Alan Borsuk:

We already have hefty private school voucher programs in Milwaukee and Racine and a growing voucher scene in the rest of the state, plus a new special-education voucher program, and a convoluted but fairly lively charter school scene, particularly in Milwaukee. What more could be done?

It’s a time when school choice insiders are pulling out their wish lists and brain storming. The special ed vouchers and the statewide voucher program could be given bigger pushes. Maybe something could happen to increase the number of charter schools statewide, but charters always seem to play back-up to private schools in state politics.

Ideas such as “education savings accounts,” discussed in this column recently, are increasingly likely to emerge. Such accounts could offer parents more flexible ways to select education programs for their children, potentially including several providers. No one so far has gotten specific about what this could mean, but there’s serious interest.

Molly Beck:

He said school districts can save money because of reduced health insurance costs for staff and can be creative in retaining teachers, like providing bonuses.

Humphries said in an interview that Evers was too focused on objecting to the expansion of private voucher and independent charter schools and not focused enough on raising student achievement and closing the gap in academic achievement between white and black students.

“When student learning — not politics — is our focus, there is nothing that we cannot do,” Humphries said Tuesday.

Much more on Tony Evers, here.

Alan Borsuk:

Keep this phrase in mind: Education savings accounts.

It may not be occurring at your kitchen table, but at some tables, people are talking about the future of school choice programs in Wisconsin. And these are, in many cases, important people — thought leaders and political leaders among Republicans and conservatives — who are likely to have strong roles to play when decisions are made as part of the hugely important state budget process next spring.

Among those people, education savings accounts — ESAs, in the jargon of this — are an idea of considerable interest. Vouchers 2.0, some say. The next step in giving parents power over the education of their children, rather than leaving it with school systems (even private ones), some say.

You may think we have a lot of school choice these days, and there is certainly a case for saying that. In fact, let’s summarize things a little bit since I assume only people who are paid to do this understand the landscape.

Doug Erickson:

On the latest round of statewide tests, fewer than half of Wisconsin public school students in grades three through eight scored proficient or better in English language arts or math.

The results, released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction, showed 42.5 percent of students scored in those top two categories in English language arts, while slightly fewer, 42.3 percent, scored proficient or advanced in math.

The state simultaneously released scores from the ACT college readiness assessment, now required of all high school juniors in Wisconsin. In this second year of the requirement, the composite ACT score for public school students was 20.1 out of a possible 36, up one-tenth of a point from the prior year.

Erin Richards

The results are the latest picture of how publicly-funded students are performing in core subjects statewide.

A 2-year-old statewide ACT exam administered to all juniors offered a look at performance at high schools funded by taxpayers. Juniors in public schools posted an average composite score of 20.1, close to the same as last year. Juniors using taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private high schools posted a lower overall ACT score — 18.2 — than public schools but made comparatively more improvement from last year.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction made test-score results for all public schools and districts available on the department’s searchable data portal Tuesday. The private-school results can be found in separate spreadsheets on the department’s website.

“The federally required tests give us a look at how kids are doing when compared to a rigorous standard,” DPI Spokesman Tom McCarthy said. “They are not trying to assess whether a student is passing or failing a given grade.”

Larry Cuban

There is a strongly-held myth many academics, policymakers, and reformers repeat weekly: schools hardly ever change. Those who believe in this myth often cite the large literature demonstrating failed innova­tions in schools or point at calcified bureaucracies and stubborn teachers and principals who block reform after reform (see here and here). Like all myths, this one has a factual basis. There have been many failures to transform schooling in the U.S. From open-space schools to vouchers, there have indeed been vain attempts to alter the course of schooling.

Such a myth is useful for those who beat the drums that U.S. schools are broken. After all, they seek changes that meet their view of what constitutes a “good” education. “Troubled” schools is the basis for the profound pessimism that presently exists over the capacity of public schools to improve. So it is a politically useful myth, but it is inherently mistaken nonetheless.

Danielle Dreilinger:

Louisiana Education Superintendent John White has a radical solution to get 362 voucher students off waitlists: Enroll now, the state will pay later.

These students have all been granted taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private school. But the budget ran short by about $2 million, generating anguish and attention for families that had already made their plans and, in some cases, purchased uniforms.

If private schools agree to enroll these students anyway, without a guarantee of payment, White will go to the Legislature in the spring and ask lawmakers for more money, he said. But if lawmakers’ answer is no, the schools would get less than $100 per child.

Locally, a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school.

Alan Borsuk:

Another possibility: I have floated in the past a fantasy of creating a school oversight board that would control the faucet for public money for schools in Milwaukee. Leave the structure of MPS, vouchers and charters in place, but put a board above them that would require individual schools to show good cause why they are worthy of public support. Sort of like a super chartering authority.

Of course, there is the option of not doing much to change things. Every year, the percentage of Milwaukee children enrolled in the conventional MPS system goes down by one to two points. Most likely, within three to four years, less than half will be in MPS, with the rest generally in charter schools, private schools, or suburban public schools available through the open enrollment option. In other words, MPS is in deep long-term trouble already. Maybe those who don’t like MPS can just let existing trends keep working.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial.

Paul Hill:

A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research is one of the relatively few recent studies reporting a negative voucher effect—students using vouchers in Louisiana learned a good deal less than similar students in regular public schools. The reason: students with vouchers had few good choices, since the available schools were weak and had lost large numbers of tuition-paying students.

Annysa Johnson:

Messmer Catholic Schools will spend $500,000 to boost teacher salaries by 10% to 30% over the next two years in a move intended both to sustain recent academic gains and uphold the church’s teachings on social justice, its president said.

“If we’re going to exhibit Catholic values of justice, that means appropriate compensation and fulfilling our mission,” said Jim Piatt, whose system employs about 100 teachers on three campuses.

“Teachers should not be paid at a level that qualifies them for assistance or free and reduced lunch,” he said.

The move by Messmer is an attempt to raise its teacher salaries to about 90% of their public school counterparts in and around Milwaukee, said Emily Koczela, its newly hired chief financial officer, who like Piatt had worked in the Brown Deer School District before joining Messmer.

She stressed that the money for the raises would come from internal savings and increases in state-funded voucher payments, and not new pleas to donors.

Koczela said she expects at least some of the other 100-plus schools in the 10-county Archdiocese of Milwaukee to follow suit.

“We’re pretty sure this is going to be a beacon,” she said.

Annysa Johnson:

Andy Vitrano corrals a group of school leaders from across Milwaukee inside the main hallway at St. Anthony School on the city’s south side.

They’ve spent much of the last hour discussing the importance of data in assessing a school’s performance, dissecting one school’s attendance figures and brainstorming ideas for improvement.

Now he’s dispatched them, clipboards in hand, on a scavenger hunt, in search of the many ways St. Anthony tracks data — from the daily attendance listing in the front hall to classroom charts that track students’ academic and behavioral improvement.

“They’re looking for things they can use in their own buildings,” said Vitrano, a former principal turned leadership coach with the nonprofit Schools That Can Milwaukee, which runs this monthly “deans’ collaborative.”

The group’s gatherings, says Executive Director Abby Andrietsch, are the only place in Milwaukee, and one of a few around the country, where school leaders regularly work across sectors — traditional public, charter and private voucher schools — to improve educational outcomes for children.

Paul Hill, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Will this set off another round in the polarized debate over whether vouchers work? It’s an article of faith on the right that vouchers are always a good thing, and on the left that they always do harm. These extremes are silly: vouchers are simply a way of giving parents the freedom to choose, and whether students benefit depends less on the ways money flows from the government to the school than on the quality of schools available and how well informed parents are.

Vouchers apparently benefit students in localities where students can get access to well-established and effective schools, for example, Catholic schools that already had strong records of success with poor and minority students. Vouchers work a lot less well when the available schools, as in Louisiana, are not particularly coherent, well-run, or effective. To be more effective than Louisiana’s program, vouchers also have to be well-funded: those that pay a lot less than the tuition private schools charge benefit the parents who are already paying tuition but don’t do much for students who need to get out of district-run schools.

Chris Rickert:

It’s as if taxpayers face paying for a voucher student twice — once through state taxes for vouchers, and again through district property tax levies for, well, I’m not sure what, given that the voucher students are no longer in the districts.

Dan Rossmiller, government relations director at the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, noted “it’s not always the case where the students are moving from a public school to a voucher school.” That’s because some students who have never attended public school are eligible for vouchers, too.

Of course, like other voucher students, their families still have to fall below certain income limits. And in the absence of vouchers, taxpayers would probably still be paying for a lot of low-income students’ education, anyway (just in the public schools, where public schools’ leaders like to keep them).

Rossmiller’s also right that a district can’t simply close a school or lay off a teacher because it loses two or five or 10 students — and the taxpayer funding that comes with them — to voucher schools. There would have to be bigger losses before districts could find offsetting efficiencies, like closing schools.

Still, changes in district enrollments happen all the time for many reasons. Birth rates go up and down, local economies boom or bust, districts provide better or worse education. Students leaving for other public school districts or for voucher-supported private schools are only two of many possibilities.

Alissa Quart:

“This school would be more of a safety,” Joyce Szuflita explained to the parents. She gestured at the colored paper handouts fanned out between them, and then pointed at another zoned school on a different sheet. “That’s a curated class of parents because they chose to move into the zone of the school that they wanted,” said Szuflita. “So, you don’t have to have G&T if you have that,” she added, referring to gifted-and-talented programs.

It was early morning at a diner in Brooklyn’s South Slope neighborhood, and the couple had contacted Szuflita for advice. The couple—an academic and a public-health researcher—was moving from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to New York City and was nervous about the schooling of their two-year-old and their not-yet-born child. They knew that securing a spot in one of the borough’s handful of coveted high-performing elementary schools was notoriously difficult.

Useful in many cities, particluarly those with vibrant charter and voucher options. Madison’s school climate has not materially changed in many decades. Parents face the “choice” of a largely monolithic, one size fits all government school system along with several private school options.

Alan Borsuk:

The mountain keeps eroding and the foothills keep growing. Where does this lead?

It’s time for my annual look at Milwaukee’s changing and amazing educational landscape, as shown by enrollment numbers for the several streams of publicly funded education that flow strongly in the city.

It’s been a quarter-century since the launch of private school vouchers and charter schools ended the days when saying you got a publicly funded education meant you went to schools in a centralized system.

Now, publicly funded education comes in a lot of flavors. Enrollment trends offer an important view of what is happening.

I’m going to break this into pieces. This week, the mountain, namely, the Milwaukee Public Schools system.

Next week, the molehills, namely, the development in recent years of more than half a dozen of what I would call mini-school districts in Milwaukee.

Life on the mountain offers a lot of what we could diplomatically call challenges.

A big one is that the enrollment picture for the conventional MPS system gets worse, notch by notch, year by year.

Focus on this number: 56%. That’s the percentage of Milwaukee children who get publicly funded education who were enrolled this fall in MPS (defined basically as the schools where staff members are employees of MPS).

The MPS share has gone down by a percentage point or two in pretty much every recent year. I thought it was a big deal when it fell to 67% in the mid-2000s. By two years ago, it was 59%, and last year 57%. How far away is the day when it’s half?

Alan Borsuk:

In this space two weeks ago, I offered some thoughts on what has been learned in the quarter-century since Milwaukee became the first American city where publicly funded vouchers paid for educating children in private schools.

But there’s so much more to say, especially in the light of the prospect — I’d even say likelihood — of large growth in coming years in the still-young statewide voucher program.

So let’s pose a few questions that you might want to remember in 2017, 2019, or 2021, when new state budgets take shape.

Who’s going to use vouchers statewide, part one.Will it be predominantly kids who would otherwise be going to private schools? Or will there be a lot of students who otherwise would be going to public schools?

Either answer carries major implications. Making a complex picture probably a bit oversimplified, think of it this way:

Molly Beck:

The number and type of crimes committed at high schools, at their events and on school buses would be printed on the state’s school report cards under a bill being circulated this week.

Any public high school, public charter high school or private voucher high school would be required to track reports of criminal activity beginning in the 2017-18 school year and submit the data to the state Department of Public Instruction annually under the bill authored by Rep. John Jagler, R-Watertown.

Jagler said the idea of the bill was triggered by a large fight in September at Milwaukee’s Barack Obama School of Career and Technical Education. He said he subsequently learned from police department employees that Milwaukee police are often called to the school, but Jagler could not find related data from the state Department of Justice or DPI.

“I was kind of surprised that the information wasn’t there, or wasn’t easily available — and I was kind of surprised the data wasn’t being tracked,” he said. “To me, I don’t know how anybody can think this information shouldn’t be available to parents.”

Round and round we go.

Obtaining police call data required a rather involved effort several years ago. SIS August 4, 2008:

The absence of local safety data spurred several SIS contributors to obtain and publish the police call data displayed below. Attorney and parent Chan Stroman provided pro bono public records assistance. Chan’s work on this matter extended to the Wisconsin Attorney General’s office. A few important notes on this data:

13% of the records could not be geocoded and therefore are not included in the summary information. The downloadable 1996-2006 police call data .zip file is comprehensive, however.

Clicking on the numbers below takes the reader to a detail page. This page includes all matching police calls and a downloadable .csv file of same. The csv file can be opened in Excel, Numbers and many data management tools.

This summary is rather brief, I hope others download the data and have a look.

Gangs & School Violence forum.

Wisconsin’s stürm and drang over “Act 10” is somewhat manifested in Madison. Madison’s government schools are the only Wisconsin District, via extensive litigation, to still have a collective bargaining agreement with a teacher union, in this case, Madison Teachers, Inc.

The Madison School Board and Administration are working with the local teachers union on a new “Handbook”. The handbook will replace the collective bargaining agreement. Maneuvering over the terms of this very large document illuminates posturing and power structure(s) in our local government schools.

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham wrote recently (September 17, 2015 PDF):

The Oversight group was able to come to agreement on all of the handbook language with the exception of one item, job transfer in the support units. Pursuant to the handbook development process, this item was presented to me for review and recommendation to the Board. My preliminary recommendation is as follows:

Job Transfer for all support units
(See Pages 151, 181, 197, 240, 261)

Superintendent Recommendation
That the language in the Handbook with regard to transfer state as follows: Vacancies shall first be filled by employees in surplus. The District has the right to determine and select the most qualified applicant for any position. The term applicant refers to both internal and external candidates for the position.

The District retains the right to determine the job qualifications needed for any vacant position. Minimum qualifications shall be established by the District and equally applied to all persons.

Rationale/Employee Concern

Rationale:
It is essential that the District has the ability to hire the most qualified candidate for any vacant position—whether an internal candidate or an external candidate. This language is currently used for transfers in the teacher unit. Thus, it creates consistency across employee groups.
By providing the District with the flexibility of considering both internal and external candidates simultaneously the District can ensure that it is hiring the most qualified individual for any vacant position. It also gives the District opportunities to diversify the workforce by expanding the pool of applicants under consideration. This change would come with a commitment to provide stronger development opportunities for internal candidates who seek pathways to promotion.

Employee Concern:
The existing promotional system already grants a high degree of latitude in selecting candidates, including hiring from the outside where there are not qualified or interested internal applicants. It also helps to develop a cadre of dedicated, career-focused employees.

September 24, 2015 Memo to the Madison government schools board of education from Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham:

To: Board of Education
From: Jennifer Cheatham, Superintendent of Schools
RE: Update to Handbook following Operations Work Group

The Operations Work Group met on Monday September 21, 2015. Members of the Oversight Group for development of the Employee Handbook presented the draft Employee Handbook to the Board. There was one item on which the Oversight Group was unable to reach agreement, the hiring process for the support units. Pursuant to the handbook development process, this item was presented to me for review and recommendation to the Board. There was discussion around this item during the meeting and, the Board requested that members of the Oversight Group meet again in an attempt to reach consensus.

Per the Board’s direction, District and employee representatives on the Oversight Group came together to work on coming to consensus on the one remaining item in the Handbook. The group had a productive dialog and concluded that with more time, the group would be able to work together to resolve this issue. Given that the Handbook does not go into effect until July1, 2016, the group agreed to leave the issue regarding the hiring process for the support units unresolved at this point and to include in the Handbook the phrase “To Be Determined” in the applicable sections. As such, there is no longer an open item. When you vote on the Handbook on Monday, the section on the “Selection Process” in the various addenda for the applicable support units will state “To Be Determined” with an agreement on the part of the Oversight Group to continue to meet and develop final language that the Board will approve before the Handbook takes effect in the 2016-17 school year.

Current Collective Bargaining Agreement (160 page PDF) Wordcloud:

Proposed Employee Handbook (304 Page PDF – 9.21.2015 slide presentation) Wordcloud:

Background:

1. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has filed suit to vacate the Madison government schools collective bargaining agreement with Madison Teachers, Inc.

2. Attorney Lester Pines has spent considerable time litigating Act 10 on behalf of Madison Teachers, Inc. – with some success.

3. The collective bargaining agreement has been used to prevent the development of non-Madison Government school models, such as independent charter, virtual and voucher organizations. This one size fits all approach was manifested by the rejection [Kaleem Caire letter] of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

4. Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending more than $15,000 per student annually. See also “What’s different, this time?”

5. Comparing Madison, Long Beach and Boston government school teacher union contracts. Current Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham has cited Boston and Long Beach government schools as Districts that have narrowed the achievement gap. Both government districts offer a variety of school governance models, which is quite different than Madison’s long-time “one size fits all approach”.

6. Nearby Oconomowoc is paying fewer teachers more.

7. Minneapolis teacher union approved to authorize charter schools.

8. Madison Teachers, Inc. commentary on the proposed handbook (Notes and links). Wordcloud:

9. A rather astonishing quote:

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

– Madison School Board member Ed Hughes.

10. 1,570,000 for four senators – WEAC.

11. Then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

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

Schwerpunkt via wikipedia.

WORT-FM

How is the school year going? What about the behavior improvement plan, community schools, teacher diversity, racial equity, test scores, white flight, and school voucher schools? Today Carousel Bayrd talks with Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dr. Jennifer Cheatham today to discuss the upcoming year and her vision for the future.

Alan Borsuk:

Being superintendent was a pretty low profile matter for much of the last 166 years, but no more.

Here are three reasons why:

Vouchers: DPI oversees administration of the private school voucher program. Evers and his two predecessors were big advocates of the conventional public school system.

Voucher advocates generally regard all of them and the DPI as a whole as foes.

Common Core: In 2010, Evers signed up Wisconsin to be part of the Common Core effort to create consistent standards across the nation for what children should learn.

Didn’t seem like such a big deal then. Now, of course, it’s highly unpopular, especially among Republicans.

State tests: Evers signed Wisconsin up to be part of a multistate consortium developing tests aligned to the Common Core.

The resulting test had its first full run last spring. There were big problems with the launch and the Legislature killed that test. New tests are coming, but controversies over testing remain.

Vivian Wang:

Laying down a new marker in the competition for school enrollment in Milwaukee, the School Board has approved a high-profile young educator’s proposal for a new charter school, after he promised to ramp up efforts to reverse the flow of students leaving the district for voucher schools and other options.

Maurice Thomas’ planned Milwaukee Excellence Charter School, set to open in 2016, promises an “unapologetically college preparatory” education for grades six to 12, complete with longer school days, an extended school year and strict disciplinary standards. By 2024, Thomas said, 100% of graduates will be at a four-year college.

Such “no excuses” schools have produced higher rates of graduation and better test scores than conventional schools in some parts of the country. Such a school could be especially impactful at the planned location on the city’s northwest side, a historically underserved area in education.

The school will likely be housed in the vacant Edison Middle School building at 5372 N. 37th St.

As a charter school authorized by Milwaukee Public Schools, Milwaukee Excellence will keep the public dollars that follow students into its classrooms in MPS coffers. As an independent school, though, it can be staffed by non-district, non-unionized employees and operate free of some regular rules governing public schools.

Molly Beck

Overall, roughly $4.5 billion annually is devoted to general school funding in the proposed state budget. The cost for new students in the program over the next two years is projected to be about $37 million. In the last state budget, about $384 million was appropriated for the state’s three voucher systems.

Rep. Sondy Pope, D-Cross Plains, said the proposed state budget further harms already financially struggling public school districts. Barca characterized the estimated cost as funds “stolen” from public schools and diverted to the “private voucher school experiment.”

“We simply cannot afford to build two parallel school systems in this state,” said Barca.

Jim Bender, president of voucher lobbying group School Choice Wisconsin, said he could not respond to the memo because it was speculative. He added the memo was created to grab headlines. “Without seeing how they came up with the calculation, it’s very difficult to respond to,” he said.

More from Erin Richards.

It is useful to see an article with complete spending perspective data!

Much more on vouchers, here.

Mitch Henck.

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

Jay Bullock:

I know that this problem is not unique to Milwaukee, and it’s probably not exclusively the fault of our marketplace, as much as I like to blame it. Comparable urban districts have high mobility rates even without a lot of school vouchers – a quick googling turns up annual figures like 30 percent for Minneapolis, 26 percent in Cincinnati, and a staggering 119 percent in St. Louis one recent year. This compares to the GAO’s finding that, nationally, the number is well under 10 percent.

So I guess that’s my challenge to Erin Richards while on her fellowship. What effect, exactly, does a voucher program and marketplace like here in Milwaukee have on mobility? And more than that, on school spirit and loyalty?

Because if MPS is banking on a strong alumni program to help its high schools, something needs to change in schools now to create those loyal graduates. As long as this city remains a marketplace, I fear that kind of school pride is never coming back.

School pride is irrelevant if students cannot read.

Alan Borsuk:

I asked Dan McKinley, as he reaches retirement, what he has learned in nearly a quarter-century of involvement in efforts to improve the education of high-needs children in Milwaukee. He gave me four answers, and we’ll get to those.

Then, a few days later, he sent me a fifth lesson — the most important one, he said.

“It really is all about love,” he said. “When you visit a school, if you can’t feel the love, you know there is something missing in the educational program. The school may be working hard, but outcomes of all that work are probably not that good.

“This is what the policy-makers miss: In the end, it is not about teacher data or management techniques. It is about a community of people dedicated to high ideals who work every day to bring out the best in the children they love.”

McKinley and the organization he headed all these years, PAVE, have been good at spotting the love and spotting the quality in schools.

For years, while the State of Wisconsin was allowing schools of hugely varying quality to receive public money through the private school voucher program or independent charter programs, and while voucher advocates took a pass on getting involved in quality, PAVE picked the places it supported financially with care and smart eyes.

Mediocre schools and especially those that were just horrible got almost nothing from PAVE, which was a conduit for millions of dollars in scholarship help, no-interest loans and other help to many of the most promising schools in the city.

Hank Long:

Public schools are required by state and federal law to accept students with disabilities and to make appropriate accommodations for their learning.
So when a district – despite its best of intentions – fails to meet the individual educational needs of such students, where are the students and their families to turn?

That’s an issue Amy Christensen-Bruce grappled with for years before she discovered Academy of Whole Learning. The private school located in St. Louis Park primarily serves students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Christensen-Bruce said it was the first school that was able gain her confidence that the unique needs of her now fourth-grade son – who has autism – were being met.
Whether he was enrolled at a local public school or a charter school, Christensen-Bruce said her child struggled to learn at the rate she knew he was capable of.

Chris Rickert:

From the way some of the more enthusiastic public school supporters talk, you’d think alternative forms of public education, such as voucher schools, were making millions on the backs of ill-treated kindergartners.
The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voucher schools are not-for-profit, though, and it seems unlikely that any of them is, say, forcing 8-year-olds into sweatshops or flogging them for chewing gum in class.

But you’d never know that from the Madison School District’s denial of an open records request from a pro-voucher organization on grounds that the request wasn’t education-related.

School Choice Wisconsin president Jim Bender says the “vast majority” of about 30 larger districts complied with the organization’s request for student directory data. It is considering plans to use the information to send out postcards reminding parents of the enrollment period for the statewide voucher program.

Erin Richards:

Bender said he thinks it’s unlikely that districts would be bristling at the request if it had come from any entity or individual other than his. School district leaders say that’s not true; they’re concerned about their families’ personal information going out to anyone.

Historically it’s been a nonissue because nobody ever asks for it.

State open records law mandates districts release student directory information upon request, unless parents have opted out of the directory or unless districts have passed policies to further restrict release of the data.

Directory information includes information such as students’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, date and place of birth, major field of study, height, weight, athletic team participation, awards achieved and schools attended.

The information is key to rounding out important school items such as yearbooks, playbills, sports rosters, announcements to the media about student accomplishments and contact lists that help families communicate with each other.

Oshkosh School District Superintendent Stan Mack said his district will comply with releasing all the directory data that state law and its own district policy allow.

Jason Stein:

Top GOP leaders in the Assembly say they hope to unveil their version of an accountability bill by as soon as Wednesday. But Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke (R-Kaukauna) said there are still differences with Senate Republicans over whether the proposal should include upfront consequences or other “interventions” for failing schools or leave those to be determined later.

“We think there should be some accountability with the accountability bill,” he said.

This same disagreement helped stymie passage of the schools bill in the previous legislative session.

Republicans from both houses met Tuesday on the proposal, which leaders in the Senate and Assembly have said is their first priority in the legislative session opening this week.

The accountability bill seeks to place similar standards on all schools receiving taxpayer dollars, from traditional public and charter schools to private voucher schools accepting state money. The proposal is closely linked to a separate push from Republicans to expand the role of and funding for voucher schools statewide.

Both Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) said that they hope to have standards legislation introduced soon in each house.

Alan Borsuk:

What about Burke wanting to kibosh that small statewide program, while leaving the Milwaukee and Racine program alone (except, she says, she’ll take steps to deal with low-quality voucher schools)? If you oppose one voucher program, shouldn’t you oppose them all?

My reading of it is as simple as saying the statewide program is small and not yet deeply rooted. It’s vulnerable.

Undoing Milwaukee and Racine vouchers — especially Milwaukee – would most likely be a nightmare, as a practical matter. MPS is not ready to take on a flood of new kids and the impact on the state budget would be substantial. The Milwaukee and Racine programs are now deeply rooted. Parents like their schools. The fight over cutting off vouchers would be epic.

The political realities on vouchers for either Burke or Walker are almost sure to be difficult next year. Burke most likely would face an all-Republican or split legislature where she’ll have a ton of problems. Killing the statewide voucher program may be undoable.

For Walker, even with a Republican-controlled legislature, the same may be true when it comes to expanding vouchers. Too much opposition and too much cost would spell, at most, a small expansion for the statewide program, I bet.

As much as advocates on both sides of the voucher debate dream of big victories – unlimited vouchers or the death of vouchers – my guess is we’re in the zone where we’re going to stay. These programs will continue to be hot potatoes, but changing the potato recipe is not going to be easy.

Walker and Burke both know that, best as I can see.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Patrick Marley:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

Vouchers

Milwaukee Public Schools Spend More on a Vacant Building.

A focus on adult employment.

Molly Beck:

im Bender, president of voucher advocacy group School Choice Wisconsin, said Burke’s comments were misleading because funding for the voucher program comes from state general purpose revenue.

“You can’t talk about taking money away from K-12, unless you believe that money belongs to K-12,” Bender said. “It’s not possessive of any one particular place.”

Eskelsen García, who expressed support for Burke, told the audience to look to her home state of Utah, where the Utah Education Association helped trigger a voter referendum in 2007 that successfully overturned a law that had passed in the state legislature that would provide any student with a school voucher.

NEA spokeswoman Staci Maiers said in an emailed invitation to Monday’s event that “Burke is getting ready to release her K-12 education platform, and she wanted to talk with real teachers and other educators — who are actually in the classroom with students — to find out how best to improve education.”

Burke spokesman Joe Zepecki said there are no immediate plans for Burke to release an education plan, however.

Jessie Opoien has more.

Alan Borsuk

In recent years on this Sunday, the last before most kids start school, I have offered thoughts on what is new and worth watching on the school scene in Wisconsin and particularly in Milwaukee.

I started to make up a list for this year and was struck by how, um, boring it was. Permit me to try a different approach, namely, a debate with myself (I win!) over this proposition:

Wisconsin education is suffering a serious case of the blahs.

In defense of this statement, I point to how few new schools, new programs and initiatives there are this year, particularly in Milwaukee.

With its large voucher and charter sectors and with Milwaukee Public Schools frequently undergoing changes, you could count on Milwaukee to offer new developments each fall in recent years.

This year, there’s not much. A few programs are being launched or growing, such as the addition of parent centers in many Milwaukee schools that didn’t have them until now. But it’s really kind of status quo out there. And it’s a status quo in which less than one in five MPS students are rated as proficient or better in reading.

Consider my snapshot summary of the three big sectors of Milwaukee schools:

Unfortunately, status quo governance has become the norm in Madison and generally across the Badger State. Our agrarian era K-12 governance structures persist, mostly on the fumes of the past. Yet, spending continues to grow, with Madison’s $15,000+ / student double the national average, despite long term disastrous reading results. A 2012 comparison with the Austin, TX school district is worth a look.

Gordon Lafer

During the past year, Wisconsin state legislators debated a series of bills aimed at closing low-performing public schools and replacing them with privately run charter schools. These proposals were particularly targeted at Milwaukee, the state’s largest and poorest school district.

Ultimately, the only legislation enacted was a bill that modestly increases school reporting requirements, without stipulating consequences for low performance. Nevertheless, the more ambitious proposals will likely remain at the core of Wisconsin’s debates over education policy, and legislative leaders have made clear their desire to revisit them in next year’s session. To help inform these deliberations, this report addresses the most comprehensive set of reforms put forward in the 2013–2014 legislative session.

Backers of these reforms are particularly enamored of a new type of charter school represented by the Rocketship chain of schools—a low-budget operation that relies on young and inexperienced teachers rather than more veteran and expensive faculty, that reduces the curriculum to a near-exclusive focus on reading and math, and that replaces teachers with online learning and digital applications for a significant portion of the day. Rocketship proposes that its model—dubbed “blended learning” for its combination of in-person and computerized instruction—can cut costs while raising low-income students’ test scores (Rocketship Education 2011).

The call for public schools to be replaced by such tech-heavy, teacher-light operations comes from some of the most powerful actors in local and national politics: the major corporate lobbies, including Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, Americans for Prosperity, and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC). It is these groups, rather than parents or community organizations, that provided the impetus for legislators to consider proposals for mass school closure and privatization in Milwaukee.

The report was discussed recently on Wisconsin Public Radio.

Related: Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP – voucher) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP..

Interview with MMSD School Board candidate Wayne Strong Safe schools and high academic achievement:

High academic achievement, for Strong, means that all of our MMSD students are achieving to the fullest extent of their abilities.

“Whether you are a TAG [Talented and Gifted] or a special-needs student or whether you are a middleof- the-road student, the teachers [should be] challenging our students to do the best that they can do and to be the best that they can be,” Strong says.

“We’ve got to make sure we are doing that for all of our students.”

Strong wants to improve graduation rates and he feels that the disparity in the way that kids are disciplined affects that quite a bit.

“Right now, our African American students are only graduating at a rate of 53 percent. That’s still not good,” Strong says.

Michael Flores: I’ll build bridge from community to School Board, more.

Madison school board candidates Wayne Strong and Michael Flores propose achievement gap solutions.

Credit Kaleem Caire for big impact

It’s easy to talk about Madison’s awful record of graduating barely half of its black high school students in four years, among other glaring racial disparities.

Kaleem Caire actually did something about it. And that’s what matters most. Caire’s impact on Madison during his four years as leader of the Urban League of Greater Madison has been profound.

Unfortunately, unanswered questions about his surprising departure and “less than ideal” use of the nonprofit’s credit cards won’t help the cause. It will give supporters of the status quo more leverage to argue against bold change.

The Madison School Board in late 2011 rejected the Urban League’s promising charter school proposal, siding with the teachers union over the Urban League and its many supporters. The proposal for a Madison Preparatory Academy was aimed at low-achieving minority students. It would have offered higher expectations for students, a longer school day and year, more pressure on parents to get involved, more minority teachers, uniforms, same-sex classes and internships with local employers

Libbey Meister: Flores would be wonderful School Board member.

Ed Hughes: I look forward to helping Madison schools thrive (Mr. Hughes is running uncontested for the 3rd time).

On Politics: Mary Burke would cut statewide vouchers, private school tuition deduction

Associated Press:

Parents who want Mississippi lawmakers to approve special education vouchers are adding their voices in support.
House and Senate lawmakers held a hearing Tuesday to showcase the proposals. Natalie Gunnels of Tupelo told lawmakers that public school administrators can’t or won’t take care of students like her son Patrick, who has trouble walking, is sensitive to noises, and has trouble reading and writing.
“It’s obvious to me and my husband that the public school system is not equipped to educate the Patricks of our state,” Gunnels said.
The plan would give debit cards with more than $6,000 on them to parents who withdraw their special education students from public schools. The money could be spent on private school tuition or private tutoring services.
Mandy Rogers, a disability advocate, said that the state has been promising improvements but not delivering since the federal law was passed.

Erica L. Green, Liz Bowie and Jean Marbella:

— Newly named to head Baltimore’s public schools, Gregory E. Thornton has unfinished business in the district he is leaving behind after 31/2 tumultuous years.
Wearing a red T-shirt, he arrived Friday at a school where, to peals of laughter, the 59-year-old would join kids in a “jump rope-a-thon.” But, as so frequently happened during his tenure, there were political hoops to jump through first.
“How are we doing?” Thornton asked a state senator he spied in the welcoming crowd.
It was not so much a pleasantry as a pulse check: How are we doing, he meant, in thwarting two bills that would close public schools and sell empty facilities to private schools that accept vouchers?
In a brief exchange, the senator mentioned a potentially worrisome legislator, and Thornton said he’d already talked to her the previous night. And then, it was time to “make some noise” as he exhorted the school crowd who had gathered to jump rope in honor of a phys ed teacher who started the tradition 35 years ago.
It was just another day navigating the complicated terrain of Milwaukee Public Schools.

Laurence Steinberg:

High school, where kids socialize, show off their clothes, use their phones–and, oh yeah, go to class.
Every once in a while, education policy squeezes its way onto President Obama’s public agenda, as it did in during last month’s State of the Union address. Lately, two issues have grabbed his (and just about everyone else’s) attention: early-childhood education and access to college. But while these scholastic bookends are important, there is an awful lot of room for improvement between them. American high schools, in particular, are a disaster.
In international assessments, our elementary school students generally score toward the top of the distribution, and our middle school students usually place somewhat above the average. But our high school students score well below the international average, and they fare especially badly in math and science compared with our country’s chief economic rivals.
What’s holding back our teenagers?
One clue comes from a little-known 2003 study based on OECD data that compares the world’s 15-year-olds on two measures of student engagement: participation and “belongingness.” The measure of participation was based on how often students attended school, arrived on time, and showed up for class. The measure of belongingness was based on how much students felt they fit in to the student body, were liked by their schoolmates, and felt that they had friends in school. We might think of the first measure as an index of academic engagement and the second as a measure of social engagement.
On the measure of academic engagement, the U.S. scored only at the international average, and far lower than our chief economic rivals: China, Korea, Japan, and Germany. In these countries, students show up for school and attend their classes more reliably than almost anywhere else in the world. But on the measure of social engagement, the United States topped China, Korea, and Japan.
In America, high school is for socializing. It’s a convenient gathering place, where the really important activities are interrupted by all those annoying classes. For all but the very best American students–the ones in AP classes bound for the nation’s most selective colleges and universities–high school is tedious and unchallenging. Studies that have tracked American adolescents’ moods over the course of the day find that levels of boredom are highest during their time in school.
It’s not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents–it’s every single thing we have tried.
One might be tempted to write these findings off as mere confirmation of the well-known fact that adolescents find everything boring. In fact, a huge proportion of the world’s high school students say that school is boring. But American high schools are even more boring than schools in nearly every other country, according to OECD surveys. And surveys of exchange students who have studied in America, as well as surveys of American adolescents who have studied abroad, confirm this. More than half of American high school students who have studied in another country agree that our schools are easier. Objectively, they are probably correct: American high school students spend far less time on schoolwork than their counterparts in the rest of the world.
Trends in achievement within the U.S. reveal just how bad our high schools are relative to our schools for younger students. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, routinely tests three age groups: 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds. Over the past 40 years, reading scores rose by 6 percent among 9-year-olds and 3 percent among 13-year-olds. Math scores rose by 11 percent among 9-year-olds and 7 percent among 13-year-olds.
By contrast, high school students haven’t made any progress at all. Reading and math scores have remained flat among 17-year-olds, as have their scores on subject area tests in science, writing, geography, and history. And by absolute, rather than relative, standards, American high school students’ achievement is scandalous.
In other words, over the past 40 years, despite endless debates about curricula, testing, teacher training, teachers’ salaries, and performance standards, and despite billions of dollars invested in school reform, there has been no improvement–none–in the academic proficiency of American high school students.
It’s not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents–it’s every single thing we have tried. The list of unsuccessful experiments is long and dispiriting. Charter high schools don’t perform any better than standard public high schools, at least with respect to student achievement. Students whose teachers “teach for America” don’t achieve any more than those whose teachers came out of conventional teacher certification programs. Once one accounts for differences in the family backgrounds of students who attend public and private high schools, there is no advantage to going to private school, either. Vouchers make no difference in student outcomes. No wonder school administrators and teachers from Atlanta to Chicago to my hometown of Philadelphia have been caught fudging data on student performance. It’s the only education strategy that consistently gets results.
The especially poor showing of high schools in America is perplexing. It has nothing to do with high schools having a more ethnically diverse population than elementary schools. In fact, elementary schools are more ethnically diverse than high schools, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Nor do high schools have more poor students. Elementary schools in America are more than twice as likely to be classified as “high-poverty” than secondary schools. Salaries are about the same for secondary and elementary school teachers. They have comparable years of education and similar years of experience. Student-teacher ratios are the same in our elementary and high schools. So are the amounts of time that students spend in the classroom. We don’t shortchange high schools financially either; American school districts actually spend a little more per capita on high school students than elementary school students.
Our high school classrooms are not understaffed, underfunded, or underutilized, by international standards. According to a 2013 OECD report, only Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland spend more per student. Contrary to widespread belief, American high school teachers’ salaries are comparable to those in most European and Asian countries, as are American class sizes and student-teacher ratios. And American high school students actually spend as many or more hours in the classroom each year than their counterparts in other developed countries.
This underachievement is costly: One-fifth of four-year college entrants and one-half of those entering community college need remedial education, at a cost of $3 billion each year.
The president’s call for expanding access to higher education by making college more affordable, while laudable on the face of it, is not going to solve our problem. The president and his education advisers have misdiagnosed things. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of college entry in the industrialized world. Yet it is tied for last in the rate of college completion. More than one-third of U.S. students who enter a full-time, two-year college program drop out just after one year, as do about one fifth of students who enter a four-year college. In other words, getting our adolescents to go to college isn’t the issue. It’s getting them to graduate.
If this is what we hope to accomplish, we need to rethink high school in America. It is true that providing high-quality preschool to all children is an important component of comprehensive education reform. But we can’t just do this, cross our fingers, and hope for the best. Early intervention is an investment, not an inoculation.
In recent years experts in early-child development have called for programs designed to strengthen children’s “non-cognitive” skills, pointing to research that demonstrates that later scholastic success hinges not only on conventional academic abilities but on capacities like self-control. Research on the determinants of success in adolescence and beyond has come to a similar conclusion: If we want our teenagers to thrive, we need to help them develop the non-cognitive traits it takes to complete a college degree–traits like determination, self-control, and grit. This means classes that really challenge students to work hard–something that fewer than one in six high school students report experiencing, according to Diploma to Nowhere, a 2008 report published by Strong American Schools. Unfortunately, our high schools demand so little of students that these essential capacities aren’t nurtured. As a consequence, many high school graduates, even those who have acquired the necessary academic skills to pursue college coursework, lack the wherewithal to persevere in college. Making college more affordable will not fix this problem, though we should do that too.
The good news is that advances in neuroscience are revealing adolescence to be a second period of heightened brain plasticity, not unlike the first few years of life. Even better, brain regions that are important for the development of essential non-cognitive skills are among the most malleable. And one of the most important contributors to their maturation is pushing individuals beyond their intellectual comfort zones.
It’s time for us to stop squandering this opportunity. Our kids will never rise to the challenge if the challenge doesn’t come.

Laurence Steinberg is a psychology professor at Temple University and author of the forthcoming Age of Opportunity: Revelations from the New Science of Adolescence.
———————————-
“Teach with Examples”
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The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
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978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
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Wisconsin State Journal:

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

Matthew DeFour:

Assembly lawmakers want to change report cards for public, charter and private voucher schools and force poorly performing public schools to close or convert to charter schools.
They also want to create a politically appointed council to advise the Department of Public Instruction on the best formula for determining report card scores.
The nine-member council would be led by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. The governor, Senate president and Assembly speaker would each appoint two members and the Assembly and Senate minority leaders would each appoint one member, none of whom would be legislators.
But Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said Friday there isn’t support for such sweeping reforms of the accountability system this session, though there may be support for a narrower bill being developed by Sen. Paul Farrow, R-Pewaukee.
Farrow said he plans to introduce a bill next week that would ensure all public, charter and private voucher schools are reporting student information to the state, including results of a new state test in spring 2015.
Farrow said he wants to seek input from interested groups about possible changes to the accountability system, including consequences for low-performing schools, that could be enacted next session in time for the report card in fall 2015.

Pat Schneider:

“I’m an academic,” says Slekar, a Pittsburgh-area native whose mother and grandmother were elementary school teachers and who was a classroom teacher himself before earning a Ph.D. in curriculum from University of Maryland.
“I understand scholarship, I understand evidence, I understand the role of higher education in society,” he says. “When initiatives come through, if we have solid evidence that something is not a good idea, it’s really my job to come out and say that.”
Michael Apple, an internationally recognized education theorist and professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison agrees. In the face of conservative state legislators’ push to privatize public education, “it is part of my civic responsibility to say what is happening,” says Apple.
“In a society that sees corporations as having all the rights of people, by and large education is a private good, not a public good,” he says. “I need to defend the very idea of public schools.”
Both Apple and Julie Underwood, dean of the School of Education at UW-Madison, share Slekar’s concern over the systematic privatization of education and recognize a role for scholars in the public debate about it.
…
A wide-ranging, animated, sometimes loud conversation with Slekar includes familiar controversies hotly debated around the country and in the Wisconsin Capitol, like high-stakes testing, vouchers and Common Core standards. The evidence, Slekar says flatly, shows that none of it will work to improve student learning.
The reform initiatives are instead part of a corporate takeover of public education masquerading as reform that will harm low-income and minority students before spreading to the suburbs, says Slekar, in what he calls the civil rights issue of our time.
A 30-year attack has worked to erode the legitimacy of the public education system. And teachers are taking much of the blame for the stark findings of the data now pulled from classrooms, he says.
“We’re absolutely horrible at educating poor minority kids,” says Slekar. “We absolutely know that.”
But neither the so-called reformers, nor many more casual observers, want to talk about the real reason for the disparities in achievement, Slekar says, which is poverty.
“That’s not an excuse, it’s a diagnosis,” he says, quoting John Kuhn, a firebrand Texas superintendent and activist who, at a 2011 rally, suggested that instead of performance-based salaries for teachers, the nation institute merit pay for members of Congress.

Local Education school academics have long had interactions with the Madison School District. Former Superintendent Art Rainwater works in the UW-Madison School of Education.

Further, this 122 page pdf (3.9mb) includes contracts (not sure if it is complete) between the UW-Madison School of Education and the Madison School District between 2004 and 2008. Has this relationship improved achievement?
Related: Deja Vu? Education Experts to Review the Madison School District and When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Karthik Muralidharan & Venkatesh Sundararaman (PDF):

We find that private school teachers have lower levels of formal education and training than public-school teachers, and are paid much lower salaries. On the other hand, private schools have a longer school day, a longer school year, smaller class sizes, lower teacher absence, higher teaching activity, and better school hygiene. After two and four years of the program, we find no difference between the test scores of lottery winners and losers on math and Telugu (native language). However, private schools spend significantly less instructional time on these subjects, and use the extra time to teach more English, Science, Social Studies, and Hindi. Averaged across all subjects, lottery winners score 0.13 σhigher, and students who attend private schools score 0.23 σhigher. We find no evidence of spillovers on public-school students who do not apply for the voucher, or on students who start out in private schools to begin with, suggesting that the program had no adverse effects on these groups. Finally, the mean cost per student in the private schools in our sample is less than a third of the cost in public schools.
Our results suggest that private schools in this setting deliver (slightly) better test score gains than their public counterparts, and do so at substantially lower costs per student.

Ben Velderman:

Hundreds of Milwaukee families have discovered in recent years that having a school voucher doesn’t mean much if your private school of choice doesn’t have the classroom space to accommodate additional children.
In Bad Faith screen grab topSuch is the case for the city’s St. Marcus Lutheran School. The high-performing private school has a long waiting list for any available seats that open up, and it’s not difficult to understand why. By virtually all measures, St. Marcus Lutheran is outperforming Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) – its government-run counterpart – by a wide margin. The most telling statistic is probably the schools’ graduation rates: St. Marcus succeeds in getting a diploma into the hands of 96 percent of its students, compared to MPS’ dismal 65 percent graduation rate.
If families who qualify for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program could flee their neighborhood government school, many of them obviously would. More than 25,000 students already have fled the district, which has caused MPS’ enrollment to crater. The attendance drop, in turn, has led to a surplus of school buildings the downsized district no longer needs.
But MPS leaders don’t want alternative schools using the empty buildings.
MPS officials believe that St. Marcus Lutheran and other high-quality voucher and charter schools pose an existential threat to the district, which is why they’ve devised a very clever plan to block the schools’ size and future growth by denying them access to the city’s vacant and unused school buildings

Erin Richards:

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

Matthew DeFour & Molly Beck:

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

Stephanie Simon:

Republicans eager to attract black and Latino voters believe they have hit on an ideal magnet: school choice.
Led by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, with high-profile contributions from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the GOP is pushing an election-year initiative to talk up school choice at every turn.
Calling for more charter schools, vouchers and tax credits to help parents pay private school tuition fits with the party’s mantra that the government works best when it gets out of the way and lets the free market flourish. But top strategists say it’s more than that: Talking about helping poor minority children softens the GOP’s image and lets candidates offer a positive vision instead of forever going on the attack. And unlike immigration reform, school choice is politically safe; there’s no chance of blowback from the tea party.
Plus, the photo ops are great. As the conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks put it in a strategic planning document: “Focus on kids and the future = excellent media opportunity.”

Erin Richards

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

Stephanie Simon & Maggie Severns:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor vowed Wednesday to protect and promote school choice programs and attacked Democratic politicians, including New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, for seeking to block the growth of charter schools and voucher programs.
Long an advocate of school choice, Cantor used a speech at the Brookings Institution to vow that Republicans would defend what he called an “education revolution” that has shifted power away from traditional public schools and put it in the hands of parents. Many states now allow parents to get tax-funded vouchers to send their children to private or parochial schools or chose from an array of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.

Dave Zweifel:

On its face, sending money to religious schools ought to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s prohibition against promoting religion. The designers of vouchers cleverly got around that by sending “vouchers” to families who meet certain financial guidelines and who, in turn, pay for tuition at a private school.
So now Jewish taxpayers are helping fund Christian schools, nonbelievers are contributing to devout fundamentalists, and scientists are helping pay for evolution deniers.
Worse, though, is that the proliferation of vouchers is eating at the very fabric of the American public education system — a system in which children of all beliefs, creeds and colors learn about each other, share experiences and explore conflicting ideas so that they can intelligently engage in the complexities of American democracy.
That’s what is so dangerous about vouchers. Using taxpayer dollars, they promote putting people who look alike and think alike with each other. That may be your view of the world, but don’t ask others to pay for it.

Related: Sweden’s voucher system.

Erin Richards:

In its first year operating free of a state-imposed enrollment cap, Racine’s private school voucher program saw enrollment more than double to 1,245 students, according to fall enrollment figures released by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Growth in the Milwaukee private-school voucher program continued its steady climb, increasing by about 3.6% from last year to 25,820 students, up from 24,941 last September.
Including the 512 students using a voucher to attend a private school in a new statewide program, the traditional third Friday of September head count reveals a total of 27,577 students using public dollars to attend 148 private, mostly religious schools in the state in the 2013-’14 school year.
Participating private school leaders and voucher-school champions celebrate the growth, saying they’re meeting a parent need and offering more children an opportunity to pursue a quality education.
“I think the community has responded very positively,” said Frank E. Trecroci, the founder and administrator of Mount Pleasant Renaissance School in Racine, which more than tripled its number of voucher students to 280 this fall, up from 89 voucher students in September 2012.
But many public-school advocates see the growth of voucher programs as a threat, and those concerns are now coming from a chorus of voices outside Milwaukee.
“I struggle with the wisdom of moving in this direction,” Patricia Deklotz, the superintendent of the Kettle Moraine School District in Waukesha County, said Thursday. “We’re building a dual system of funding here.”

Ann Doss Helms:

School choice plays a growing role in the quest to educate all students in the Charlotte region, speakers told more than 100 people gathered Saturday for a forum on the future of public education.
In the past, public education was synonymous with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Superintendent Heath Morrison was one of the speakers at the session organized by Staying Ahead Carolina, a social networking group. But he was joined by Eddie Goodall of the N.C. Public Charter Schools Association and state Rep. Rob Bryan, R-Mecklenburg, co-sponsor of the state’s Opportunity Scholarship Act, which will provide income-based vouchers to pay private school tuition starting in 2014.
All of them, along with Bill Anderson of the nonprofit advocacy group MeckEd, agreed that families want high-quality choices for their children. But they voiced different views on the benefits and drawbacks of North Carolina’s options.
“Parents like choice. That shows up on every survey, across the state and across the country,” Morrison said. “We have to make sure that there’s quality as well as quantity.”
“Parents like choice. That shows up on every survey, across the state and across the country,” Morrison said. “We have to make sure that there’s quality as well as quantity.”
Staying Ahead Carolina, a nonpartisan group that has previously focused on noneducation issues such as arts and health, convened the forum at UNC Charlotte Center City to talk about choices, challenges and changes in public education.

Chris Rickert:

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

Chris Rickert

The funny thing about the whole loud, bitter debate over school vouchers in Wisconsin is that it’s hard to argue with the goals of the most honorable advocates from both sides.
Honorable pro-voucher folks see the issue as one of choice: What does it matter if voucher schools don’t do any better than public schools? Everyone knows that different children need different educational experiences, and if choice is intimately connected with freedom, and public education is a right, then parents should be able to choose which schools their children go to — on the government’s dime.
Honorable anti-voucher folks, on the other hand, see a strong and enduring network of public schools as kind of a great democratic leveler of playing fields: Here are institutions where children — regardless of means and family background — can go to get a good education, experience cultures and histories different from their own, and be molded into capable participants in a democratic society and lovers of the commonweal.
All of these values — choice and freedom, democracy and community — are distinctly American.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannei Bettner email (PDF):

As school resumes, The Progressive Magazine is revving up the movement to save public schools. On their new web site, created specifically for the anti-voucher/save public schools project, www.publicschoolshakedown.org, The Progressive is pulling together education experts including Diane Ravich (education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education), activists, bloggers, and concerned citizens from across the country.
PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN is dedicated to EXPOSING the behind-the-scenes effort to privatize public schools, and CONNECTING pro-public school activists nationwide.
“Public School Shakedown will be a fantastic addition to the debate”, says Diane Ravitch. “The Progressive is performing a great public service by helping spread the word about the galloping privatization of our public schools.”
“Free public education, doors open to all, no lotteries, is a cornerstone of our democracy. If we allow large chunks of it to be handed over to private operators, religious schools, for-profit enterprises, and hucksters, we put our democracy at risk”, Ravitch adds.
That’s where Public School Shakedown comes in. While there are already groups such as the National Education Policy Center doing terrific research on education privatization and its effects, and bloggers writing pointed, hilarious reports, there is still not a great deal of understanding in the general population of how the education privatization movement works.
Teachers understand that the attack on public education is an attack on the very heart of our democracy. Yet the “school choice” movement has succeeded in setting the terms of the conversation. To the unknowing layperson, “school choice” and “education reform” sound like benign policy goals that aim to improve children’s access to high-quality education.
The time is right for a journalistic platform like The Progressive to put the pieces together.
From its base in Madison, The Progressive has made the attack on public schools a primary focus of its reporting.
Wisconsin is ground-zero for the school voucher movement. The first school voucher program started in Milwaukee back in 1990. But the last few years of the Walker Administration really brought home the importance of this issue.
The 2011 protests called attention to the public as to how much is at stake – a great public school system, open to all, and a democracy – not just a pay-as-you-go system of winners and losers that leaves the poor and middle classes behind.

Madison School Board President Ed Hughes

Rick Esenberg has responded to my last blog post, which was critical of a short article he had written about the difference between supporters and opponents of school vouchers.
I wrote that Esenberg’s analysis was superficial and his characterization of voucher opponents insulting. While decrying the unflattering terms I employed, Esenberg writes that my analysis of his piece is sophomoric, cartoonish and simplistic. Okay, fine. Let’s move on.
Esenberg writes that I overlooked his principal point, which is that people’s views on vouchers are heavily influenced by their predispositions. That seems to me to be obvious. What I found more interesting about his article is that it suggested the challenge of discussing whether vouchers represent sound public policy without resorting to arguments about whether public schools or voucher schools lead to better learning outcomes or which end up costing taxpayers more. It’s not that these aren’t important considerations, but the various rhetorical thrusts and parries along these lines have been repeated almost ad nauseum and neither side is going to convince the other on either basis. Let’s explore some other arguments.

The ongoing Madison School Board voucher rhetoric is ironic, given the disastrous reading scores.

Eugene Kane:

As I regularly pass by the former Malcolm X Academy that has been vacant for years, the words of a legendary African-American educator comes to mind:
“No schoolhouse has been opened for us that has not been filled.”
Booker T. Washington said that in 1896 during an address to urge white Americans to respect the desire by most African-American parents to seek the best possible education for their children.
Fast-forward to 2013 in Milwaukee, and the issue of vacant school buildings gives a pecular spin to Washington’s words. Back then, he could never have imagined the combination of bureaucracy and politics that has some educators scrambling to find spaces to fill with African-American students.
The campaign by a local private school funded by taxpayers to buy the former Malcolm X Academy at 2760 N. 1st St. has caused some in town to question why Milwaukee Public Schools hasn’t done more to turn closed school buildings into functioning houses of learning.
In particular, some conservatives question why MPS hasn’t been willing to sell valuable resources to school choice entities that are essentially their main competition for low-income minority students.
Actually, that stance seems valid from a business standpoint; why help out the folks trying to put you out of business?

The City of Milwaukee: Put Children First!

St. Marcus is at capacity.
Hundreds of children are on waiting lists.
Over the past decade, St. Marcus Lutheran School in Milwaukee’s Harambee neighborhood has proven that high-quality urban education is possible. The K3-8th grade school has demonstrated a successful model for education that helps children and families from urban neighborhoods break the cycle of poverty and move on to achieve academic success at the post-secondary level and beyond.
By expanding to a second campus at Malcolm X, St. Marcus can serve 900 more students.

WILL Responds to MPS on Unused Schools Issues

On Tuesday, Milwaukee Public Schools responded to WILL’s report, “MPS and the City Ignore State Law on Unused Property.” Here is WILL’s reply:
1. MPS’ response is significant for what it does not say. WILL’s report states that, right now, there are at least 20 unused school buildings that are not on the market – and practically all of these buildings have attracted interest from charter and choice schools. As far as its records reveal, MPS refuses to adopt basic business practices, such as keeping an updated portfolio of what is happening with its facilities. How is the public to know where things stand when it is not clear that MPS keeps tabs on them?
2. MPS thinks everything is okay because it has sold four buildings since 2011 and leases to MPS schools. MPS’ response is similar to a football team (we trust it would be the Bears) celebrating that they scored two touchdowns in a game – only to end up losing 55-14. Our report acknowledged that MPS had disposed of a few buildings, but when there are at least 20 empty buildings – and substantial demand for them – claiming credit for selling a few is a bit like a chronic absentee celebrating the fact that he usually comes in on Tuesdays. Children and taxpayers deserve better.

Conservative group says MPS, city not selling enough empty buildings

A conservative legal group says that Milwaukee Public Schools is stalling on selling its empty school buildings to competing school operators that seek school facility space, and that the City of Milwaukee isn’t acting on a new law that gives it more authority to sell the district’s buildings.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which supports many Republican causes, says its new report shows that MPS is preventing charter schools and private schools in the voucher program from purchasing empty and unused school buildings.
But MPS fired back yesterday, saying the legal group’s information omits facts and containts false claims.
For example, MPS Spokesman Tony Tagliavia said that this year, five previously unused MPS buildings are back in service as schools.
He said MPS has also sold buildings to high-performing charter schools. Charter operators it has sold to such as Milwaukee College Prep and the Hmong American Peace Academy are operating schools that are under the MPS umbrella, however, so the district gets to count those students as part of its enrollment.

Bill Boelter

My entire career of close to 50 years has been focused on growing a business in and close to the city of Milwaukee. This is where I have my roots. I have followed education closely over these years.
The Aug. 17 Journal Sentinel had an interesting article about conflicting opinions on what the most viable use is for the former Malcolm X School, which closed over six years ago.
The Milwaukee School Board has proposed to have the city convert the site into a community center for the arts, recreation, low-income housing and retail stores. The cost to city taxpaying residences and businesses has not been calculated. Rising tax burdens have been a major factor in the flight to the suburbs and decline of major cities across our country.
St. Marcus Lutheran School is prepared to purchase Malcolm X for an appraised fair market value. St. Marcus is part of Schools That Can Milwaukee, which also includes Milwaukee College Prep and Bruce-Guadalupe Community School. Other participating high performing schools are Atonement Lutheran School, Notre Dame Middle School and Carmen High School of Science and Technology. Support comes from private donations after state allowances for voucher/choice students.
Their students go on to graduate from high school at a rate of over 90%, compared to approximately 60% at Milwaukee Public Schools. The acquisition of Malcolm X would give an additional 800 students the opportunity to attend a high performing school and reduce waiting lists at St. Marcus.

The Washington Post

NINE OF 10 Louisiana children who receive vouchers to attend private schools are black. All are poor and, if not for the state assistance, would be consigned to low-performing or failing schools with little chance of learning the skills they will need to succeed as adults. So it’s bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due.
The Justice Department has petitioned a U.S. District Court to bar Louisiana from awarding vouchers for the 2014-15 school year to students in public school systems that are under federal desegregation orders, unless the vouchers are first approved by a federal judge. The government argues that allowing students to leave their public schools for vouchered private schools threatens to disrupt the desegregation of school systems. A hearing is tentatively set for Sept. 19.

Washington Post:

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II plans to unveil a 12-point education plan on Tuesday that would push for charter schools, offer voucher-like scholarships for preschoolers and empower a majority of parents to close down, convert or overhaul their children’s failing school, according to an outline of his K-12 education plan.
The Republican gubernatorial candidate wants to double the number of female students who focus on science and technology, widen the use of virtual schooling and expand on the commonwealth’s nearly two-year-old law that gives tax credits to donors who provide voucher-like scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools. Cuccinelli also would seek two amendments to Virginia’s constitution, including one that would clear the way for government funds to flow to religious schools.
Cuccinelli, who is the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee, is expected to unveil his education policies Tuesday in Richmond during a campaign stop at the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School for Government and International Studies. Several of his proposals are intended to address the achievement gap among some minority students and chronically underperforming schools in jurisdictions such as Petersburg and Norfolk.

A. David Dahmer:

MMSD School Board President Ed Hughes said that public education these days is under a lot of pointed criticism if not under an outright attack. “Initiatives like the voucher expansion program are premised on the notion that urban traditional public schools are not up to the task of effectively educating a diverse body of students,” Hughes says. “We’re out to prove that they are wrong. We agree with Superintendent Cheatham that in Madison all of the pieces are in place for us to be successful. Following the framework that she will describe to you, we set the goal for ourselves to be the model of a thriving urban school district that is built on strong community partnerships as well as genuine collaboration of teachers and staff. As we do that, we will be the school district of choice in Dane County.”
Cheatham said that Madison has a lot of great things going for it, but also had its share of challenges.
“A continually changing set of priorities has made it difficult for our educators to remain focused on the day-to-day work of teaching and learning, a culture of autonomy that has made it difficult to guaranteed access to a challenging curriculum for all students,” Cheatham said. “The system is hard for many of our students to navigate which results in too many of our students falling through the cracks.”
It starts with a simple but bold vision that every school is a thriving school that prepares every student for college, career, and community. “From now on, we will be incredibly focused on making that day-to-day vision become a reality,” she said.
“Many districts create plans at central office and implement them from the top down. Instead, schools will become the driving force of change in Madison,” Cheatham said. “Rather than present our educators with an ever-changing array of strategies, we will focus on what we know works — high quality teaching, coherent instruction, and strong leadership — and implement these strategies extremely well.”

Related: The Dichotomy of Madison School Board Governance: “Same Service” vs. “having the courage and determination to stay focused on this work and do it well is in itself a revolutionary shift for our district”.
“The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”.
Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Alan Borsuk

In a steady trickle, the come-on’s for schools arrive in our mail. Usually in large-postcard format, they offer a photo of cute kids, stylish designs, and upbeat messages about the great program our child needs. They come from individual Milwaukee Public Schools, religious schools, charter schools, even Headstart programs. Some of the schools are at hefty distances from our neighborhood.
Our youngest child graduated from high school eight years ago and none of our kids were ever candidates to go to the schools we hear from. I understand mass mailings are done from broad lists, but are these people serious?
The answer is yes, when it comes to marketing. Selling your school to potential parents has become an imperative in Milwaukee. Mass mail, billboards, tables at community events, door-to-door recruitment, print and electronic advertising, brochures, sidewalk solicitations — they’re all used by many schools. Use of computer-based social media is on the rise, of course.
Children and parents hold the power to make or break schools by deciding where to enroll, and unlike, oh, say, when I grew up, there is little presumption that people will choose the public school nearest to them just because that’s what they’re supposed to do.
You may associate school choice with private schools in the voucher program, charter schools and the thousands of City of Milwaukee kids who enroll in suburban public schools. You’re right — every enrollment decision in those situations is a product of choice, and frequently involves marketing.
But choosing what school you go to is pervasive among MPS parents, as well. There’s a reason the main pillar of MPS enrollment is called the “three-choice” process. In the broad sense of the term, MPS is a powerful example of school choice in action. Again, marketing is a big part of this.

Tom LoBianco:

INDIANAPOLIS — Former Indiana and current Florida schools chief Tony Bennett built his national star by promising to hold “failing” schools accountable. But when it appeared an Indianapolis charter school run by a prominent Republican donor might receive a poor grade, Bennett’s education team frantically overhauled his signature “A-F” school grading system to improve the school’s marks.
Emails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan’s school received an “A,” despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a “C.””They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work,” Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence’s chief lobbyist.
The emails, which also show Bennett discussed with staff the legality of changing just DeHaan’s grade, raise unsettling questions about the validity of a grading system that has broad implications. Indiana uses the A-F grades to determine which schools get taken over by the state and whether students seeking state-funded vouchers to attend private school need to first spend a year in public school. They also help determine how much state funding schools receive.

Madison and Wisconsin Math Data, 8th Grade

Where have all the students gone?
Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:

Esenberg sets out to identify the fundamental differences between voucher advocates and opponents. His thesis is that views on vouchers derive from deeper beliefs than objective assessments of how well voucher schools perform or concerns about vouchers draining funds from public schools. To him, your take on vouchers depends on how you view the world.
Esenberg asserts that voucher advocates are united by their embrace of three fundamental principles: that a centralized authority is unlikely to be able to decide what is best for all; that families should be trusted to select their children’s schools since ordinary people are capable of making choices for themselves without paternalistic direction; and that “government does not do diversity, experimentation and choice very well.”
By implication, he asserts that voucher opponents think that a centralized authority will be able to decide what’s best for all, that families shouldn’t be trusted to make choices for their children, and that government control is the best way to foster innovation.
And there you have it. Your views on school voucher expansion are entirely explained by whether you prefer individual freedom, like the voucher advocates, or stultifying government control, like the voucher opponents. In cinematic terms, voucher opponents are the legions of lifeless, gray drones in Apple’s famous 1984 commercial and voucher supporters are the colorful rebel, bravely challenging the control of Big Brother and hurling her sledgehammer to smash mindless conformity. You couldn’t ask for a more sophisticated analysis than that, could you?
While his thesis invites mockery, Esenberg’s short article does present a bit of a challenge to voucher opponents like myself. Can we set out a coherent justification for our opposition that doesn’t depend on the facts that voucher schools drain needed resources from public schools and don’t perform any better? Sweeping those fairly compelling points aside, Esenberg asks, in effect, what else you got?

Mr Hughes anti-voucher rhetoric is fascinating on several levels:
1. The Madison School District’s long term, disastrous reading results. How much time and money has been wasted on anti-voucher rhetoric? Reading has long been job one.
2. Local private schools do not have much, if any availability.
3. Madison spends double the national average per student (some of which has been spent on program explosion). Compare Milwaukee Public and Voucher Schools’ Per Student Spending.
4. Madison’s inability to address its long-term disastrous reading results will bring changes from State or Federal legislation or via litigation.
5. Superintendent Cheatham cited Long Beach and Boston as urban districts that have “narrowed the achievement gap”. Both districts offer a variety of school governance models, which is quite different than Madison’s long-time “one size fits all approach”.
I recall being astonished that previous Madison School District administrators planned to spend time lobbying at the State level for this or that change – while “Rome is burning“. Ironically, Superintendent Cheatham recently said:

“Rather than do a lot of work on opposing the voucher movement, we are going to focus on making sure our schools are the best schools possible and the schools of choice in Madison,” Cheatham said.

Mr. Hughes in 2005:

This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.

A great, salient quote. I would hope that the District would focus completely on the matter at hand, disastrous reading scores. Taking care of that problem – and we have the resources to do so – will solve lots of other atmospheric and perception issues.
In closing, I sense politics in the voucher (and anti-open enrollment) rhetoric. Two Madison School Board seats will be on the Spring, 2014 ballot. One is currently occupied by Mr. Hughes, the other by Marj Passman. In addition, local politics play a role in becoming school board President.

The dichotomy that is Madison School Board Governance was on display this past week.
1. Board Member TJ Mertz, in light of the District’s plan to continue growing spending and property taxes for current programs, suggests that “fiscal indulgences“:

Tax expenditures are not tax cuts. Tax expenditures are socialism and corporate welfare. Tax expenditures are increases on anyone who does not receive the benefit or can’t hire a lobbyist…to manipulate the code to their favor.

be applied to certain school volunteers.
This proposal represents a continuation of the Districts’ decades long “same service” approach to governance, with declining academic results that spawned the rejected Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.
2. Madison’s new Superintendent, Jennifer Cheatham introduced her “Strategic Framework” at Wednesday’s Downtown Rotary Club meeting.
The Superintendent’s letter (jpg version) (within the “framework” document) to the Madison Community included this statement (word cloud):

Rather than present our educators with an ever-changing array of strategies, we will focus on what we know works and implement these strategies extremely well. While some of the work may seem familiar, having the courage and determination to stay focused on this work and do it well is in itself a revolutionary shift for our district. This is what it takes to narrow and eliminate gaps in student achievement.

The Madison School Board’s letter (jpg version) to the community includes this statement:

Public education is under sustained attack, both in our state and across the nation. Initiatives like voucher expansion are premised on the notion that public schools are not up to the challenge of effectively educating diverse groups of students in urban settings.
We are out to prove that wrong. With Superintendent Cheatham, we agree that here in Madison all the ingredients are in place. Now it is up to us to show that we can serve as a model of a thriving urban school district, one that seeks out strong community partnerships and values genuine collaboration with teachers and staff in service of student success.
Our Strategic Framework lays out a roadmap for our work. While some of the goals will seem familiar, what’s new is a clear and streamlined focus and a tangible and energizing sense of shared commitment to our common goals.
The bedrock of the plan is the recognition that learning takes place in the classroom in the interactions between teachers and students. The efforts of all of us – from school board members to everyone in the organization – should be directed toward enhancing the quality and effectiveness of those interactions.
There is much work ahead of us, and the results we are expecting will not arrive overnight. But with focus, shared effort and tenacity, we can transform each of our schools into thriving schools. As we do so, Madison will be the school district of choice in Dane County.

Madison School Board word cloud:

Related: North Carolina Ends Pay Boosts for Teacher Master’s Degrees; Tenure for elementary and high-school teachers also eliminated

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, signed a budget bill Friday that eliminates teacher tenure and–in a rare move–gets rid of the automatic pay increase teachers receive for earning a master’s degree.
The legislation targets a compensation mechanism that is common in the U.S., where teachers receive automatic pay increases for years of service and advanced degrees. Some research has suggested those advanced degrees don’t lead to improved teaching.
Although a few other states have talked about doing away with the automatic pay increase for advanced degrees, experts say North Carolina is believed to be the first state to do so.
The budget bill–which drew hundreds of teachers to the Capitol in protest earlier this week–also eliminates tenure for elementary and high-school teachers and freezes teacher salaries for the fifth time in six years.
It comes as states and districts across the country are revamping teacher evaluations, salaries and job security, and linking them more closely to student performance. These changes have been propelled, in part, by the Obama administration and GOP governors.

The challenge for Madison is moving away from long time governance structures and practices, including a heavy (157 page pdf & revised summary of changes) teacher union contract. Chris Rickert’s recent column on Madison’s healthcare practices provides a glimpse at the teacher – student expenditure tension as well.
Then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 Madison Rotary speech offers important background on Madison’s dichotomy:

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

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

Jay Greene:

On President Obama’s recent visit to Ireland, he offered a surprising explanation of the enduring tensions there: “If towns remain divided–if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs–if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.” Given his use of the word “we,” it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is also how the president views religious “schools and buildings” in the United States.
Like much of the Democratic Party leadership, Mr. Obama supports allowing families to use public funds to attend the school of their choice, including charter schools, but strongly opposes the inclusion of private religious schools among the options. Opponents of voucher programs that include religious schools often cite “separation of church and state” concerns.

Matthew DeFour:

“If the students are performing at or better than they were in the schools they came from, then that would be a compelling case to offer more choices like that to more families across the state,” Walker said. “If the majority are not performing better, you could make a pretty compelling argument not to.”
Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said work on an accountability bill is wrapping up and he hopes it will begin circulating for sponsors by the end of this month. He hopes hearings will be held in late summer and early fall with a bill sent to the governor by the end of the year.
“I hope that everyone comes away happy that this is the right thing to do,” Olsen said. “The voucher people want a bill like this because they’re only as good as their weakest school.”
Olsen said the bill will not only apply the report card system to schools participating in the voucher program, it will also make changes to the report card for public schools.
The report card released last fall didn’t measure high school student growth, because it was based on one test taken in 10th grade. The state budget the governor signed Sunday expands high school testing to grades nine and 11. The accountability bill will ensure future report cards include those tests, Olsen said.
Democrats have been skeptical that Republicans will follow through on holding private voucher schools accountable. Earlier this year Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, compared talk of a bill to Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.
In February, Walker told the State Journal editorial board that he hoped to sign a voucher school accountability bill before the budget was approved. That didn’t happen, but Walker said there was push back from the Legislature.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Chris Rickert:

Jim Bender, of the pro-voucher group School Choice Wisconsin, said there are a range of legitimate reasons parents choose voucher-funded private schools, but that the rising number of voucher students proves parents want that choice.
That’s probably what you’d expect to hear from a leader in what voucher critics see as a national effort to privatize — and profit from — education.
Of course, what you hear from Democratic lawmakers and a DPI run by a Democratically leaning state superintendent — who rely for political support on teachers unions — is about what you’d expect to hear from those with a vested interest in public schools’ hegemony.
Vouchers might be one of those childhood-related policy debates that has less to do with what children need than with what lawmakers and their special interests want.
And if what children need is to be ignored, the next best thing might be to pay a little more attention to what parents say their children need.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Karl Dommershausen:

I started out against the voucher program in Wisconsin, even organizing a letter from the Janesville School Board to our lawmakers opposing this effort. Later, I decided to research vouchers/charters and their tax credits/scholarships to understand them better. I didn’t study existing private schools, unless they were involved with vouchers.
Gov. Tommy Thompson started Wisconsin’s voucher system in 1990 in Milwaukee. It has grown, and other programs have emerged throughout the country. With thousands of voucher programs in 20 states, solid evidence for evaluation should exist. From Florida’s scholarship programs, Texas’ charter schools, Indiana and Louisiana’s charter-to-voucher adjustments, Tennessee’s Muslim question, and other adaptations, I searched for answers. Surprisingly, very little documentation of results exists, and what is available appears to be selectively picked.
Private companies and their associations have created the “mantra of choice and competition” for the impoverished, challenged and underperforming. This method focuses on the hopes and fears of parents. It also labels public schools and teachers as culprits, while ignoring social-economic factors, dwindling funding, or lack of parental involvement and responsibility.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Barabara Miner:

When Gwen Moore walked into Milwaukee’s North Division High School in September 1965, she was terrified.
“North was seen as this jungle,” she explains more than 40 years later. “All black, segregated, inferior.”
Moore had wanted to attend West Division high School, a “white” school closer to home. When she tried to register at West, school officials told her she had to go to North Division. (It would be another decade before the federal courts would order the desegregation of Milwaukee’s schools.)
“My mom was in Texas at a Baptist convention, and I talked to her and said, ‘Mom, they wouldn’t let me go to West,’ ” Moore remembers.
“Gerrymandering,” her mom muttered.
“Gerry who?” Moore asked.

Much more on vouchers, here.

Laura Waters:

Take over Camden Public Schools! Reform tenure and evaluate teachers and principals on student growth data! Strengthen and expand charter schools! Enact a school voucher bill!
Education reformers in New Jersey and elsewhere sure do love radical change, seven-league strides towards the imagined Bethlehem of high-achieving schools accessible to all children. We’ve no patience for baby-steps that gingerly transverse the mired ruts of the status quo, no time for triangulated compromises that slap a coat of paint on failing schools and call it an improvement.
But sometimes meaningful change does occur incrementally. This is hard to hear for die-hard reformers. But one particular Jersey-grown school reform measure argues for a gradual approach: the state’s Interdistrict Public School Choice Program.

Jason Stein

Lawmakers also want to expand school voucher programs beyond the borders of Milwaukee and eastern Racine County. The programs allow parents who meet income thresholds to send their children to religious schools and other private schools at taxpayer expense.
Under the motion approved 12-4 along party lines by Republicans on the budget panel:

• Public schools would receive $150 more per student in general aid this fall and another $150 increase the following year. The plan would cost $289 million over two years, with $231.5 million funded with state taxes and the rest with an additional $52 million in higher local property taxes and an increase in expected revenues from the state lottery.
  School districts would have the authority to spend this new money. Walker wanted to give schools $129 million in state aid but require all of it to go toward property tax relief, rather than be used for new expenses.
  Under the budget committee’s proposal, total property taxes would increase by less than 1% per year, with school levies going up somewhat more than that.

• A new voucher program would become available to all students outside Milwaukee and Racine. It would be limited to 500 students the first year and 1,000 students every year thereafter. Walker wanted no limits on the number of students in the program after the second year.
  If there are more students seeking slots in the program than allowed, the proposal would allocate the available slots by lottery. The slots would go to the 25 schools with the most applications, with each school getting at least 10 seats.

• The new program would be available to students in any school district. Walker wanted to make it available in districts with 4,000 or more students that were identified as struggling on school report cards issued by the state.
• No more than 1% of the students of any given school district could participate in the new program.
• Over 12 years, the negative financial impacts for the Milwaukee Public Schools from the voucher program here would be phased out.
• The new program would be available to students of families making 185% of the federal poverty level or less — well below the income thresholds for Milwaukee and Racine. Those programs are available to families making up to 300% of the federal poverty level, with a higher threshold for married couples.
• Voucher schools in all parts of the state would receive $7,210 per K-8 student and $7,856 per high school student — up from $6,442 currently. Walker wanted to provide $7,050 for students in kindergarten through eighth grade and the same larger increase to high school students.

Secret voucher ‘deal’ boosts their $ by 9% at the expense of WI’s 870,000 public school kids. owl.li/lHhx2 #WIedu

— Tony Evers (@WISuptTonyEvers) June 5, 2013

Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Tony Evers (PDF):

Today, Republican leaders are finalizing a deal to likely expand Wisconsin’s private school voucher program statewide. While this dramatic proposal has significant implications for citizens and taxpayers across Wisconsin, it has been developed behind closed doors with no public input, no public hearings, and no public fiscal analysis. If this proposal becomes law, taxpayers across Wisconsin will be financing a new entitlement for private school children whose tuition is currently paid for by their parents. To address the lack of information about the potential fiscal effects of this program, the attached table estimates potential long-term costs of statewide subsidization of private school tuition on a district-by-district basis. Cost to subsidize current private school students only: up to $560 million annually
While some lawmakers claim the purpose of the program is to provide educational choices to those who cannot afford it, the current school choice programs in Milwaukee and Racine provide vouchers to families who are already choosing to send their children to private schools. As many as 50% of the children participating in the Racine choice program were already in private schools when they began receiving a state-funded subsidy in
2011-12. If the voucher program is expanded statewide, it can be assumed that current private school families would also be eligible for this new entitlement.

Related:

• Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding
  
  
• “Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”
• Are MMSD Programs Effective? Who Knows.
• Tony Evers notes and links.
• Vouchers notes and links.

Save our Public Schools – Voucher Action Tomorrow! – eepurl.com/Aqqqj

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) June 3, 2013

Pat Schneider:

ALEC is still at it, Julie Underwood, dean of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, cautions in “School Boards Beware,” (PDF) a commentary in the May issue of Wisconsin School News.
The model legislation disseminated by the pro-free market American Legislative Exchange Council’s national network of corporate members and conservative legislators seeks to privatize education and erode the local control, Underwood says.
“The ALEC goal to eliminate school districts and school boards is a bit shocking — but the idea is to make every school, public and private, independent through vouchers for all students. By providing all funding to parents rather than school districts, there is no need for local coordination, control or oversight,” she writes in the magazine of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
Underwood, who says that Wisconsin public schools already face unprecedented change, last year co-authored a piece about ALEC’s grander plans, a “legislative contagion (that) seemed to sweep across the Midwest during the early months of 2011.”
In her recent piece, Underwood argues that a push to privatize education for the “free market” threatens the purpose of public education: to educate every child to “become an active citizen, capable of participating in our democratic process.”

Related:

• The state this year will start rating each school on a scale of 0 to 100 based on student test scores and other measurables. The idea, in part, is to give parents a way to evaluate how a school is performing while motivating those within it to improve.
• Several schools across the state — including Madison’s Shorewood Elementary, Black Hawk Middle and Memorial High schools — are part of Wisconsin’s new teacher and principal evaluation system, which for the first time will grade a teacher’s success, in part, on student test scores. This system is to be implemented across Wisconsin in 2014-15.li>And instead of Wisconsin setting its own student benchmarks, the state is moving toward using Common Core State Standards, which have been adopted in 45 other states. State schools are starting new curricula this year in language arts and math so students will be prepared by the 2014-15 school year to take a new state exam tied to this common core and replacing the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination.

Although Underwood says she generally backs most of these changes, she’s no fan of the decision announced last month that makes it easier for a person to become a public school teacher — even as those who are studying to become teachers must now meet stiffer credentialing requirements. Instead of having to complete education training at a place like UW-Madison en route to being licensed, those with experience in private schools or with other teaching backgrounds now can take steps to become eligible for a public teaching license.

“I think that’s really unfortunate,” says Underwood, who first worked at UW-Madison from 1986-95 before coming back to town as education dean in 2005.

Related:

• When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
• Many notes and links on Julie Underwood.
• The oft-criticized WKCE will soon be replaced by Wisconsin’s Common Core implementation.
• NCTQ Sues UW Ed Schools over Access to Course Syllabi.
• An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria

Matthew DeFour:

(Wisconsin) Public school advocates have intensified their efforts to sway Republican lawmakers on the biggest K-12 education issues in the state budget, which are scheduled for debate Wednesday.
Heading into the holiday weekend, Republicans hadn’t reached an agreement about the most controversial proposal in Gov. Scott Walker’s 2013-15 budget proposal — the expansion of private school vouchers to Madison and other school districts around the state.
But Walker told reporters Friday he was optimistic.
“I think we’re down that path,” he said. “We haven’t got it out there to announce yet, but I think we’re going to get that into the next week.”
At least three Republican senators have said they oppose Walker’s voucher expansion, while three others say they won’t vote for the budget unless a voucher expansion is included.
Republican leaders didn’t respond to requests for comment Friday.
John Forester, a lobbyist for the School Administrators Alliance, sent a message Friday to school officials across the state to contact Republican leadership. He called the message the most urgent in his 12 years lobbying for school districts.
“The feedback I’m receiving inside the Capitol clearly indicates that our pressure is having an impact on this budget process,” Forester said.
At a news conference last week, Democrats announced that they had collected more than 16,000 signatures on a petition to remove the voucher expansion from the budget.
Madison School Board members sent out appeals to constituents asking them to contact members of the Joint Finance Committee, the lawmakers revising Walker’s budget proposal before it goes to the full Senate and Assembly.

Neil Heinen:

The Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee continues its review of Governor Scott Walker’s budget with varying degrees of success. There are some baffling policy proposals in the budget that need a lot of work. But the proposal that would unquestionably do the most damage to Madison is the one to expand the school voucher program. In fact, if the $73 Million expansion is approved, and public school spending is frozen, one could argue it would damage the entire state.
Even worse, passage of a voucher expansion to include Madison would come at a time when Madison is poised to support the broadest, most inclusive and thoughtful dialogue about public schools and the achievement gap in decades. Vouchers and not only completely unnecessary, they inject unneeded politics into an important education conversation. We ask lawmakers to please reject this proposal so the people of Madison can go about this critical work.

Vouchers are not a existential threat to our local schools. Rather, ongoing disastrous reading scores merit endless attention and action.

Pat Schneider

Why is EAGnews, the website for a Michigan-based “education reform” group — proudly pro-voucher, pro-charter school, anti-union and basically anti-public schools — blasting local Madison media outlets with alarming press releases about spending in the Madison School District?
To galvanize Madison citizens into demanding accountability from school district officials, says Steve Gunn, communications director for the group.
To promote EAG’s pro-voucher agenda, say critics.
“Maybe we’ll whet some taxpayers’ appetite, and they’ll march down there and ask, ‘What are you spending my money on?'” Gunn said in a phone interview Thursday. The website is part of Education Action Group, a private nonprofit organization out of Muskegon, Mich.
The headline of the press release EAGnews sent to local media Thursday proclaims: “Madison schools spent $243,000 for hotels, more than $300,000 for taxis and more than $150,000 for pizza in 2012.”
Well, actually it’s $232,693 in hotel expenses in 2012 that EAG cites in the body of its press release and associated article. Beyond the discrepancy between headline and text, both press release and article mash together credit card expenses for travel by district employees with expenditures for routine district functions. In citing more than $300,000 in taxi cab charges paid to three local companies, EAG does not mention that the companies are hired to transport special needs, homeless and Work and Learn students to school and job placement sites.
Gunn admits that the taxi charges or the “cool $4.8 million” in payments to bus companies might be for transporting children, but says he doesn’t know for sure because the school district did not deliver promised details about the spending list it released in response to an open records request.

“Wisconsin Wave” appears to be active on governance issues as well, including education, among others.


is a project of the Liberty Tree Foundation. The Liberty Tree Foundation appeared during the 2013 Madison School Board race due to Sarah Manski’s candidacy and abrupt withdrawal. Manski’s husband Ben is listed as a board member and executive director of Liberty Tree. Capital Times (the above article appeared on The Capital Times’ website) writer John Nichols is listed as a Liberty Tree Foundation advisor.
Long-term disastrous reading scores are an existential threat to our local schools not vouchers

Christian D’Andrea:

Recently, Step Up for Public Schools (SUPS) released a pamphlet titled “The Truth about Vouchers and Privately Run Charters.” Unfortunately, a better title for their flier would have been “Half-Truths.” SUPS raises several tired talking points about school choice in Wisconsin that have been repeatedly debated, disproven, and regurgitated over more than two decades of voucher discussion.
Today, we’ll break down their “Fast Facts” on how the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and the Parental Private School Choice Program (Racine) have affected education in the Badger State. While there are also some interesting statements about non-instrumentality charter schools (the same schools that regularly outscore both regular public schools and instrumentality charter schools in Milwaukee, we’ll save that for another day. Let’s look at what the SUPS has to say about Wisconsin’s voucher programs.
1. Students in the taxpayer-funded private school voucher program do not perform better than their peers in neighborhood public schools.
A: In more than 20 years of operation, there has only been one apples to apples comparison of student growth between similarly matched students from MPS and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). That study – the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) – showed very few statistically significant differences between the two groups of pupils. What they did find was that voucher students were 4-7 percent more likely to graduate, attend a four-year college, and stay in that college than their peers. While factors like parental involvement may have played a role, the study strongly suggests that these schools were a significant force behind the improved attainment of the students that chose vouchers.
One thing is clear – there’s no evidence that these voucher schools are hurting students, despite having only 50 percent or less of the funding that their traditional public school peers have had in Milwaukee. As the state’s data collection and standards improve and we learn more about student growth and the impact that individual teachers have, we’ll develop a better understanding of where MPS and MPCP schools stand in terms to serving students on a year-to-year basis.

Melissa Sargent, D-Madison, represents District 48 in the Assembly:

By now, most people have heard about Scott Walker’s proposal to expand the voucher school system to new districts, including Madison, yet many people aren’t clear as to what this means for our students as well as the administrators, teachers and parents. I’ve been asked by numerous constituents to give an explanation of how this would apply, in real terms, to our public education system.
The best way to break this down is in three parts: the fiscal effect on taxpayers and our public schools; a comparison between public school and private school accountability; and a comparison of the performance of students in voucher schools and public schools.
FINANCES: Madison currently has 4,202 private school students. Based on a conservative assessment of income levels, 1,387 of these students would be eligible for the voucher program. So what does this mean for Madison taxpayers?
If 1,387 private school students become voucher students, Madison taxpayers would subsidize private schools for about $3.8 million and see a reduction in state aid of that amount. The Madison district’s taxpayers would have to pay more to replace the $3.8 million, or the district would have to make $3.8 million worth of cuts in services for public school students. One thing that has been made abundantly clear to me by my constituents and other community members is Wisconsinites don’t like the idea of their taxpayer dollars going toward private education.

State Senator Fred Risser, Representative Jon Erpenbach, Representative Mark Miller:

As legislators, we hear about many important issues that will impact our state’s future. No issue we face has an impact as far reaching as the education of Wisconsin children. Providing future generations with the skills to be productive and successful must be a top priority.
Unfortunately, in the proposed state budget, corporate special interests won out over Wisconsin children.
In the proposed budget, the governor has chosen to increase voucher program funding by $94 million. The proposal also expands the voucher program to school districts with two or more “failing schools.”
Based on this language, the Madison School District would as failing, and therefore open to voucher expansion. As a result, Madison tax dollars would be invested in private, unaccountable schools, rather than its public schools.
We believe that just isn’t right. Every time a student leaves the public school and enters the voucher program, the state withholds $2,200 in funding from the public school. While it may mean one fewer student to educate, the school’s fixed costs remain the same, and the district is forced to raise property taxes to cover the difference.

Much more on vouchers, here. Madison’s long-term, disastrous reading scores.

Mad City Grumps (PDF):

Wisconsin is marching inexorably down a path toward two separate publicly-funded education systems for our k-12 students. One is our traditional public schools; the other, private voucher schools largely funded by taxpayer dollars.
The school voucher program began in 1990 under Governor Tommy Thompson with a modest investment in Milwaukee. 337 students, all low-income, used vouchers valued at $734,000 ($2,178/voucher) to attend seven private, nonsectarian schools. Since then, the voucher program has grown exponentially. Funding last year equaled $158M and provided vouchers worth $6,442 to 24,000 students who attended private/parochial schools in Racine and Milwaukee.
In the next two years, the program expansion, if approved by the State legislature, will spread to at least nine more school districts, including Madison. 29,000 students will participate. Funding will increase to $209M – an almost 300-fold increase since inception. Public school funding, over that time span, has increased only three-fold.
Vouchers will be available to a family of four with an income of almost $78,000/year. In addition, these students may always have been private school students. Once students secure a voucher, they have that voucher in subsequent years no matter how high the family income. This policy generates a separate system, subsidizing private education at taxpayer expense with no accountability to, nor approval from, that taxpayer.

Much more on Grumps, here.

Abby Rapaport:

When news broke Tuesday that the Louisiana Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s voucher system, which uses public dollars to pay for low-income students to go to private schools, the fight over vouchers made its way back into the headlines. The Louisiana program, pushed hard and publicly by Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, offers any low-income child in the state, regardless of what public school they would attend, tuition assistance at private schools. It’s something liberals fear will become commonplace in other states in the future if conservative lawmakers get their way on education policy.
Yet conservatives have been dominating legislatures since 2010 and there has been little success in creating voucher programs. Louisiana is one of only two states with such a broad program in place. After the 2010 Tea Party wave there was “a big spike in the number of states considering voucher legislation,” says Josh Cunningham, a policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). But most of those states didn’t actually pass any bills. Since 2010, four states have created new voucher programs. This year alone, according to NCSL, voucher bills have failed in seven states. While vouchers were once a key piece of the school choice agenda, they now play second fiddle to more popular education reform policies. But are they dead?
“Charter schools are the main thing at this point in time,” says William J. Mathis, managing director at the National Education Policy Center, which studies educational policy. “Vouchers just never seemed to grab traction.”

Much more on vouchers, here.
Sweden’s voucher system.

Jack Craver:

It’s been clear for weeks that Gov. Scott Walker’s budget faced major challenges in getting through the state Senate, where a small group of veteran, moderate Republicans has advocated for higher funding of public education and protested loudly a budget provision that would expand private voucher schools in nine cities across the state.
The state Assembly, where Republicans hold a 20-seat majority and which is dominated by conservatives swept into office in the tea party wave of 2010, has largely been dismissed as a rubber stamp for Walker and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.
On Tuesday, however, 13 Assembly Republicans made clear that they have serious concerns about the Walker budget’s funding for public education.
In an open letter to Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, and Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, the co-chairs of the budget-crafting Joint Finance Committee, the group implored the committee leaders to provide more money to local schools:
“Collectively, we have heard from parents and schools in our districts that the budget proposal should provide more funding for public schools. We’re sure you have heard similar comments. We all know that Wisconsin has a strong history of quality education for our youth. To keep that tradition, we agree that the public schools in our districts would benefit from an increase in K-12 funding and an increase in revenue limits.”

Chris Rickert:

If Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed expansion of the state’s school voucher program wasn’t dead already, a letter from the feds calling into question the program’s legality could be the final nail in the coffin.
Among other things, the April 9 letter requires the Department of Public Instruction to monitor voucher schools to make sure they are in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and to report complaints they get from parents who allege the voucher program discriminated against their disabled children.
For the American Civil Liberties Union and Disability Rights Wisconsin, whose complaint led to the letter, “this is a big win,” said Julie Mead, a professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at UW-Madison.
And a big loss for voucher proponents, who detest the kind of government oversight and bureaucracy the feds are requiring. Even worse for them is that the feds’ criticism is just one more reason for Republicans who were already iffy on Walker’s expansion to oppose it.
Now the question is whether the state’s existing voucher program — which has proven popular with parents, or at least with parents of non-disabled students — can survive the federal order.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email (PDF):

Thanks to the volunteers who helped make phone calls at MTI on April 23. With few volunteers, 51 callers were “patched through” to leave a message for Senator Sheila Harsdorf that voucher expansion is bad for Wisconsin and that public schools must be fully funded. The Governor’s proposed budget will take $96 million from public schools to fund private and parochial “voucher” schools and private charter schools.
This program was a great success in other Senate Districts as well, generating well over 200 contacts last week. Any member interested in giving this a try, another night of calling is being considered for Thursday, May 9, 4:30 – 7:30 p.m., at MTI. The constituents we are calling are targeted based on their likelihood to respond positively and include WEAC members and voters favorable to public schools. This fight is critical because if we lose, voucher schools will be coming to Madison, whether we want them or not, with slick marketing campaigns designed to lure tax dollars into their pockets by denigrating our public schools. Don’t let this happen! We need seven confirmed volunteers to make this set-up worthwhile.
If you can join us next Thursday, please contact Jeff Knight (knightj@madisonteachers.org / 257-0491).

Matthew DeFour:

At a recent rally in a Latino community center in Waukesha, Gov. Scott Walker urged a group of mostly private school parents, students and administrators to advocate for his proposal to expand vouchers beyond Milwaukee and Racine.
“I need your help,” Walker told a crowd of about 350 people, the majority of them children, on April 25. “We need you to help us spread that message to other lawmakers in our state Capitol, because they need to understand this is not a political statement; this is not a political campaign. … This is about children.”
A week earlier at First United Methodist Church in Downtown Madison, representatives from the Department of Public Instruction and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards laid out the arguments against voucher expansion to a group organized by Grandparents United for Madison Public Schools.
“This is a Waterloo moment for public education,” WASB lobbyist Joe Quick told about 60 people.
“You’ve got good schools here,” concurred DPI financial adviser Jeff Pertl. “We’ve got to fight to protect them.”
In recent months, in gymnasiums, libraries, churches and offices across Wisconsin, both sides in the voucher debate have ramped up their efforts to sway public opinion, especially in the districts of a handful of key Republican senators.

M. D. Kittle:

The governor also touched on statewide proficiency data released by the state Department of Public Instruction earlier this week.
DPI on Tuesday released test scores comparing Milwaukee Parental Choice Program students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, failing to account for disparate income levels between the students.
“The vast majority of families in that program are low income,” Walker said. “If you compare the same income categories of students who come from families in Milwaukee Public Schools with Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, you’ll find that in almost every category the kids in the choice schools outperform those in the public schools.”
He added he wanted all schools to perform better.
DPI’s release showed that 19.4 percent of MPS students were proficient or advanced in mathematics compared to 13.2 percent MPCP students participating in the Wisconsin Student Assessment System.
It also showed 14.2 percent of MPS students were proficient or advanced in reading, compared to 11.1 percent of MPCP students.
Data released by the voucher advocacy organization School Choice Wisconsin, however, showed that MPCP students outperformed MPS students everywhere except math, including reading, language arts, science and social studies when comparing only students in low income families.
Free and reduced lunch is available for students whose parents earn less than 185 percent of the federal poverty line, about $41,000 for a family of four. Until last school year, the income eligibility for the school choice program was 175 percent of the federal poverty line.

St. Marcus Superintendent Henry Tyson, via a kind reader’s email:

Dear supporters of St. Marcus School,


I need your help in setting the story straight. Perhaps you read the bold headline in the local section of the Journal Sentinel yesterday — “Wisconsin voucher students lag in latest state test.” That claim is not accurate. You need to understand that this is misinformation about the Choice program. I want you to know the truth — and be our voices in sharing this with others.
The state released the 2012 WKCE test scores this week, conveniently comparing the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) to all of Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and showing that MPS “beat” MPCP in every subject area.
Unfortunately, this is a gross misrepresentation of reality and is not an “apples to apples” comparison. The information that was released FAILED to do the appropriate comparison of MPS low-income students to MPCP, whose students are almost ENTIRELY from low-income families. When doing an accurate comparison of MPCP to MPS’s low-income population, choice schools beat MPS in all subjects except math. (Remember MPS has many students who are not in poverty and are high-achieving. By nature, almost allMPCP students are low-income.)
Beyond the program averages, our St. Marcus students are doing tremendously well, outpacing both the MPS and MPCP numbers by wide margins:



This may seem unimportant, since people are often negative about the choice program. However, it is actually very important at this time to set the record straight. Legislators are reading this misinformation, our supporters are reading this misinformation and so is the general public. At a time when there is much debate about the amount of the choice voucher funding and the expansion of the program, it is essential that we set the record straight. We need to get correct information to our supporters and legislators immediately!
At St. Marcus, it has been demonstrated that it is possible to educate the urban poor, even very poor children, in a highly effective manner. To protect the well-being of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and to enable St. Marcus to continue to grow and deliver excellent education to more students please take ACTION:
Forward this e-mail to your friends and certainly any legislators you know.
Contact your legislator directly and encourage them to support an increase in the voucher amount for MPCP schools. (Unbelievably, the current voucher amount of $6,451 is lower than the voucher amount back in 2006!)
Thanks for acting in support of your friends at St. Marcus and the awesome students achieving great things in schools like ours.
If you have any other questions or concerns, you can contact me.
Blessings,
Henry Tyson, Superintendent
414-303-2133
henry.tyson@stmarcus.org

Listen to a 2012 interview with Henry Tyson, here.
The Wisconsin State Journal:

The lower scores do not reflect falling performance. Students just need to know more to rank as high as they used to.
Most states are doing the same thing and will benchmark their exams to international standards.
Just as importantly, the computerized assessments of the near future will adjust to the ability of students. That will give parents and educators much better, more detailed and timely information about what students know and what they still need to learn.
Some critics will disparage any and all testing, pretending it will be the only measure Wisconsin will use for success. Others have lamented the increasing role of the federal government in the process.

Phil Hands cartoon.

Pat Schneider:

The way Principal Michael Hernandez tells it, something had to go.
Hernandez decided that at Sherman Middle School, it will be French class.
With a renewed emphasis on curriculum basics in the Madison School District, the need at Sherman to double-down on math skills, and a scheduled expansion there of the AVID program that prepares low-income minority kids for college, Hernandez figures the north-side middle school will need to drop its second “world language” offering next year.
French 2 will continue for seventh-graders who took French 1 this year. The school’s Spanish-language program — including three sections of dual-language instruction — also will continue.
“Unfortunately, there are tough decisions we have to make,” Hernandez told me. “With budget cuts, I can’t have a class with only approximately seven students, when I could use that (staff) allocation for a math intervention class.”
Principals will be developing these kinds of adjustments around the margins to prepare for the 2013-2014 school year as district officials begin work on the budget and schools get projections on how many staff members they will have.
School Board members on Monday will receive a “budget briefing” instead of fleshed-out budget proposal. Penciled in is $392,807,993 in district-wide spending next school year, down a fraction from this year.
The scaled-down budget proposal is due to the uncertain prospects of a controversial proposal in Gov. Scott Walker’s budget to shift aid and expand vouchers to Madison and eight other school districts — at a projected cost of more than $800,000 to the Madison public schools. In addition, new Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham just came on the job three weeks ago and is not prepared yet to present a detailed budget.

Related: Status Quo Costs More: Madison Schools’ Administration Floats a 7.38% Property Tax Increase; Dane County Incomes down 4.1%…. District Received $11.8M Redistributed State Tax Dollar Increase last year. Spending up 6.3% over the past 16 months.

Mike Ford:

At the start my public policy career I had the good fortune to work with someone who fully understood the power of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) in influencing Wisconsin policy debates. To paraphrase my colleague, legislators want answers, and LFB is the respected authority that provides them. It follows that the content of LFB fiscal notes are often the catalyst, or death knell, for major potential policy changes.
It will bear watching how yesterday’s LFB memo on the fiscal impact of the Governor’s proposed school voucher expansion to nine different communities plays out. The note, available here, is, like just about all LFB work, well done.
First the note points out the obvious. When a student switches from a public school to private school via the theoretical choice program the district loses revenue. Why? Each student attending a public school district generates somewhere around $10,000 in state aid and local revenue (this is an estimate for ease of understanding, the actual amount varies by district). When a student leaves for any reason, the district will eventually lose the $10,000 per-kid. If you look at Table 4 on page 5 the first column shows the eventual estimated impact on participating district revenue limits.
School districts will naturally get worked up about this; they want the market-share and the revenue that comes with it. However, it is hard to justify that districts should be receiving funds for students they are no longer educating.
The more problematic part of the note for school choice advocates is the next three columns. The first column shows the aid reduction to public school districts to pay for 38.4% of the new choice program. Districts don’t lose this money, they offset it with the property tax levy. In most cases, the local per-pupil cost for a choice program is less than the local per-pupil cost for a public school student, so on the surface it appears taxpayers are getting a bargain. However, the next column is where things get more complicated.
That column, labeled “Aid Formula Reduction,” reflects two things. First, the loss of state aid that would have been generated by each pupil that leaves the district. Second, the change in distribution of state and local aid caused by having fewer students in the per-member property value calculation. In English (or something closer to it), when a student leaves a district the district’s per-member property value increases, which lowers the portion of their revenue that comes from state aid and increases the portion that comes from the local property tax.
That is why, against all logic, that last column shows a levy increase despite the lower cost of the choice program. To put in even simpler, when a student leaves for any reason it does impact the state aid/property tax split for students the district is still educating.

Matthew DeFour:

Private school enrollment has steadily declined across Wisconsin over the past 15 years, but that’s not the case in Madison and Dane County.
St. Ambrose Academy, a West Side Catholic middle and high school, has been rapidly expanding and is discussing the addition of an elementary school. EAGLE School is planning a $3 million expansion at its Fitchburg campus with the goal of increasing its student body by a third. And High Point Christian School on Madison’s Far West Side is full, so some students board a bus there and travel across town to its sister campus on the Far East Side.
“The Madison metropolitan area is definitely bucking the national trend,” said Michael Lancaster, superintendent of Madison Catholic Schools. “I wouldn’t say we’re growing at any kind of geometric or exponential rate. But we’re very solid in the Madison area.”
The vitality of local private schools could help explain the muted level of interest in Madison for the publicly funded voucher expansion proposed in Gov. Scott Walker’s biennial budget. Vouchers also face intense opposition from Dane County political and public school leaders.
Voucher expansion
Walker has proposed expanding the state’s voucher program from Milwaukee and Racine to school districts with more than 4,000 students and at least two schools with low ratings on the state’s new school report card. Based on the first report cards released last fall, students in Madison and eight other districts would qualify for vouchers.
On March 4, the Wisconsin Council of Religious and Independent Schools held the first public voucher meeting in Madison at St. James Catholic School on the Near West Side. Fewer than 10 parents and private school administrators attended.
A similar meeting last week in Beloit, a smaller city with far fewer private schools, drew about 40 people, WCRIS executive director Matt Kussow said.

The largest challenge to Madison’s $392,000,000 public schools is not the threat of vouchers. Rather, it is the District’s long time disastrous reading results that undermine its prospects and reputation.
Suburban district growth and open enrollment leavers are also worth contemplation and action.

Chris Rickert:

Turner and state Sen. Luther Olsen’s education policy analyst, Sarah Archibald, who also participated in the design team meetings, said letter grade opponents worried bad grades could stigmatize schools and their students.
Turner said the bigger problem was that in only their first year, the report cards would not be reliable enough to translate into simple grades. Walker “needed to have failing schools in Ds and Fs,” he said, as a pretext for expanding vouchers.
But Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie said letter grades were simply an easily understandable shorthand for the rating system’s five official designations, which range from “significantly exceeds expectations” to “fails to meet expectations.”
Indeed, the five designations do lend themselves to the five traditional letter grades. The report cards also rate schools on a 100-point scale, which also often translates into letter grades.
If Walker betrayed the DPI and the accountability team by introducing letter grades, DPI and the team are a bit naive if they thought no one ever would.
But more important is why Walker feels compelled in ways small — using letter grades — and large — basing voucher expansion on School Report Cards — to aggravate a public education establishment already aggravated by his moves to end teacher collective bargaining and cut education funding.
The governor’s voucher proposal was going to be controversial no matter what.

Related: NJ DOE Releases New School Performance Reports; Wisconsin? Stays Quo….

Laura Waters:

At long last the New Jersey Department of Education has released its “NJ School Performance Reports,” which replace the old School Report Cards. Details on school performance is greatly expanded now includes, according to the Christie Administration’s press release, “brand new data on college and career readiness and provide comparison to “peer schools” in order to provide a more complete picture of school performance for educators and the general public.”
Here’s coverage from the Star-Ledger, The Record, the Courier-Post, Asbury Park Press, Press of Atlantic City, NJ Spotlight, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The state also released the annual Taxpayers’ Guide to Education. Annual per pupil spending in NJ (if you use the state’s algorithm; others say it inflates costs) is $18,045, up 4.2% since last year.
Of course, there’s enormous range within that average. Fairview Boro (Bergen), for example, spends $13,317 per pupil. Asbury Park City spends $30,502. The plush magnet schools in Bergen County spend $35,900.

The Wisconsin DPI…..
April, 2013: Chief among them has been this notion from state superintendent Tony Evers that the state’s new accountability system, known as state report cards, shouldn’t be used to determine which districts get vouchers.
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March, 2013: Evers on report cards: this last year was a pilot year. It’s just not ready for prime time.
June, 2008: “Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”.

Chris Rickert:

Chief among them has been this notion from state superintendent Tony Evers that the state’s new accountability system, known as state report cards, shouldn’t be used to determine which districts get vouchers.
Under Walker’s plan, districts with at least 4,000 students and two or more schools getting a D or an F under a new rating system would be eligible for vouchers. Evers — no fan of vouchers anyway — says the report cards were not intended for such use and need more refinement over several years.
But what was the purpose of spending more than a year working with a diverse group of education and business groups and state elected officials to create the report cards — which replaced the widely panned No Child Left Behind system — if not to use them to make consequential decisions about education?
On Thursday, Department of Public Instruction director of Education Information Services John Johnson called the report cards a “work in progress” that aren’t an appropriate tool for making a “major policy decision.”
Among their current limitations are that they are based on tests that are expected to change two years from now, they can’t show growth in high school student achievement, some schools weren’t rated, and there’s too little data to reliably identify trends in school performance.
Adam Gamoran, director of the UW-Madison-based Wisconsin Center for Education Research and a skeptic on voucher programs, agrees that the tool isn’t perfect and may well change, but “that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use them now” to rate schools.
It’s also not as if DPI itself didn’t expect to use the report cards. Its budget request — which Walker didn’t include in his budget — included about $10.3 million over the next two years to replicate best practices from schools deemed high-performing by the report cards, as well as to help schools deemed low-performing by the report cards get better.

John Nichols appears to support the present DPI approach. Status Quo K-12 vs a Little “Reform” Rhetoric at a Wisconsin Budget Hearing.
Related: The Wisconsin DPI in 2008:
“Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”.
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2013/03/wisconsin_educa_14.php
A citizen, parent, voter and taxpayer might ask what the DPI has been
with state and federal taxpayer dollars since 2008?
Meanwhile, Alabama (!), Minnesota, Florida and Massachusetts are
continuing to aim high and compare their students to the world.
http://nces.ed.gov/Timss/benchmark.asp
And, Vietnam is teaching computer science concepts in primary school.
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2013/03/primary_school_.php

Cal Thomas:

The problem is that a monopoly always protects itself. The teachers’ unions and many Democratic politicians, who receive their campaign contributions, oppose school choice, which would improve not only public schools, but also the chances of poor and minority children to have a better life. The current approach appears to be to keep disadvantaged children in underperforming schools so that underperforming teachers keep their jobs and the politicians they support keep theirs. As long as the monopoly survives, we can expect more cheating and corner-cutting and less real achievement for children who ought to be everyone’s first concern.
Instead, as Atlanta would suggest, public school children are subject to all manner of manipulation and disservice by people charged with educating them. Perhaps if parents had the freedom to send their children to a school they believed would offer them a better shot at true success they would fare better. Could school choice be the answer?
Indiana thinks so. Last week, the state’s Supreme Court upheld a voucher program that gives poor and middle-class families access to tax dollars to help them pay private school tuition. Parents should decide where their children go to school.

Christian D’Andrea:

A recent analysis by a Madison think tank is trying to poke holes in the six-year work of the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP). The true discovery here, however, is that this report from the Forward Institute seems to be more interested in discrediting the SCDP’s results than providing meaningful statistical analysis on the data or the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program itself. Even in that aspect, it falls short thanks to a limited view of the project’s six years of analysis in Wisconsin’s largest district.
According to the Forward Institute, the SCDP fails to provide compelling data that voucher schools are the underlying influence behind greater graduation and college attendance rates for students that leave MPS through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
While the Forward Institute raises interesting points about the overall effect of familial influences on a child’s education and their overall success, the group fails to examine the full scope of research that the SCDP has produced in the realm of high school attainment in Milwaukee’s public and voucher schools.

Related: Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP..
Madison will spend about $15k per student during the 2012-2013 school year, yet continues to produce disastrous reading results.

Alan Borsuk:

Vouchers, charters, public school spending, treatment of teachers – isn’t there something we’re not fighting about when it comes to education?
Why, yes, and last week’s quiet end to a boring race for state superintendent of public instruction underscores one of the biggest examples of that: The Common Core learning standards initiative.
The Common Core is the biggest thing in Wisconsin education that you hardly ever hear about, unless you’re employed in the school world. Then you hear about it all the time. For a lot of schools, teachers and students, it’s bringing clear, significant and, let us hope, ultimately productive changes in what goes on daily.
Take a tour of a school or talk to school leaders about what they’re up to anywhere in the state and two out of every three sentences you hear include the phrase “Common Core.” At least it feels that way.
In many classrooms, each student now has explicit goals to work on daily (“Use place value understanding to round whole numbers to the nearest 10 or 100,” for example, from the third-grade math standards) and will gladly tell you what standard they’re focused on at the time you ask (I’ve asked). Or perhaps show you the standard and their work on it on their iPad. If this hasn’t come to your child’s school yet, look for something like this soon.
The Common Core movement has swept across the nation in the last five years. It arose largely from among governors, state education chiefs, corporate leaders and education advocates who believed the nation as a whole was not aiming high enough in education and that the wide variation from state to state in defining good achievement and what it takes to get a high school diploma was a problem.

David Blaska:

Congratulations to Madison’s white power elite, especially to Democrats, organized labor, John Matthews and his teachers union. You very well may have elected a teachers union-first (“Collectively we decide …”), children second school board. You also just handed Scott Walker a powerful case for expanding private school vouchers.
What are you afraid of? That more parents might not choose the taxpayer-coerced public school monopoly? What do you expect, when you leave them no (ahem) … choice.
I would like to hold out hope that absentee ballots will make the difference, but 279 votes is probably too many for Wayne Strong to overcome to defeat Dean Loumos, who holds an 18,286 to 18,007 lead. If there are 1,333 absentee ballots that need to be counted, as the city clerk’s website advertises, Strong would have to beat Loumos 806 to 527 in those uncounted votes.
(BTW: Is this the new normal? As absentee voting becomes more popular, winners won’t be declared for a week after the election?)

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.