by Milburn.

“Roscoe’s Treasure” is a story about Roscoe, the family dog, who goes missing only to return with a surprise — a mysterious set of dentures. The story follows Roscoe and his family on a hilarious adventure to return the dentures to their rightful owner. Milburn said she was inspired to write the story after hearing about a similar true-life occurrence from a friend of hers. “I heard the story and how frustrating it was and thought ‘Wow! What a great idea that would be for a story!” said Milburn.

Robert Pondiscio & Kevin Mahnken, via a kind reader’s email:

Among opponents of the Common Core, one of the more popular targets of vitriol is the standards’ focus on improving literacy by introducing higher levels of textual complexity into the instructional mix. The move to challenge students with more knotty, grade-level reading material represents a shift away from decades of general adherence to so-called “instructional level theory,” which encourages children to read texts pitched at or slightly above the student’s individual reading level. New York public school principal Carol Burris, an outspoken standards critic and defender of leveled reading, recently published an anti-Common Core missive on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog that was fairly typical of the form. Where, she wondered, “is the research to support: close reading, increased Lexile levels, the use of informational texts, and other questionable practices in the primary grades?”

The blog post, which has already been intelligently critiqued by Ann Whalen at Education Post, expanded on remarks delivered by Burris earlier this month at an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate with Fordham president Michael Petrilli and former assistant secretary of education Carmel Martin. There, too, she demanded evidence of literacy improvements arising from the use of complex texts.

A fair request and one that warrants a thorough response. But first, for the benefit of readers who are neither teachers nor literacy specialists, a quick explainer on how these two theories of reading work: In leveled reading, a teacher listens as her student reads a piece of text at a given reading level. If the child makes two-to-five mistakes per one hundred words, that is considered her “instructional” level. Zero or one mistakes means the book is too easy; six or more mistakes and that level is deemed her “frustration” level. Children are then offered lots of books at their “just right” level on the theory that if they read extensively and independently, language growth and reading proficiency will follow, setting the child on a slow and steady climb through higher reading levels. It sounds logical, and, as we will see, there are definite benefits to getting kids to read a lot independently.

By marked contrast, Common Core asks teachers to think carefully about what children read and choose grade-level texts that use sophisticated language or make significant knowledge demands of the reader (teachers should also be prepared, of course, to offer students support as they grapple with challenging books). Instead of asking, “Can the child read this?” the question might be, “Is this worth reading?”

Leveled reading is intuitive and smartly packaged (who wants kids to read “frustration level” books?), but its evidence base is remarkably thin. There is much stronger research support for teaching reading with complex texts.

What’s the source of the blind faith that Burris and others have in leveled reading instruction? “In the decades before Common Core, an enormous amount of the instruction in American elementary and middle schools has been with leveled text,” says David Liben, a veteran teacher and Senior Content Specialist at Student Achievement Partners. “The generally poor performance of our children on international comparisons speaks volumes about its effectiveness. To become proficient, students need to have the opportunity to read, with necessary support, rich complex text. But they also need to read—especially if they are behind—a huge volume and range of text types just as called for in the standards.” Students could read many of these less complex texts independently. “Instruction with complex text at all times is not what is called for, even by Common Core advocates,” Liben takes care to note.

Burris and others, however, offer a reflexive defense of leveled instruction. At the Intelligence Squared event, she claimed that “We know from years of developmental reading research that kids do best when they read independently with leveled readers.” Such surety is belied by a surprising lack of rigorous evidence. Literacy blogger Timothy Shanahan, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, recently detailed his discovery of the inauspicious origins of instructional level theory as a young scholar.

Made famous in Emmett Betts’s influential, now-little-remembered 1946 textbook Foundations of Reading Instruction, leveled reading theory actually emerged from a more obscure study conducted by one of Betts’s doctoral students. “I tracked down that dissertation and to my dismay it was evident that they had just made up those designations without any empirical evidence,” Shanahan wrote. When the study—which had in effect never been conducted—was “replicated,” it yielded wildly different results. In other words, there was no study, and later research failed to show the benefits of leveling. “Basically we have put way too much confidence in an unproven theory,” Shanahan concluded.

A pdf version of the post is available here, via a kind reader.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Christopher S. Rugaber:

Three years ago, Jason Prosser was stunned to discover the cost of child care for his newborn son — so much so that he and his wife postponed having a second child.

The day care center they found near their Seattle home tops $10,000 a year. Next year, their son, now 3, can attend a Catholic preschool less than half as costly.

“It’ll be nice to have enough relief next year,” Prosser said. “It’s just funny that the relief will be a private school.”

He and his wife are among legions of middle-class families who are straining under the weight of accelerating costs for a range of essential services from day care to health care. And now a study by the Center for American Progress shows just how heavy the burden has grown: For a typical married couple with two children, the combined cost of child care, housing, health care and savings for college and retirement jumped 32% from 2000 to 2012 — and that’s after adjusting for inflation.

Compounding the pain is that average pay for Americans is barely topping inflation.

The figures help explain why many Americans feel stressed even as the economy has strengthened — and why some feel bewildered to hear that overall inflation in the United States is, if anything, too low.

From TVs, computers and cellphones to clothing and cars, many goods have dropped in price in the past decade. Those declining prices have helped keep overall inflation historically low — even lower than the 2% the Federal Reserve thinks is ideal.

Yet when you consider that average health care and college costs rocketed more than 80% from 2000 to 2012, it’s easier to understand why many families feel they are struggling.

Laurie Rogers, via a kind email:

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” – Voltaire
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” – George Orwell

If I were to build a list of the worst systemic problems in public education, the Common Core State Standards would not be at the top of the list. The Common Core (CCSS) is a huge problem, to be sure. It’s dictatorial, inadequate, experimental, expensive, developmentally inappropriate, politically infused – it’s nearly everything critics have said it is. But it isn’t the worst problem we face.

That dishonor goes to The Network, a moniker I’ve given to the conglomeration of corporate and government interests (and their allies) that have seized control of America’s classrooms. The Network is huge – containing most of the K-12 education mob, plus its allies in the Department of Education; colleges of education; unions; media; government agencies, associations and legal teams; foundations; corporations; legislatures; fundraising groups; colleges and universities; business; and even the courts.

The Network prefers to operate quietly, promoting supposedly good intentions. Its hallmark phrase: “It’s all about the kids.” But try opposing The Network on behalf of a child – yours or anyone else’s. If you can’t be put off, persuaded, ignored, bullied or bought out, The Network has no problem getting nasty. The more honest and honorable you are, the nastier The Network becomes.

This isn’t about left or right, Democrat or Republican. It’s about “in” and “out”; money and power; agenda and ideology. The Network spends a lot of taxpayer money growing itself, feeding itself and shielding itself from accountability. The bigger it is, the more power it has. The more power it has, the more friends it gains. The more friends it gains, the more money it gets. The more money it gets, the bigger it grows – even as it completely fails our children. Allies of all stripes play along.

In Washington State, legislators and judges now tout the additional billions they’ll rip from taxpayers for failed school districts. They don’t say how much is spent currently or what it buys. They don’t hold districts accountable. Education already is a bottomless pit of wasted dollars; they don’t seem to care.

Stephen Foley:

Openings for graduate-level jobs have stalled over the past 18 months, while demand for less-skilled workers continues to improve

Should you invest in equities, bonds or property – or a college education?

The start of the university year has brought a new round of angst about whether a US university degree is worth the money, after years of inflation-busting fee increases, mounting student debt and disappointing job prospects for graduates.

Comparing a university degree with an investment in stocks and bonds leaves out great unquantifiable benefits of higher education, but the return on such an expensive outlay is a vital consideration for parents, children and society at large, even if it is often felt instinctively rather than spelt out or calculated.

In the US, where tuition fees have more than tripled in real terms since the 1970s, the student debt burden now sits at $1.2tn. One in seven recent borrowers defaulted on student loans within three years – a rate that suggests college has become unaffordable in too many cases. With countries including the UK moving rapidly towards a US-like model, the debate has resonance around the world.

Lucy Kellaway:

While it is depressing that vast riches are a socially acceptable status symbol for 18-year-olds, they are no worse than more traditional ways of lording it over others.

Two of my children have recently graduated from two different British universities and tell me that to stand out, money helps a bit, though not nearly as much as being cool. This is – and was – the top way of differentiating yourself and is done by following six pernicious and foolish cool rules.

The first way to be a Very Cool Fresher is to treat with disdain everything laid on by the university, shunning all freshers’ activities and holding your own parties instead – which is hard if you don’t know anyone. Next you must act unfriendly to almost everyone, save a few people you’ve deemed cool enough. This rather defeats the point of university which is to broaden, not narrow, horizons.

The first way to be a Very Cool Fresher is to treat with disdain everything laid on by the university
Taking drugs, getting very drunk, chain-smoking roll-ups all help at being cool – as they always did – and they are still just as bad for you.

Being from London is eternally cool. Being from Swansea, anywhere in the countryside, Southampton, Hull, and everywhere else in the world save a few capital cities – is eternally not cool. This is tough, since there is not a lot you can do about where your parents live.

Looking gorgeous is cool. And looking thin. So is wearing the right clothes. The first is unfair, the second dangerous, and the third a lot of hard work.

Being clever is also cool, and getting good marks in all assignments and getting a first-class degree is very cool – the catch being that visibly working hard is not. Being in the library at opening time is only cool if you’ve been up all night.

While all these rules are familiar to me, they are more lethal now as the cool bar is set far higher. On my first day at university I felt passably cool in my apple green OshKosh dungarees – but that was only because half the girls were in tweeds and twinsets. Now that everyone can buy the same clothes online, to be really cool you have to spend half a lifetime combing vintage shops.

Steven Elbow, via a kind reader:

Last year’s “Race to Equity” report set off an impassioned discussion about the vast disparities in the quality of life for African-Americans and whites. But that discussion was restricted to Dane County.

Now the authors have issued a new report that they hope will take the discussion to the rest of Wisconsin. The report, drawing on data from across the country, shows that the state is dead last in providing for the well-being of its African-American kids.

“We’ve been working exclusively in Dane County on this,” said Ken Taylor, executive director of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families. “So we need to broaden the discussion, because obviously it’s not just a Dane County issue.”

The WCCF, which issued the “Race to Equity” report last October, this week unveiled a new report, “Race for Results,” based on data compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s “Kids Count” report. Now in its 25th year, “Kids Count” has in the past focused on the overall well-being of kids by state, last year ranking Wisconsin 12th overall. But this year, researchers zeroed in on race. White Wisconsin kids tied with California for 10th. But the welfare of the state’s African-American kids ranked dead last, finishing behind Mississippi for the dubious distinction.

Tutankhamun Assad, via a kind reader:

I am a blue collar African-American man and the proud father of two black boys. I enjoyed reading the Rev. Alex Gee’s eloquent piece about racial disparities, and the many spot-on articles that have followed. While fully appreciating the concern exhibited by the white community for these very real issues, I have to ask: What is the role of the African-American community in these racial disparities? Are we enabling the drivers of disparity by lowering our own expectations? Where is the honest conversation about our accountability in helping reduce those disparities?

I attended many of the disparity meetings and noticed one glaring omission: the secret truths we as African-Americans understand about what is oppressing our culture and our refusal to discuss what we do to sabotage our own cultural advancement. We fully expect transparency and accountability from white Madison, so why can’t we be honest with ourselves? For instance, while we expect many things from the school system — and it is glaringly obvious it is failing us — it should be equally obvious that we are failing ourselves. We are sending children out of the house who are not prepared to survive, much less thrive.

The African-American community needs to talk about three topics that have not been addressed: 1. The public demeanor of our youth. Too often black adults see disgraceful behavior exhibited by our children and we simply stand by and allow it to continue. In malls, schools, at sports functions, or in any public place, our children often are not conducting themselves as if we have taught them how to behave. We must admit this and acknowledge that we are responsible for said behavior. How many of us have challenged kids about their behavior? Then again, when a responsible adult talks to us about our children’s actions, we respond with this: “You talk to me, not my kid!” Well, where were you when your kid was acting out? We want the whole community to baby-sit our kids, but then we get mad when someone attempts to functionally act as a parent. Far too frequently we sabotage positive African-American role models in our communities, all the while genuflecting to the white power elite.

Related: The proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.