schoolinfosystem.org
WILL: Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, enrollment in Wisconsin schools has dropped by more than 3%, with some districts suffering even greater declines. But an antiquated school funding system means that Wisconsin taxpayers are still paying for students that are no longer in the system. Wisconsin uses what is known as the “Three-Year […]
WILL: WILL has learned that DPI goes beyond these requirements in evaluating new school applications. Even if schools submit accurate and sufficient information according to our state law, if they do not comply in precisely the manner that DPI requires, their applications are often denied. WILL sees no justification for the practice of DPI exceeding […]
Lucas Robinson: The Madison School Board unanimously voted Monday night to rename Jefferson Middle School after 19th-century Black voting rights activist Ezekiel Gillespie. A survey of about half of the school’s students showed a preference to replace President Thomas Jefferson’s name with writer Maya Angelou, the other finalist whittled down by an ad hoc committee […]
Wisconsin Senate (and Assembly) Committee on Education: Department of Public Instruction Laura Adams -Policy Initiatives Advisor for the State Superintendent Duy Nguyen – Assistant Superintendent for the Division of Academic Excellence Tom McCarthy – Executive Director for the Office of the State Superintendent ExcelinEd Dr. Kymyona Burk – Senior Policy Fellow University of Wisconsin–Madison Mark […]
When you see “school district could shut it’s doors” headlines, be sure to google per pupil funding levels. You won’t learn this from the article. Then google the local budgets of your high achieving choice school. https://t.co/gATUrXRFVU pic.twitter.com/snXeikpsGK — Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) February 19, 2023 The article. Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at […]
Jonathan Turley: I recently wrote about how public schools and boards are making the case for school choice advocates with failing scores and rising controversies. The latest shocking statistic was released this week that 23 schools in Baltimore City had zero students who tested proficient in math. Those schools include 10 high schools, eight elementary schools, three Middle/High schools […]
I requested copies of the contracts related to Madison’s latest reading program on May 19, 2022. Curiously, I just received a response to this simple request yesterday – after numerous email and phone followup attempts. The April, 2022 Madison School Board presentation on the latest reading program – an effort to address our long term, […]
Quinton Klabon: The coronavirus pandemic was a 2-year catastrophe for children. Students suffered through virtual schooling, quarantined teachers, and emotional misery. Academic results, the lowest this century, still have not recovered. After sending $860 million to help Wisconsin public schools manage through spring 2021, Congress sent a final $1.49 billion to get students back on track. The goal? Do […]
David Blaska: Blaska’s Bottom Line asks a bunch of questions: The Wisconsin State Journal refuses to publish Blaska’s letter asking Madison school officials whether, after eight years, is Restorative Justice working?Especially considering we have another school board election on the April 4 ballot. Editorial page editor Scott Milfred complained: “It was long …” [It was 245 words — exact […]
Zach Weissmueller and Nick Gillespie Public schools have failed to teach kids to read and write because they use approaches that aren’t based on proven techniques based on phonics. Many schools have been influenced by the work of Columbia University’s Lucy Calkins, who is the subject of a new podcast series from American Public Media, Sold […]
Olivia Herken; The district doesn’t need to approve any new funds to provide this raise, and instead, the enrollment for summer school this year will be capped at 4,000 students to be able to hike pay within the already approved budget. The pay raise increases staffing costs from $2.8 million last year to $3.5 million. […]
Scott Girard: Surveys to help guide the Madison public schools’ Safety and Student Wellness Ad Hoc Committee have a long list of suggestions for the district. The responses illustrate the difficult and involved task in front of both the committee, which is nearing its completion after forming last March, and the Madison Metropolitan School District as […]
Olivia Herken: This week the school district contended with more violent incidents. On Tuesday, a 14-year-old was stabbed in the chest in a park after an incident at a middle school parking lot earlier in the day, and on Wednesday, police were called to East High for a fight between students. Some survey respondents called […]
Olivia Herken: Enrollment in Wisconsin’s traditional public schools has continued to decline since the start of the pandemic. There isn’t a single answer as to where students are going and why. A nationwide declining birth rate and changing trends in where families live are big contributors. But there’s clearly a growing appetite in Wisconsin for […]
Kaleem Caire: Thank you CapTimes for printing my OpEd. Interestingly, in a conversation with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction yesterday, state officials told us that we are legally obligated to count our students who are enrolled and present on the day of the pupil count (tomorrow, Friday). This is state law. They also told […]
Scott Girard: For the full 2022-23 school year, an independent charter school like One City receives $9,264 per student from the state that the student’s resident school district would otherwise receive. The state counts students twice each school year: the third Friday of September and the second Friday of January. If a student is enrolled […]
Olivia Herken: After receiving a wave of conservative backlash, a student-organized drag show at Madison East High School has been postponed because of safety concerns. In addition to an “abundance” of supportive messages regarding the event, the Madison School District also has received “several messages that have raised a number of safety concerns for this […]
Chris Rickert: Citing an exodus of core-class teachers, Madison charter school One City Schools told parents of about 60 students Thursday that it would shut down its first ninth- and 10th-grade classes after only one semester. The school’s vice president of external relations, Gail Wiseman, said the school lost five teachers since the beginning of […]
Martin Austermuhle: The 13-member board that oversees the county school system has been embroiled in controversy in recent years, with Chair Juanita Miller and various board members trading accusations related to contracts and violations of board policies. An independent audit last year found problems on both sides, while separately the State Board of Education requested Miller’s removal from […]
Matthew Barakat: Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is launching an investigation into one of the state’s most prestigious high schools, acting on complaints that students there weren’t properly recognized for their achievements on a standardized test. Miyares said at a news conference Wednesday that his Office of Civil Rights is investigating the Thomas Jefferson High […]
Sarah Mervosh: But recently, he said, he has made strides, in part because of an unusual and sweeping high school literacy curriculum in Memphis. The program focuses on expanding vocabulary and giving teenagers reading strategies — such as decoding words — that build upon fundamentals taught in elementary school. The curriculum is embedded not just […]
Wall Street Journal: Several red states appear poised to adopt expansive school-choice policies this year, prompting the teachers unions and their allies to claim that the sky is falling, especially in rural areas. Corey DeAngelis is right to call out the Chicken Littles for their scaremongering (“The Little Red Schoolhouse Could Do With a Little Competition,” op-ed, […]
Scott Girard: In her message to constituents, Gomez Schmidt listed a series of district accomplishments in her three years on the board, including navigating the pandemic, adopting new K-5 reading curriculums, investing in the “science of reading” and seeing the community approve a record referendum. “I am grateful that this experience has challenged me in […]
Scott Girard: “We need impactful change in our handbook before May 15 or the mass exodus of staff will continue,” she said. “It’ll become impossible to staff our schools with qualified teachers and the staff that our students deserve.” MMSD spokesperson Tim LeMonds wrote in a statement Tuesday that the district “has hired more teacher […]
Olivia Herken: Board members Gomez Schmidt, Ali Muldrow, Laura Simkin and Nicki Vander Meulen voted against eliminating stand-alone honors classes. Board members Nichelle Nichols, Maia Pearson and Savion Castro voted in favor of eliminating them. Stand-alone honors classes are meant to be more academically challenging. Students can also earn honors credit in some general classes […]
Scott Girard: A survey that will help guide safety and student wellness work in the Madison Metropolitan School District is open for staff, parents and students until 11:59 p.m. Monday. The Madison School Board’s Safety and Student Wellness Ad Hoc Committee met Thursday for the 16th time to discuss progress on the subject. The group […]
Dylan Brogan: The “time is now” to eliminate standalone honors classes in Madison high schools, according to Superintendent Carlton Jenkins. At a Dec. 5 school board meeting, Jenkins said a “racist attitude” underlies support for keeping separate classes that offer more rigorous coursework to students. “We are no longer going to uphold what is considered […]
Olivia Herken: His stand-alone classes didn’t give him that much deeper of an understanding of a subject than earning honors did, Hernandez said. In his general Western civilization class, for example, he had to read an additional book to earn his honors credits, which allowed him to gain more knowledge than he normally would have. […]
Scott Girard: Those totals don’t include the Madison Metropolitan School District or Milwaukee Public Schools, both of which passed operational referendums in 2020 that continue to allow them to surpass the revenue limit. Both districts are among those that are increasing their total tax levies and contributing to the statewide rise, WPF notes. “Property tax levies increased […]
Dave Cieslewicz: There has been lots of news out of the Madison School District lately. I’d like to focus on three stories that are interrelated. The first is the reinstatement of Sennett Middle School Principal Jeffrey Copeland. I’ve writtenabout that extensively, so I won’t go over the details here, but his return is a good thing. […]
Scott Girard: West math teacher Sigrid Murphy said that even more recently, in the 2020-21 school year, “30% of the students in geometry at West identified as white while 72% of the students in geometry honors identified as white.” The school’s overall enrollment that year was about 52% white students. “Within the (West) math department, […]
Scott Girard: Copeland told the Wisconsin State Journal this week that his comments were not about the applicant’s country of origin or race. Instead, he said, they were focused on ensuring students had a teacher they could understand in front of them. He also suggested the comment about “just giving people damn jobs” was in reference to […]
Wall Street Journal: The parental revolt even spread to Minnesota despite opposition from teachers union. Denise Specht, the president of the teacher’s union Education Minnesota, claimed in September that its “political program has been successful between 80 and 90 percent of the time when our locals make endorsements in school board races and carry out an […]
Ed Treleven: Remington’s Nov. 23 decision does not directly address the merits of the policy but spends a great number of its 33 pages discussing what is considered legal standing, as expressed in recent state and federal court decisions. Ignoring Doe’s lack of standing, Remington wrote, would be ignoring his own “limited and modest role […]
Scott Girard: In May, Wisconsin Transparency Project president and founder Tom Kamenick wrote in an email to the Cap Times that he has “received more complaints about MMSD than any other government agency.” “I’m frequently seeing lengthy delays, exorbitant fees, and downright illegal denials from the district,” Kamenick wrote. “The district seems to make transparency […]
Mine Antonucci: The California Teachers Association spent heavily on school board races in the state, distributing $1.8 million to 125 local affiliates, which were required by union policy to add almost $1 million more to the total. That investment seems to have mostly paid off. California election results take weeks to finalize, but union-backed candidates are leading […]
Scott Girard: As mayor, she would not have unilateral authority to put officers in schools. The school resource officer program, originally begun in the 1990s, operated on a contract between the city of Madison and the Madison Metropolitan School District. Both sides voted to terminate it in summer 2020 amid nationwide and local protests over police brutality of […]
Scott Girard: MMSD had its strongest ratings in the growth and on-track to graduation priority areas, though both were down slightly from last year’s scores. In growth, the district received a 73.6 out of 100, while it scored 77 out of 100 for on-track to graduation. In the other two priority areas, MMSD scored a […]
Scott Girard Vander Meulen has faced an opponent in each of her two previous campaigns. In 2017, Ed Hughes was on the ballot but dropped out of the race following a health issue in his family and in 2020, the late Wayne Strong ran against her, but suspended his campaign amid his own health issues before returning […]
David Blaska: Because our Woke school boss confuses correlation with causation. Like all good critical race theorists, he’s big on disproportionality. If A doesn’t equal B, he goes all Al Sharpton. Today’s subject is time outs in an empty room for troublemakers or, rarely, restraint. Restraint being just holding back a kid so he doesn’t bust another […]
Scott Girard: The school’s new Sifting and Winnowing Club organized two sessions for their peers to attend in the auditorium Friday to get answers to questions on issues they care about. Madison School Board member Nicki Vander Meulen and city of Madison District 5 Ald. Regina Vidaver spoke to the first group, while Emerge Wisconsin […]
Scott Girard: A St. Louis-area native, van Buren spent five years teaching there and five more in New Mexico before she arrived in Madison and began working at La Follette. Her jobs have included a mix of teaching English, being a school librarian and now teaching a mix of design and technology classes. At all […]
“Perhaps the gravest injustice of our time is the imprisonment of minority kids in substandard public schools… The real culprits are union collective-bargaining agreements and state laws that put teachers unions’ interests ahead of students’.”https://t.co/P2Qj2XTUA6 — Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) November 1, 2022 The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for […]
Scott Girard: The new budget totals $597.9 million in spending, up from the $515.7 million spent in 2021-22 and the $482.9 million the year prior. It’s also up from the June preliminary budget, which called for $561.3 million in spending. The tax rate, however, is down to $9.97 per $100,000 of property value from the […]
Kristen Griffith: There are four contested races on the fall ballot, while three candidates are running unopposed. Meanwhile, the terms of four appointed members on the 11-member board are expiring later this year; their replacements will be appointed by the next governor, likely in January. Early voting has started and Election Day is Nov. 8. Among the […]
Scott Girard: In 2021-22, there were 1,714 out-of-school suspensions (OSS) given to 766 students in grades 6-8. That was up from the 986 given to 529 students in the COVID-shortened 2019-20 school year, and most significantly from the 1,459 given to 714 students in the last fully in-person school year, 2018-19. OSS dropped at both […]
Chris Rickert: Officers searching the vehicle the suspects arrived in found the marijuana and other items, the blog said. Lisko said that while no charges have been filed, a detective has been assigned to the matter. Principal Dan Kigeya said in an email home to parents Thursday afternoon that “staff responded to the incident quickly, […]
Scott Girard After stalling out earlier this year, a Madison School Board ad hoc committee considering a new name for Jefferson Middle School reconvened Tuesday evening. The School Board originally appointed the committee in March after then-Jefferson principal Sue Abplanalp made a renaming request to the board Feb. 28. The district received 42 proposals for new […]
Olivia Herken: “Historically, the concept of advanced learning and honors has served to segregate students based on race, socioeconomic status and special education status,” School Board member Savion Castro said. And when these students do access the advanced classes, they often report feeling “isolated, feeling tokenized and experiencing a white-washed curriculum.” “I think we all […]
Scott Girard: “This means a lot to me because I don’t want students who are younger than me to lack various resources and opportunities that will be offered,” La Follette’s Yoanna Hoskins said. “I want my teachers to be well compensated and respected for all the hard work they put in every single day.” Adding […]
Scott Girard: Students get one warning each class period if they have their phone out, and if they take it out again in that class, it goes into a bucket or is given to the teacher for the rest of the period. If a student refuses, school administrators take the phone to the office for […]
John Hindraker: Minnesota, as in other states, concerned parents have banded together to try to wrest control of the public schools away from teachers’ unions, in order to improve the quality of education and to stop left-wing indoctrination. Earlier this year, we started a 501(c)(4) organization called the Minnesota Parents Alliance to lead those efforts […]
David N. Figlio Cassandra M.D. Hart and Krzysztof Karbownik Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes as the program matured and scaled up. We observe growing benefits (higher standardized […]
Zach Goldberg Eric Kaufmann We began by asking our 18- to 20-year-old respondents (82.4 percent of whom reported attending public schools) whether they had ever been taught in class or heard about from an adult at school each of six concepts—four of which are central to critical race theory. The chart below, which displays the […]
Olivia Herken: We have extended ourselves beyond a balanced budget with this calculated use of fund balance to make this historical investment in our hourly staff,” board member Christina Gomez Schmidt said, “which we have heard is very important. “I do want to recognize that our obligation in the next year’s planning and budget is […]
David Blaska: Why in hell (our favorite rhetorical flourish) is the Madison public school district promoting a Get Out the Vote rally? For a partisan election! No school board candidate, no school referendum is on the ballot. But Tony Evers and Mandela Barnes are! Why is the rally, scheduled for Monday 10-24-22 at the State Capitol, […]
Chris Rickert: A state-authorized public charter school in Madison initially refused to work with police after a student found a gun in a school employee’s backpack, according to a recently released police report, and the employee refused to answer questions about the incident. Police ultimately closed their investigation of the June 1 incident involving Milestone Democratic […]
This isn’t a thing. If students’ families can pick where they go, there is no segregation. In the current setup, unless you can afford to live in the neighborhoods with nice schools, you’re locked out. https://t.co/D9ETr84Bfj — Mister Vigilante (@MisterVigilante) September 16, 2022 The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement […]
🚨🚨GROOMING ALERT! The Wisconsin Dept. of Public Instruction has created a guide for “gender expansive” PRESCHOOLERS The guide dubs parents “trolls” and “jerks” if they refuse to use “they/them” pronouns or allow their kids to read books about trans toddlers pic.twitter.com/TrQ5BVc1Yw — Chrissy Clark (@chrissyclark_) September 13, 2022 DPI Commentary: “The Wisconsin Department of Public […]
Robert Pondiscio In 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Oregon law requiring that parents or guardians send their children to public school in the districts where they lived. The Society of Sisters, which ran private academies, claimed that the law interfered with the right of parents to choose religious instruction for their children. The […]
Bryan Caplan: I have deep doubts about the intellectual and social value of schooling. My argument in a nutshell: First, everyone leaves school eventually. Second, most of what you learn in school doesn’t matter after graduation. Third, human beings soon forget knowledge they rarely use. Strangely, these very doubts imply that the educational costs of […]
Elizabeth Beyer: Legislative Republicans have defended their decision to keep revenue limits flat by noting Wisconsin schools will be getting $2.3 billion in federal COVID relief aid, known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER funds. Madison is anticipating its share will be roughly $66.7 million. School officials have not laid out how […]
Elizabeth Beyer: Here are highlights of the work being done currently at Madison’s four main high schools, according to the Madison School District. Notes and links on the recent Madison tax and spending increase referendum The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are […]
Moria Balingit: While students saw across-the-board gains in the 2021-2022 school year compared to the previous academic year, state education officials said the progress was not enough, and pinned some of the good news on lowered standards — not on better student performance. “Despite the scores being up from last year, they are down from […]
Wisconsin Policy Forum: Scott Girard: That was the fourth-highest percentage among the 10 districts in the state with the most Black students enrolled in AP courses, behind only Beloit (83.7%), Wauwatosa (82%) and Racine (68.9%). Milwaukee Public Schools, the only Wisconsin district larger than MMSD, saw all student groups have lower rates of opting out […]
Dale Chu: In the 1840s, Horace Mann, known as the “father of American education,” argued that children should be taught to read whole words instead of individual letters, which he described as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” that make children feel “death-like, when compelled to face them.” This malformed opinion morphed into the broader whole-language theory, […]
Scott Girard: Jones’ questions included specific suggestions for using available funding for further increasing the salary schedule instead of what’s currently planned, including new positions like the Village Builders initiative, and cutting district and administrative staff positions that were “difficult to fill for the 2021-22 school year.” District leaders have continually blamed a challenging state budget that […]
Dave Cieslewicz: That’s an average of about 3.5 times a day or almost once per day to each school. According to a story in this morning’s Wisconsin State Journal the breakdown is 220 calls to East, 158 to La Follette, 170 to Memorial and 92 to West. In addition to the raw numbers there were […]
AP Dillon: Wake County is the largest school district in the state and the fifteenth largest nationwide. WCPSS has tens of thousands of employees and a current operating budget of $1.94 billion. The district has 198 schools and an estimated158,761 students. Jim Martin, Christine Kushner, Karen Carter, Roxie Cash, and Heather Scott are the five incumbents not seeking […]
Shannon Whitworth: Nowhere can you see self-proclaimed “progressives” more in opposition to progress than on the issue of school choice in the state of Wisconsin. Over 30 years ago, Wisconsin created the first school choice program in the nation, liberating thousands of families from failing public schools and giving many children, particularly those in our […]
AP Dillon: The USDOE’s “Aiding and Abetting” report looks at how provisions enacted in 2015 during the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) are protecting students from sexual abuse in schools. Specifically, a look at the provisions in Section 8546 related to “aiding and abetting,” have been implemented in State […]
Colin Carroll: That is exactly right. And you can see that more clearly when Rufo’s correct quote is put into full context. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust. I think that the public schools have done a remarkable job at doing just that, specifically, […]
Becky Dernbach: I’ve been reporting on Hassan’s journey since she became the first Somali American to win the Minnesota Teacher of the Year award, in 2020. Over that time, I visited her classroom, spoke with her students, and talked to school parents and fellow teachers. All of them praised Hassan’s teaching methods, her uncanny ability to […]
Scott Girard: Despite enrollment dropping over the past five years districtwide, especially during the pandemic, the full-time equivalent (or FTE) staff positions dedicated to those areas have not dropped at the same rate. In student services, for example, the 2017-18 school year featured 105.78 students per staff member in positions including psychologist, social worker, nurse […]
Ann Althouse: But what’s really bothering Strauss isn’t the outrage of insulting education departments. It’s Hillsdale’s participation in charter schools around the country. There’s the “Hillsdale K-12 curriculum that is centered on Western civilization and designed to help ‘students acquire a mature love for America.’” Valerie Strauss: At the reception last week, held at a […]
Keeping schools and preschools open when other countries closed them was an extremely difficult decision. In March 2020 the criticism against me was harsh for not closing down schools and preschools, but I was – and still am – convinced that it was the right decision. https://t.co/AzM5RHu5gY — Anna Ekström (@Anna_Ekstrom) July 9, 2022 The data […]
Scott Girard Katina Maclin won’t be able to vote this fall, but her ideas will be present at every polling place in the city of Madison. The high school junior, who recently moved from Sun Prairie to Glendale, designed two new voting-themed stickers for voters to consider grabbing after filling out their ballot. “It speaks to how […]
Scott Girard: The effort to consider a new name for Madison’s Jefferson Middle School is on pause until October, following low attendance by members of the ad hoc committee appointed for the effort. The School Board appointed the committee in March after Jefferson principal Sue Abplanalp made a renaming request to the board Feb. 28. […]
Elizabeth Beyer: An average home valued at $376,765 could see a property tax increase of up to $106, meaning the school portion of the tax bill would be roughly $3,926 in December, compared with $3,820 this past year. The district’s total property tax levy would increase 2.77% over the previous year, to roughly $366.8 million. […]
Sean Phillip Cotter: Boston Public Schools, which has narrowed its ostensibly nationwide superintendent search down to one current and one recent former BPS administrator, is beset on all sides by poor student outcomes, yawning socioeconomic achievement gaps, reports of increased violence in and around school buildings, declining enrollment and snarled student transportation strategies. The commissioner […]
Scott Girard: Board president Ali Muldrow, who has a conflict of interest in discussing teacher salaries as her husband is a teacher, commented only on the hourly workers’ pay rate Monday, but indicated she strongly supports an increase. “I’m really deeply vested in our ability to substantially shift how we’re compensating hourly wage workers,” Muldrow […]
Scott Girard: One of the biggest things was how we co-created our equity vision. That was a huge piece of it, having our families, our students and our staff really lean in, look at our data, both numerical (and) looking at our interviews with our families, especially families who have not been included in school […]
Ruy Teixeira: Finally, there is perhaps the key issue for many Asian voters: education. It is difficult to overestimate how important education is to Asian voters, who see it as the key tool for upward mobility—a tool that even the poorest Asian parents can take advantage of. But Democrats have become increasingly associated with an […]
Benjamin Yount: “As proficiency has plummeted under his tenure, Governor Evers is forced to point to outdated data to back up his claims that he has been an effective leader on education,” Will Flanders with the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty told The Center Square. Flanders added that Gov. Evers’ approach to public schools […]
Shannon Whitworth Recently, in my high school Business Communication class, I had one of the most disheartening conversations I’ve ever had with my students. It was regarding the effects of the pandemic lockdowns. Policymakers and leaders need to listen to these experiences, get students back on track and develop new strategies if we ever have […]
Chris Rickert: LeMonds said the base rate for summer school staff is $28 per hour, or 12% higher than in previous years. But the relief money last year allowed the district to pay $40 an hour. The district’s teachers’ union, Madison Teachers Inc., had not responded to requests for comment. Wednesday’s district email said “chronic […]
Alex Gutentag: The collapse of educational pathways and structures has had a particularly brutal effect on the poorest students, who can least afford to have their schooling disrupted. High-poverty schools had the lowest levels of in-person instruction, causing low-income students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. The entirely foreseeable ways in which bad COVID-19 […]
Ricardo Cano, Nanette Asimov Teachers at San Francisco’s Lowell High School gave freshman students significantly more D and F grades this past fall, the first semester after the school board eliminated the merit-based admissions it had relied on for decades. The lower grades, while expected by many, are likely to become part of a fervid […]
Hannah Natanson and Laura Vozzella “We are not serving all of Virginia’s children and we must,” Youngkin said at a news conference in Richmond, where he and his education team presented the report. “We want to be the best in education. We should be the best in education. And the data that is compiled and […]
David Blaska: If you doubt that the Woke Wobblies have taken over Madison’s public schools, we submit the following: School board president Ali Muldrow and immediate past member Ananda Mirilli are accusing Ismael Ozanne, a black man, of racism most foul. They want him to resign (!!!) because police arrested Freedom Inc. spokesperson Jessica Williams […]
Paul Hill & Kate Destler: The solutions will require new modes of spending, performance measurement, and school oversight, as well as much greater flexibility in teacher hiring, training, and work. Superintendents and school-board leaders can’t make these changes all by themselves. They’ll need serious help and new thinking from governors, state legislators, the federal government, […]
David Leonhardt Across much of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, school buildings stayed closed and classes remained online for months. These differences created a huge experiment, testing how well remote learning worked during the pandemic. Academic researchers have since been studying the subject, and they have come to a consistent conclusion: Remote learning was […]
Scott Girard The Madison Metropolitan School District received 42 proposals for names for Thomas Jefferson Middle School on the city’s west side as officials consider a renaming. Four suggest keeping it as “Thomas Jefferson Middle School” and another would make it simply “Jefferson Middle School,” though the submission makes it clear the author wants it to still […]
David Leonhardt: Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas and other states more rigorously measured student learning and pushed struggling schools to adopt approaches that were working elsewhere. The accountability movement went national in the 2000s, through laws signed by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The timing of the test-score increases is consistent with this story, as […]
Elizabeth Beyer: The district is receiving $70.6 million over the course of three payments. The district’s first installment, ESSER I, was approximately $9.2 million and had been exhausted by the end of the 2020-21 school year. Currently, $39.8 million of the second two installments, ESSER II and III, are written into the 2022-23 preliminary budget. […]
Scott Girard: In a statement last week, Madison Teachers Inc. put the blame on DPI for the last-minute change from the district. “DPI should understand that to us who have to actually implement this additional work, this move signals the prioritization of compliance above compassion,” MTI president Michael Jones wrote. Jones wrote that the other […]
Scott Girard “There is a lot of evidence that the state of Wisconsin has the most extreme gaps in opportunity and outcomes based on race and that within Wisconsin, MMSD is often ranked among the worst or the worst in some of these indicators,” MMSD director of research Brianne Monahan said. Jackson said the process […]
Elizabeth Beyer: “That was my first-ever protest,” he said. “It was remarkable to see people outside of Door 1, outside of the Castle (what students call the Collegiate-Gothic style façade that faces East Washington Avenue) all together coming as one. We actually made change from it.” The protests were organized in response to what students […]
Elizabeth Beyer and Emily Hamer: Most other Dane County school districts shifted their masking protocol to strongly recommend, as opposed to require, face coverings while in school buildings on March 1, when the Public Health Madison and Dane County emergency masking order expired. The decision by the city-county health department to lift the mask order […]
“CRT is not taught in schools.” West High School in Madison is teaching the basics of CRT once a month to their entire student body. Called “Regent Pride,” the slides explore the basic tenets of CRT. Multiple concerned parents have contacted me. Thread below: pic.twitter.com/qrsRTe65oU — Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) April 8, 2022 Mandates, closed schools and […]