John Schmid:

Taking advantage of what he calls a climate that’s conducive to reorganizing state government, one of Gov. Scott Walker’s top economic advisers said he’s drafting set of recommendations that will change how Wisconsin allocates hundreds of millions of dollars each year in federal job training funds and simultaneously reform the state’s education system.
The goal is to repair an “antiquated state workforce” and education system that fails to provide employers with workers, which in turn leaves openings unfilled and hundreds of thousands of working-age Wisconsinites lacking employable skills, said Tim Sullivan, former chief executive officer of Bucyrus International Inc. and chairman of the Governor’s Council on Workforce Investment, a state advisory panel.

Walker [17-19] Last Biennial Budget: $76 billion
Evers[19-21] First Biennial Budget: $87.5 billion
Evers [23-25] Proposed Biennial Budget: $103.8 billion

Will you get $27.8 BILLION more value from govt? Sell underused properties, consolidate overlapping agencies. $0 INCREASE! pic.twitter.com/DNXG1aSozd

— Will Martin, Business Owner & Govt Reformer (@willmartinWI) February 20, 2023

WILL budget primer:

• Massive Spending Growth: Governor Evers proposed budget increases spending by 18.5% compared to the previous budget. GPR spending would rise by 22.85% compared to the previous budget.
• Agency GPR Growth: Some agencies would see massive growth in GPR spending. For example, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation’s GPR allocation would grow by 3351%. The Department of Tourism would have a 1027% increase in GPR spending.
• Voucher Freeze: The governor proposes freezing enrollment in Wisconsin’s school choice programs at 2024 enrollment levels. This would shut the school house door on thousands of families in Wisconsin desperate for options stuck in schools that aren’t working for them.
• DEI Positions: Governor Evers wants to spend more than $2.9 million of taxpayer dollars on 15 new executive-tier positions whose mandate is to use government activity to increase “equity.”
• Work Requirements: Able-bodied adults are required to participate in the Food Share Employment and Training program to continue receiving Food Share benefits after the first three months. Governor Evers would repeal this requirement despite the economic and personal benefits they bring to the state and its participants.

Yet:

Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at least $23,000 per student.

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

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

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Scott Shackford:

The speech orientation of the law is clearly not neutral: It censors only one position on the controversy based on its viewpoint. Walker further rejects the state’s attempt to say that the act aims to regulate conduct, not speech. (This argument may be familiar to libertarians, who have seen states use it to try to unduly control who is and is not allowed to give advice.) Walker notes that laws against racist conduct at the workplace can be identified separately from speech. But IFA can only be understood through the lens of what is and is not said. It is entirely a regulation of speech, not conduct.

Walker then subjects the law to strict scrutiny, requiring the state to prove that it has a compelling interest to justify engaging in such censorship. To put it mildly, constitutional law is not on the state’s side here.

“The First Amendment does not give the state license to censor speech because it finds it ‘repugnant,’ no matter how captive the audience,” Walker writes. “And even assuming the IFA serves a compelling government interest—like prohibiting discrimination—it is not narrowly tailored. In large part, this is because the [Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992] already prohibited much of what Defendants claim the IFA aims to prohibit. For example, a diversity and inclusion training could be so offensive, and so hostile to White employees, that it could create a hostile work environment. That is already illegal—as both parties acknowledge.” Walker concludes that the IFA attacks ideas, not conduct, and so the plaintiffs are likely to win the case.

Walker also agrees with the plaintiffs that the IFA is “impermissibly vague” in how it defines the forbidden ideas, leaving it for the state to resolve and leaving employers unclear about what sort of discussion about race is and is not forbidden.

Benjamin Yount:

“As proficiency has plummeted under his tenure, Governor Evers is forced to point to outdated data to back up his claims that he has been an effective leader on education,” Will Flanders with the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty told The Center Square.

Flanders added that Gov. Evers’ approach to public schools has had a darker impact than the report suggests.

“The sectors that actually are doing better – choice and charter – have been the subject of repeated attempts by the governor to bring them to an end,” Flanders added. “School shutdowns during COVID, which the governor did nothing to stop, have exacerbated already huge achievement gaps among minority and low income students. None of this is reflected fully in the data for this ranking.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

State Senator Kathy Bernier and State Representative Joel Kitchens:

Literacy in Wisconsin is in crisis: 64% of Wisconsin 4th graders can’t read at grade level, with 34% failing to read at even the basic level. As co-chair of Governor Walker’s Read to Lead Task Force, you know that high quality universal literacy screening is the undisputed cornerstone of evidence-based reading instruction. Unfortunately, your veto of Senate Bill 454, The Roadmap to Reading Success, delays the inevitable adoption of desperately needed science-based standards for how we screen and identify struggling readers to get them the help they need.

For too long we have relied on the now disproven pet theories and guesswork of the education establishment and it has left a full two-thirds of our 4th graders struggling to read. How many more children need to pass through Wisconsin’s failing reading system while state specialists hold endless meetings to puzzle over this crisis?

When you vetoed the Roadmap to Reading Success, you said more money is needed. Governor Evers, under the budget you signed into law in July, the state already reimburses schools for 100% of the costs of literacy screeners. Sadly, what you vetoed are the science-based high standards that would ensure we use screeners that actually get the job done with accurate, actionable data.

Our recent budget invests $15.3 billion into K-12 education, or nearly 40% of all state spending. On top of this, Wisconsin schools are receiving an unprecedented $2.7 billion in federal COVID funds and you recently committed an additional $110 million in no-strings-attached federal ARPA funds. Governor Evers, if more funds are needed to take this inevitable and critical first step toward solving our reading crisis, you have sole control over nearly $1 billion in additional federal COVID dollars. That’s why today, we’re introducing an amendment to Assembly Bill 446, calling on you to release any portion of these funds you see fit and sign this bill into law. When a full one-third of fourth graders can’t read at the basic level, we simply cannot wait.

As red and blue states across the country are adopting the reforms in this bill and seeing stunning improvement in reading achievement, Wisconsin’s children are being left behind. If you need further convincing that the Roadmap to Reading Success is the foundational change we need to begin addressing our literacy crisis, some of the most significant research driving literacy reforms across the country is happening right here at UW-Madison’s Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Dr. Seidenberg, one of the world’s foremost researchers on neuroscientific understanding of how children learn to read, spearheads groundbreaking research. We urge you talk with Dr. Seidenberg and learn firsthand why he supports the Roadmap to Reading Success.

The time to act is now. As more and more Wisconsin parents, teachers and local school leaders are waking up to this reading crisis and taking the challenge head-on, they are crying out for desperately needed statewide leadership. The Roadmap to Reading Success isn’t speculative, wishful thinking about what might work. It is the best of evidence-based screening practices. It’s not a question of if, but when Wisconsin will adopt these science-based reforms. Governor Evers, if you don’t sign this bill into law, someone else will. So, for the sake of our kids, do your homework on this quickly and sign this bill into law.

State Senator Kathy Bernier

State Representative Joel Kitchens

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Johnny Kampis:

Unions, he says, were more concerned about protecting the pensions of the old membership than in the future benefits for new members. “They weren’t fighting for the little guy. They were fighting for themselves.” 

Among the proudest accomplishments in Act 10, Walker told us, was the fight for schoolchildren. Act 10 was about a lot more than money. It made teaching a meritocracy again, he says. “They can put the best and the brightest in the classrooms and keep them there.”

Those interested in Act 10 should become familiar with the earlier Milwaukee Pension Scandal.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Mengchen Dong:

Status holders across societies often take moral initiatives to navigate group practices toward collective goods; however, little is known about how different societies (e.g., the United States vs. China) evaluate high- (vs. low-) status holders’ transgressions of preached morals. Two preregistered studies (total N = 1,374) examined how status information (occupational rank in Study 1 and social prestige in Study 2) influences moral judgments of norm violations, as a function of word-deed contradiction and cultural independence/interdependence. Both studies revealed that high- (vs. low-) status targets’ word-deed contradictions (vs. noncontradictions) were condemned more harshly in the United States but not China. Mediation analyses suggested that Americans attributed more, but Chinese attributed less, selfish motives to higher status targets’ word-deed contradictions. Cultural in(ter)dependence influences not only whom to confer status as norm enforcers but also whom to (not) blame as norm violators.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts and tolerating long term, disastrous reading results, a majority of the Madison School board aborted the planned independent Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, in 2011.

Yet, Kaleem Caire persevered, supported by many seeking a diverse K-12 governance environment, now moving much of One City schools to a large Monona facility.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

Amber Walker:

I sometimes wonder where I would be today if my kindergarten teacher hadn’t encouraged my mother to have me take the admissions exam for Chicago’s selective elementary schools.

That one test result earned me a coveted spot at Edward W. Beasley Academic Center, one of the city’s gifted and talented elementary programs, where I matriculated to one of the top-performing high schools in the country.

And that, in turn, set the foundation for me to become the first person in my immediate family to graduate from college, earn my master’s degree, travel the world, and earn a decent, fulfilling living. If I have children of my own, they will likely attend high-performing, well-funded community schools.

As an adult covering K-12 education, I find that my experience also shaped my belief that if students, no matter their backgrounds, are treated with dignity and are provided with educational spaces where they feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable, coupled with the tools and resources they need to absorb the curriculum, they will succeed academically.

It is not easy, but it is possible.  I’ve seen glimpses of it during my time learning in, teaching in, and writing about classrooms.

Amber spent a bit of time covering education in Madison.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

Shelby Steele:

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina gave a remarkable speech at this year’s Republican National Convention. Yes, here was a black man at a GOP event, so there was a whiff of identity politics. When we see color these days, we expect ideology to follow. But Mr. Scott’s charisma that night was simply that he spoke as a person, not a spokesperson for his color.

Burgess Owens, Herschel Walker, Daniel Cameron and several others did the same. It was a parade of individuals. And in their speeches the human being stepped out from behind the identity, telling personal stories that reached for human connections with the American people—this rather than the usual posturing for leverage with tales of grievance. So they were all fresh and compelling.

Do these Republicans foretell a new racial order in America? Clearly they have pushed their way through an old racial order, as have—it could be argued—many black Trump voters in the recent election. I believe there is in fact a new racial order slowly and tenuously emerging, and that we blacks are swimming through rough seas to reach it. But to better see the new, it is necessary to know the old.

The old began in what might be called America’s Great Confession. In passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, America effectively confessed to a long and terrible collusion with the evil of racism. (President Kennedy was the first president to acknowledge that civil rights was a “moral issue.”) This triggered nothing less than a crisis of moral authority that threatened the very legitimacy of American democracy.

CJ Safir and Collin Roth

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” the dog that didn’t bark reveals the greater truth. The same might be said of Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’s first state budget proposal. Derided by critics as a “liberal wish list,” Mr. Evers’s budget proposes to expand Medicaid, freeze school choice, overturn right to work, fund Planned Parenthood, add more than 700 government jobs, increase spending by $7 billion, and raise taxes by more than $1 billion

Much more on Act 10, here

Molly Beck:

But Walker and his campaign accused Evers of flip-flopping on the issue of school funding because Evers once said in an interview with WisconsinEye that improving academic outcomes for students struggling the most could still be achieved even if the state didn’t provide a significant funding increase.

Evers in the interview did say schools needed more funding overall, however.

Four years ago, Walker leveled similar criticism when he was running against another education official: Madison School Board member Mary Burke.

He blasted Burke for the Madison School District’s massive gap in academic performance between black and white students.

The Wisconsin DPI, lead by Mr. Evers, has largely killed our one (!) teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading.

Related: MTEL

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

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2011: A Capitol conversation.

On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)

2013: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

2014: Wisconsin DPI Superintendent’s Task force on the Achievement Gap.

2018: The Simpson Street Free Press (!) digs: Are Rising MMSD Grad Rates Something to Celebrate?, and digs deeper: Madison’s ACT College Readiness Gap.

Wisconsin Legislative Council Committee on Dyslexia.

The state of journalism, 2018.

Jessie Opoien, has more.

Politifact:

“Tony misspoke,” his campaign spokeswoman Maggie Gau told us. “We acknowledge it’s not correct. As much as we try to prevent them, no one is perfect and mistakes happen on the trail.”

UW System’s funding streams

The UW System is composed of 13 campuses, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that offer four-year and advanced degrees, and 13 campuses that offer two-year degrees. Currently, its operating budget is about $6 billion per year, with about $1 billion — 17 percent — coming from state funding.

To see whether that percentage has changed during Walker’s tenure as governor, we turned to a state agency, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. (Federal funding and tuition are the two other largest sources of funding, and there are others, as well.)

Here is how much of the UW System operating budgets has come from state funding since the year before Walker took office as governor:

Mr. Evers currently serves as the Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction, an organization fighting attempts to improve elementary teacher English content knowledge requirements (Foundations of Reading).

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

MTEL

A capitol conversation

Scoot Milfred and Phil Hands:

Usual mumbo-jumbo, we do on this podcast. Why don’t we invite in today some experts to talk about our topic which is around school. Which Madison is finally going to give a try this fall to experts. I know very well we have all hands on deck here. We have Owen hands. Oh and how old are you? Oh, nine years old.

All right and Claire. How old are you? Wow, let’s Round Up will see your six. So what if I were to tell you that instead of having school from September until June? What if we had school year round? What do you think of that idea? Yeah. Yeah, it’s exciting. Yeah, I’m Clare alway knows because um, she has school year round.
She doesn’t see only doesn’t have school on weekends and Thursdays. What if you had a long break you don’t like a long break from school you’d rather be. School, I will never break off my tablet all day. What if instead of a big summer break we had just smaller breaks throughout the year. So you’d get.

More breaks, but you wouldn’t get one Brig big long break like you might get a two-week break in the fall, and maybe I got there you have it and then you wouldn’t get bored in the summer time. You guys get bored this summer at all. No, I well today on Center Stage the Wisconsin State journals political podcast from the sensible Center of Wisconsin politics. We’re going to talk about year-round school. Madison diving into it sort of and the benefits concerns and myths surrounding this sometimes controversial idea.

I’m Scott Milford the editorial page editor for the Wisconsin State Journal and I’m Phil Hands. I’m the editorial cartoonist for the Wisconsin State Journal and we are half of the State Journal editorial board.
Well, there’s the Bell, uh, even at around school fill the kids get to go out for recess. So we’ll bring back our experts later for now. Let’s talk about Madison and it’s uh dabble into your around school. So it’s the dog days of summer right now. The kids have been out of school for almost six weeks nowadays and my kids my kids did some summer camps and now that summer camps of run their course, uh, we’re going on vacation soon.
Guess but uh, but yeah, I mean the summer vacation it’s a long slog and it’s a time when kids are not necessarily. I mean, they’re looking at their devices and I guess they’re reading some uh information on their devices but it’s there’s not a lot of learning going on. We make our kids read during the summertime, but that’s only because we make them read.

Oh and go to your room and read. Well one thing we’ve been advocating on The State Journal editorial board for a long time is year-round school because yeah kids usually, um, And they they will lose some of the knowledge they’ve gained over the previous school year during that exceptionally long summer vacation.

Yeah, and lo and behold Madison is finally moving towards trying out around school this starting this next month for Madison. Yeah, except it’s not the Madison School District that’s doing it. It’s not no they’ve uh, it’s actually the to charter schools that the state has authorized to start in Madison.

Outside the scope of the school district and it’s going to be under the control of the University of Wisconsin system. So I’m confused here Scott. So I always thought that year. I mean I’ve heard that you’re around school is good for kids. It helps them learn more. It keeps them from falling behind.

But I thought Charter Schools were always evil. Well, that’s according to the uh, Progressive talking points, but I think what they so you’re saying that charter schools are doing something that’s going to help kids learn better. I’m afraid I am. Oh my goodness. You shared my world of you this podcast tale begins, six or seven years ago.

When kaleem caire then the head of the Urban League of Greater Madison proposed a charter school that would cater to. Struggling mostly black and Latino high school students boys with a charter school that would run year round and have lots of other features like longer classes, uh longer school day required extracurricular activities report cards for parents on how well they’re doing and getting involved with their children’s education.

It was called Madison prep, right right and after a long and loud, Uh debate over that the Madison School Board voted it down, uh one important note I would make on that. Is that the only African American member of the school board James Howard did vote for it. So I will say that it’s always frustrating.

I’ll go back to Summer frustrate. That’s because Madison we have some of the worst racial disparities. Uh for for African-Americans and Latinos in our in this in the state, I mean, so if you’re a black kid in the Madison Public Schools your chances of graduating our worst and they are in Milwaukee, which is not great and here was a school that was supposed to focus on this problem specifically and the high-minded Liberals whites on the school board Madison decided that no, this school wasn’t a good idea.

That’s right. And uh what’s happened now, is that the Republicans who control the legislature have. Opened up a new valve. I guess you could call it where people who want to do Charter Schools outside of the school districts control can go to the University of Wisconsin system and they will oversee the charter rather than the local school district.
So alas that’s what column has done. I’ll be kind of upside in an upside-down way. So originally what his proposal was was to start a high school. Uh here in Madison for struggling mostly minority kids. Now what he’s doing is he’s starting a preschool and kindergarten. Yes. It’s a fork and a kindergarten charter school and he’s hoping to build from the bottom up now, which I think is awesome.

Because you know getting the kids early is the best way to achieve success later in life. I mean, sometimes people argue that you know, getting people in high school is even too late to really effect change in a kid. Uh moving forward but you know, you can um give these kids a really good start early in their lives and for preschool and kindergarten.

I think it’s awesome and just to be clear. This is a free public school. It’s not a private school and it’s not a voucher school. So let’s just talk for a minute then about what year-round school means. I mean when people hear that they immediately recoil but I but I hear when I think that is you’re gonna have kids in school.

365 days a year for 27 hours a day and kids will have no time off they will we will stifle all creativity and make them, uh study for mandatory tests on regular basis. Yeah, and you actually get pushback from both the left and the right on this on the left what you tend to get is teacher unions who think wait a minute.
I’m not going to get my. Some are break anymore, which is one of the best benefits of being a teacher and then from the right when we’ve talked to the governor Walker about this editorial board meetings. His response is always sort of a flip. Uh, he says, well, I don’t think having kids butts in the seats.

More days is the answer to our problems. Yeah with a public education and generally neither of those criticisms is accurate for most your own schools because what we’d like to see in the editorial board is we wouldn’t we don’t necessarily want more days of instruction. We would like to seek it. We just think that long break the starts three months beginning of June that goes the end of August is too long.

Let’s shorten that break and add in some other breaks throughout the course of the school year in the case of the charter schools opening. For example, I think closest to what we’re talkin about is the Isthmus Montessori Academy. This is another charter school that charter school that the Madison School Board rejected and now the the organizers of.

School went to the state via the University of Wisconsin system and got approved for the charter and their schedule is going to be they’re going to take two weeks off in the fall two weeks off in the winter. And then they’re only going to have a six-week summer break. So they’re essentially going to cut the uh summer break in half.

There’s enough time for a camp or two. There’s enough time for summer activities like swim team or something like that, but it does but the summer doesn’t go on and on and on on and actually their school year is going to start. His 15th. They’re going to start a little bit earlier now in the case of clean cares new school, which is the one city is the name of it.

He’s going to actually add a lot more days to the school schedule, which is what he was originally wanted to do with the Madison prep. So he’s going to be up over 200 days of classes. So there are going to be more days in class. Yeah for his students that just shows you that this varies to some degree and actually when you.
Cat a lot of the foreign countries who students are testing better than American students on most testing those schools do have more days of classes than we do. Yeah, and they don’t have this gigantic, uh summer break. So I’m not so sure that we want to say we don’t want more days of classes, but I think to answer the governor’s point, you don’t you don’t have to have more days of classes just don’t have the giant break and then B if you do have.

Or days and classes who says the kids have to be sitting their butts in the seats. Absolutely not no, I mean so so my daughter is in is in a preschool right now and she’s been going through school most of the summer and their school during the summer time. They do a lot of field trips to get Outdoors.

They play a lot outside, you know, they’re they’re experiencing nature. They go on nature hikes that garden and they have a community garden that they work in so there’s lots of things you can do in a school environment that aren’t that isn’t, you know, doing rote memorization and with butts.

Cher’s I was just looking at a Brookings report on the summer break and this pretty much follows a lot of the research that you see it’s very well-defined that there is a slip in we call it the summer slide or the summer slip where students test better at the. Of Summer then they do at the end of summer.

Is that surprising surprising and on average student achievement scores decline over the summer vacation by about one month’s worth of school year learning and the decline is sharper in math than it is in Reading. And the loss is larger at the higher grade levels. That’s not so surprising that you don’t forget your uh algebra more than maybe your ABCs and then finally, this is much bigger issue for lower-income kids.

Are you saying this is a social justice issue Sky. I mean it is it is because middle class upper middle class families that have lots of resources. They put their kids in Camp All Summer Long my son. Well we. Afford it all summer. I mean my son. He did a computer camp this year. He did. Yeah a couple of different, uh, you know swim team camps and stuff like that lots of different activities keep them occupied but a lot of kids don’t have those opportunities and they spend the summer watching TV or hanging around the block.

That’s right. I got a high school kid at a cross-country camp this week 500 bucks. Really? I had a I had my younger daughter went to a horse camp and that was about 400. So those things are. Can’t do that. So I mean even my kids I wish they were I wish they were busier and I wish I could put him in more camps and if there was a year-round schedule, I’ll guarantee you they uh, they would be in it the white upper-middle-class school board can say well we don’t want we don’t want we don’t want year-round school, but it’s hurting the kids that are hurting already in our achievement Gap issues.

It’s that’s who is hurting the most. Yeah, and and a lot of the pushback is okay parents like us we don’t. To give up the summer break. We don’t want to give up our vacation. I’ve been working all summer. I know I have a job. I know but I’m just saying in terms of taking a vacation. They think oh, well, I’m not gonna be able to take a vacation with my kids.

I don’t like that. Well, I’ll tell you what, so what if I had two weeks in the fall when nobody else is going on vacation to go on vacation. That sounds awesome to me. I tried to go down to Florida a couple years ago for spring break and the airfare was through the roof because everybody in America had the same week for spring break.

What if I had two other week some other time? It’d be great for us. The other thing you often hear is hey, let’s let kids be kids. Summer vacation is important. They’re not just supposed to sit in front of a book called A. They’re supposed to get out and use their imagination and play and they’re putting on too much weight.

Obesity is a problem. Why are you taking away summer vacation from Phil? Well, I mean, you know, a lot of kids just sitting there iPads the whole time or their devices or whatever. They have during the summertime, you know, you know, I think every every parent has that issue it like it’s some point in summer vacation my kids say.

I’m bored. There’s nothing to do. Yeah, usually about the second week. But the point is you’d still get even if you went to this Montessori charter school, you’re still getting six weeks in the summer still getting six weeks in place. You’re getting some additional instead of a spring break. It’s a fall break and a winter break plus the spring break.

Yeah. So you’re breaking it up a little bit what some other districts have found is that you can save money. So this is the little this is a little bright, uh, Underlying point for taxpayers out there so I don’t have kids in school and work them hard. What’s the matter with you? Well grumpy, mr. Taxpayer. Guess what? You can save some money on this deal because if you what a lot of schools do is they’ll psycho kids through so that when some some kids are on break, uh, the other kids are in the school. Okay. So what you wind up with is the schools are used throughout the year rather than just sitting vacant for three months.

Yeah. Now that might. Work in Madison because what we always hear well, we don’t have air conditioning in most of the school buildings. Well, hey, we got summer school. Yeah without air conditioning. So maybe we can do it. I actually gave I gave a talk in the summer school class. It was hot. Yeah.

It was too fun. Now now let’s give the Madison School District some credit here for the summer school program which appears to be improving. I mean Madison does offer a six-week summer school program and they’ve been trying to incorporate. It’s an effort that we’ve supported here at the newspaper is uh and is they have their morning classes and these tend to be classes that are a little more fun you do you don’t just sit in a seat all the time.

You have more activities and then in the afternoon, there’s recreational activities outside and they try to incorporate reading into the recreational like yeah, so maybe there’s a scavenger hunt where you reading and then through the read up program kids get five free books that they get to pick.

And uh take home and start their library. And so the district has shown some statistics that suggest those kids that are in that program are not sliding over the summer that doesn’t quite sound like butts and shares to me. It’s not know but the problem with summer school in Madison, isn’t that we’re not doing a great job trying to teach kids in the summer and help them catch up.

Yeah. It’s that around half of the kids. Who are. Invited to summer school because the teachers say you really need to catch up their parents don’t send it. So then how you’re going to get to them? Yeah. Now if you certainly the kids fault that their parents aren’t with it together enough to to get them into school.
No now the district says they’re making strides on that and that they are getting more. The parents to put their kids in but that’s been a major problem. Now if you had a year-round school schedule, well, you can’t opt out of six weeks of school if you don’t want to do it. Yeah. So, um that, you know, a year-round schedule would solve that problem.

They be required to go. Yeah, it’s not just whether or not I want to do. I think it sounds good. And I think it’s I think it’s a basic simple. I mean, it’s not I guess it’s not a simple thing. It would take a lot of work and a lot it’s a big lift, but it’s one of those things there’s a few things the school all the science says you should do this for kids.

Well, I don’t know that all the science says that I mean, I think there is some you know, there are some researchers who you know who go out of their way to say this is not a Panacea. Well not exactly and there are programs for example racing had a uh, Your own school for more than a decade and it just stopped doing it.
Okay, and one of the reasons, why was that according to the school board is a lot of the parents that lived around the school. They didn’t want to send their kids there. But the school board was split on that on whether they wanted to continue it or not and depending on which school board members you listen to it.
Either was working or it wasn’t. Yeah, uh and the main argument was hey, let’s we have a more streamlined streamlined District if we were all in the same schedule, however, Toma is starting uh around School lacrosse has been doing it Milwaukee has been doing it. There are lots of examples of it happening and from the research.

I’ve looked at they say those kids tend to do at least as well if not better. Then kids who have longer breaks particularly the lower-income kids, but we should talk about why we don’t have year-round school. The reason we don’t have year-round school is because and if I maybe I’m wrong about this Gap, but I’ve always heard.
The reason we have a big summer vacation is so that kids can help out on the Family Farm or in Wisconsin at the resort. Okay, because we’re a tourist state so so I don’t have a family farm Family Farm. I have a garden. I mean, I don’t help my kids don’t do anything– but you’re right. It was it started as an agrarian society thing where the kids did actually have to work out in the field picking rocks and helping with chores.
They weren’t getting done on their iPads all summer long. No. No, I don’t know that they were necessarily getting smart by feeding the pigs either. But they were working and they were working in character and that was required. Uh, but we’ve moved past that now some people say well, but what about the Wisconsin Dells we need these workers.

Well gee whiz every time I go up to the sconce endell everybody I speak to at the retail store isn’t the Resort’s has an Eastern European accent. Yeah. They’re all spies. What’s more important here of filling some seasonal jobs or educating our children? Especially the kids that are of lower income.
And by the way, they’re hiring high school kids. Yeah, they’re not hiring. Uh, third graders. Yeah. I mean kaleem’s School is gonna be the youngest kids. So I think that argument tends to find another issue. What is it low income parents post do with their kid All Summer Long. Yeah, and we have.

These programs that do pop up. I mean the why does a lot of things there? You know, they are there are places to go. Um that are probably cost less I guess than uh than a formal school education. But what you find is that when these school districts that do the year-round schedules, so you say well wait a minute if there’s going to be a two-week break and the fall what am I going to do with my kids for those two?

That’s when the summer camp pops. Yeah, those things those things pop up where there’s. Is (that) what they find? Yeah. All right. Let’s go back to the experts here, which is better being in school or being out of school. Okay, but do you learn anything complete of China have poisoned my school? You learn about toys.

I do want a lot at school. But um last year in math. I won almost nothing I’d say math is probably my favorite subject. Awesome least favorite. So your dad’s a cartoonist, but art is your least favorite. Yes. Okay. Yeah, not exactly chip off the old block not exactly chip off the old block. You can’t go look at Nasa.
They’ll be just fine.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Tony Evers:

As state superintendent, I’ve fought Walker’s school privatization schemes. I’ve proudly stood by our educators and fought for more funding for our public schools, while Walker has cut funding. We must never forget that under Walker, over a million Wisconsinites voted to raise their own taxes to adequately fund their schools.

This isn’t political theater for me; it’s a job I take seriously. These are our kids. This is our future. This is about fighting for the constitution, and the trust that Wisconsinites have three times overwhelmingly given me. The people of Wisconsin deserve better than desperate politicians rigging our judicial system for their own political gain.

Mr Evers has not mentioned student achievement on his watch:

2017 Wisconsin 4th grade student reading results… “Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally, compared to 25th in 2015”

35% of Wisconsin 4th graders score proficient or advanced, down from 37% in 2015

Reading and Wisconsin DPI “administrative rules“.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student.

“Too often, according to Mark Seidenberg’s important, alarming new book, “Language at the Speed of Sight,” Johnny can’t read because schools of education didn’t give Johnny’s teachers the proper tools to show him how”.

Wisconsin has only one teacher content knowledge requirement examination (unlike Massachusetts): Foundations of Reading.

Patrick Marley:

A group of teachers and parents sued, arguing the law didn’t apply to Evers because of the powers granted to him by the state constitution. A Dane County judge agreed with them in 2012 and the state Supreme Court upheld that ruling in 2016.

In 2017, Walker signed a new, similar law. Evers did not follow that law in the way that he wrote new rules, saying he didn’t need to because of the past court rulings.

Soon afterward, a group of teachers and local school board members represented by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty asked the Supreme Court to take up anew whether Evers had to follow the law on writing state rules.

Under Friday’s ruling, the high court agreed to decide that case.

The 2016 decision was unusual in that two liberals — Shirley Abrahamson and Ann Walsh Bradley — joined with conservatives Michael Gableman and David Prosser to rule on the side of Evers’ allies.

Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally reading, our lowest ranking to date

Wisconsin has just one (!) teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading. The Tony Evers lead DPI has been attempting. to weaken this lone requirement.

Compare Massachusett’s MTEL.

Stretch Targets.

Many links on UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg’s new book:

“Too often, according to Mark Seidenberg’s important, alarming new book, “Language at the Speed of Sight,” Johnny can’t read because schools of education didn’t give Johnny’s teachers the proper tools to show him how”

Molly Beck:

The polling also showed 60 percent of public sector employees favor returning to collective bargaining, compared with only 39 percent in the private sector. Nearly 70 percent of union members favor bargaining, while only 38 percent of non-union members support it. Those polled in the city of Milwaukee and Madison media markets favor collective bargaining while the rest of the state, to different degrees, do not, Franklin said.

Timing the message
“(Focusing on Act 10) would be a good primary tactic but for the general election, I don’t think so,” said Joe Heim, a longtime political science professor at UW-La Crosse. “By the general election, the union people and anybody who opposes Act 10 would know exactly where they are going. If you are trying to get some crossover supporters who generally think Act 10 was not a bad idea, but don’t necessarily like Walker, reminding them of that time is not a good idea.”

Republicans have touted how the law saved state and local governments billions of dollars, though that’s based mostly on provisions of the law separate from bargaining that required public employees to contribute to pension and health insurance premiums. Democrats say it has contributed to a statewide teacher shortage, though school districts are facing shortages across the country.

“You don’t need to remind anyone of it,” Heim said. “Time to move on and I would hope the Democrats are smart enough to look forward.”

A spokeswoman for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin did not respond to a request for comment on whether the issue will be prominent in the 2018 campaign.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Walker’s campaign cited Act 10 as the catalyst for a “Wisconsin comeback” that resulted in $5 billion in savings to local governments.

“The extreme Democrat candidates running in the wide-open field for governor have a choice: raise taxes to pay for undoing the governor’s reforms, or accept that he fixed the financial crisis their party created,” spokesman Brian Reisinger said.

Much more on Act 10, here.

Matthew DeFour:

“I’m glad to see at least last year there was pretty broad-based support,” Walker said.

Immediately after Walker’s speech, Evers came on stage to hand out an award and deadpanned, “How ironic,” before responding: “Any time any governor adopts my budget, it’s a good day.”

In an interview with the State Journal afterward, Evers said he’s happy that Walker added money for K-12 schools — some $649 million in new spending over the biennium — “but the fact is for the last five years he cut $1 billion out (and) not counting inflation we’re not back to where we should be.”

“We’re still running behind,” Evers said. “That’s one of the reasons why I’m running (for governor). We haven’t made up that money they took from us in the past.”

Evers, who spoke at the convention on Wednesday, said school board members told him they saw the increased education funding as either not enough, given how many districts are still proposing referendums to exceed state-imposed revenue limits, or they see it as a political ploy.

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

Molly Beck:

Nygren’s plan would allow school districts with the low-revenue caps to increase the amount they spend from the current $9,100 per student limit to $9,400 per student next school year. The limit would increase by $100 each school year until it reaches $9,800 per student by the 2022-23 school year.

According to the Department of Public Instruction, the proposal would apply to about 120 of the state’s 422 school districts, including Mount Horeb, Baraboo, Milton, Portage, Prairie du Chien, Watertown, Westfield, Sparta and Tomah.

If all of the eligible school boards voted to take full advantage of the increase, property tax levies would increase by at least $22.5 million next school year, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. Seven school districts would not be able to take advantage of the proposal because of recent referendum rejections including Chilton, Darlington, Howard-Suamico and Southern Door school districts.

A spokesman for Nygren said he would begin seeking support from other lawmakers this week. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, did not respond to a request for comment.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student, despite tolerating Molly Beck:

Nygren’s plan would allow school districts with the low-revenue caps to increase the amount they spend from the current $9,100 per student limit to $9,400 per student next school year. The limit would increase by $100 each school year until it reaches $9,800 per student by the 2022-23 school year.

According to the Department of Public Instruction, the proposal would apply to about 120 of the state’s 422 school districts, including Mount Horeb, Baraboo, Milton, Portage, Prairie du Chien, Watertown, Westfield, Sparta and Tomah.

If all of the eligible school boards voted to take full advantage of the increase, property tax levies would increase by at least $22.5 million next school year, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. Seven school districts would not be able to take advantage of the proposal because of recent referendum rejections including Chilton, Darlington, Howard-Suamico and Southern Door school districts.

A spokesman for Nygren said he would begin seeking support from other lawmakers this week. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, did not respond to a request for comment.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results. long term, disastrous reading results.

Molly Beck::

Assembly Republicans introduced last week their own K-12 spending plan that counters Walker’s proposal, which Senate Republicans support.

The Assembly proposal has a smaller increase in funding that is paid to districts on a per-student basis than what Walker proposed and an increase in the amount of property taxes districts that have low-caps on their revenue limits can raise.

Bales said public school officials rallied around Walker’s proposal, but now feel like they are being pitted against each other. Groups advocating for public schools sent a letter to Walker and lawmakers Friday asking them to support both proposals.

“It’s not helpful to sort of seduce district leadership into picking sides,” Bales said. “(Budget) delays don’t help us either and I think there are places for compromise, and dividing and pitting districts against another isn’t going to be productive for education in the end.”

Walker said he’s going to continue to lobby lawmakers to support his funding increase.

“I’m going to do what I’ve done since (proposing it), I’m going to go off to schools across the state to remind people how important this is for student success,” Walker said.

Madison spends more than most, now around $18,000 per student.

Jessie Opoien:

Under Walker’s budget, teachers and school administrators would no longer have to renew their licenses every five years, which the governor’s office said would save faculty more than $750 over a 30-year career. Teachers could still be fired for misconduct and school districts would still be required to perform background checks.

“I’m not sure why the governor did it, I guess,” Fitzgerald said. “If he thinks it’s going to bring all the teachers back into the fold for the Republicans he’s probably wrong.”

Much more on Wisconsin’s weak teacher licensing requirements (and a proposal to further water them down), here.

Chris Rickert, using facts:

For context, Wisconsin employees who get health insurance through their work pay about 22 percent of the annual premium, on average, or about $1,345 a year for single coverage, according to 2015 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The average salary for a private- sector worker in Wisconsin was $45,230 in 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Madison teachers made, on average, $55,600 a year last school year and contribute 3 percent of premium costs, or about $205 a year for single coverage. Bringing that contribution up to 12 percent would mean the average teacher contributing about $600 more per year for single coverage.

While spending more than most ($18k/student), Madison’s benefit spending is substantial. This, despite its long term, disastrous reading results.

Related: an emphasis on adult enployment.

Molly Beck:

The law, known as Act 10, required local governments who offer a state health insurance plan to their employees to pay no more than 88 percent of the average premiums. Walker’s 2017-19 state budget will now require the same of all school districts, regardless of which health insurance plans they offer.

That spells trouble for the Madison School District, which for years after Act 10 was enacted didn’t require staff to pay any portion of their health insurance costs.

The district does now require employees to pay something toward their monthly health insurance premiums, but the contributions do not reach the 12 percent threshold proposed by Walker. The contribution levels in Madison range from 1.5 percent for lower-paid staff to 10 percent for school district administrators.

“While we have not done an exhaustive review, we are only aware of the Madison School District that did not capture the reform savings,” said Walker’s spokesman Jack Jablonski.

Much more on the Madison School District’s healthcare costs (a long term issue, including WPS coverage).

The District spent 25.62% of its budget on benefits (!) in 2014.

As Stanford University economic researcher Barbara Biasi explains in a new study (which is awaiting peer review), Act 10 created a marketplace for teachers in which public-school districts can compete for better employees. For instance, a district can pay more to recruit and retain “high-value added” teachers—that is, those who most improve student learning. Districts can also cap salaries of low-performing teachers, which might encourage them to quit or leave for other districts.

The 2011 Wisconsin law, known as Act 10, limited collective bargaining to base wages while letting school districts negotiate pay with individual teachers based on criteria other than years on the job and education level. Some districts like Green Bay have used the law to reward teacher performance while others such as Racine have adhered to seniority-based salary schedules.

Prior research on Washington, D.C.’s teacher-tenure reforms and merit pay has found that financial incentives improved the performance of highly rated teachers while dismissal threats led to attrition among ineffective ones. Student achievement has risen as a result. Act 10 provides an opportunity to evaluate how changes in contract negotiations affect teaching quality.

As Stanford University economic researcher Barbara Biasi explains in a new study (which is awaiting peer review), Act 10 created a marketplace for teachers in which public-school districts can compete for better employees. For instance, a district can pay more to recruit and retain “high-value added” teachers—that is, those who most improve student learning. Districts can also cap salaries of low-performing teachers, which might encourage them to quit or leave for other districts.

Ms. Biasi analyzed how the demand for and supply of teachers changed across districts with individual-salary negotiations from those that kept uniform pay schedules. She found that the share of teachers moving from salary-schedule to individual-salary districts, and vice versa, roughly doubled between 2012 and 2014 from the five years prior to the law’s enactment.

She also found changes in salary structure. For instance, salaries in Green Bay increased about 13% for teachers with five to six years of experience but a mere 4% for those who had worked 29 or 30 years. Salaries among teachers with the same seniority also diverged more. In Racine the opposite occurred. Green Bay was able to pay better teachers more without regard to the lock-step pay scales traditionally dictated by unions.

Ms. Biasi found that better teachers gravitate to districts where they can negotiate their own pay while lousy teachers tend to migrate toward those where salary scales are regimented. The study found “a 34 percent increase in the quality of teachers moving from salary schedule to individual-salary districts, and a 17 percent decrease in the quality of teachers exiting individual-salary districts.”

“These sorting patterns,” Ms. Biasi concludes, “lead to a small increase in average quality of the teaching workforce in individual-salary districts.” Student math achievement rose significantly in individual-salary districts relative to salary-schedule districts due in part to improvements in the teacher workforce.

Much more on ACT 10, here.

Oconomowoc raised teacher salaries and increased high school teaching time.

Nico Savidge:

Just before the UW-Milwaukee professors’ meeting Tuesday, Walker’s office issued a scathing statement deriding the no-confidence votes and faculty tenure.

“Some faculty bodies … appear more interested in protecting outdated ‘job for life’ tenure than about helping students get the best education possible,” Walker said. “The university should not be about protecting the interests of the faculty, but about delivering value and excellence to Wisconsin.”

The governor’s rebuke of faculty illustrates an important limit to their symbolic resolutions: While Cross may be unpopular enough among many professors to prompt no-confidence votes, he still has the backing of the Board of Regents that controls his job, and both he and the Regents have support among Republicans lawmake

Politifact:

What made headlines from the announcement by the Department of Public Instruction were scores by younger students on a different test, the Badger Exam.

More than half of Wisconsin’s public school students in grades three through eight — 51.2 percent — were proficient or advanced in English language arts in 2014-’15, and 43.7 percent did as well in math.

Meanwhile, the department’s release of the ACT scores got lesser billing in the news reports.

That release stressed that the 2014-’15 school year marked the first time in Wisconsin that all juniors (11th grade) in public high schools had the opportunity to take the test. That’s because testing fees were paid by the state.

Alan Talaga:

I think the Wisconsin State Journal’s editorial board is generally pretty fair. The editorials, mostly written by editor Scott Milfred, come from a fiscally-conservative, socially-liberal perspective. While I often disagree with their views, I admire their principled stance on marriage equality and transparency in all levels of government.

Sometimes the State Journal spills ink tilting at windmills like suggesting Walker and legislative Republicans were seriously going to consider redistricting reform, even when the latest round of redistricting gave the GOP a 10-year lock on control of the Assembly. Other times, they dilute their message a bit by trying a bit too hard to be even-handed.

However, those attempts at even-handedness go out the window when it comes to teachers’ unions, with Madison Teachers Inc. as the State Journal’s primary target. I, myself, have many criticisms of MTI, but the editorial board has handpicked them to be public employee boogeyman number one.

I would think that the elimination of almost every single teacher’s union in the state would make for a less tempting target, but this editorial board still feels a need to take weird potshots at MTI.

A couple of weeks ago, the State Journal ran an editorial in support of year-round schools, which is a good idea that I wholly support. But then much of the editorial suggested that MTI was the reason we don’t have any year-round school programs in Madison.

“Badger Rock Middle School is a good example of why the district should insist on more options with its teachers,” it read. “Badger Rock is a charter school that employs union teachers, so it follows the traditional school calendar.”

This seemed odd to me, as I had never read anything about MTI being opposed the idea of year-round schools. Obviously, I remember their opposition to Madison Prep, but that’s involved a ton of issues.

Steven Greenhouse:

All over the state, public executives are exercising new authority. Instead of raising teachers’ salaries, the Mequon-Thiensville School District, near Milwaukee, froze them for two years, saving $560,000. It saved an additional $400,000 a year by increasing employee contributions for health care, said its superintendent, Demond Means. And it is starting a merit pay system for teachers, a move that has been opposed by some teachers and embraced by others.
Ted Neitzke, school superintendent in West Bend, a city of 31,000 people north of Milwaukee, said that before Act 10 his budget-squeezed district had to cut course offerings and increase class sizes. Now, the district has raised the retirement age for teachers and revamped its health plan, saving $250,000 a year. “We couldn’t negotiate or maneuver around that when there was bargaining,” Mr. Neitzke said. “We’ve been able to shift money out of the health plan back into the classroom. We’ve increased programming.”
James R. Scott, a Walker appointee who is chairman of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, which administers the law regarding public-employee unions, said that “as a result of Act 10, the advantages that labor held have been diminished.” He added: “It’s fair to say that employers have the upper hand now.”
In Oshkosh, Mark Rohloff, the city manager, says the law has saved his city $1.2 million a year, largely because employees are now paying more of their pension and health contributions. But he said state aid cuts of $2 million a year left his city with an $800,000 shortfall.
Among the city’s 560 city workers, union membership has fallen to 225, down from 450. The police and the firefighters, who were exempted from Act 10’s restrictions on collective bargaining, make up most of the remaining union members. Mr. Rohloff said his city’s police and firefighters have averaged annual raises of 2.5 percent, while the other workers had no across-the-board raises from 2010 to 2012, and received a 1 percent increase in 2013.
“Some of the employees who are not represented feel they’re second-class citizens compared to other employees,” Mr. Rohloff said.
Demoralization is the flip side of Act 10. In Oneida County in northern Wisconsin, the county supervisors jettisoned language requiring “just cause” when firing employees. Now, said Julie Allen, a computer programmer and head of the main local for Oneida County’s civil servants, morale is “pretty bad” and workers are afraid to speak out about anything, even safety issues or a revised pay scale. “We don’t have just cause,” she said. “We don’t have seniority protections. So people are pretty scared.”

Much more on Act 10, here.

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

Collective bargaining was restored for all city, county and school district employees by a Court ruling last week through application of an earlier (9/14/12) Court decision achieved by MTI. Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas found that Governor Walker’s appointees to the WERC, James Scott and Rodney Pasch, were in contempt of court “for implementing” those parts of Act 10 which he (Colas) previously declared unconstitutional, which made them “a law which does not exist”, as Colas put it.
The Judge told Scott & Pasch to comply with his finding of unconstitutionality or be punished for their contempt. They agreed to comply.
Judge Colas made his ruling on unconstitutionality on September 14, 2012. MTI was represented by its legal counsel, Lester Pines.
In the contempt claim, in addition to MTI, Pines represented the Kenosha Education Association and WEAC. The latter was also represented by Milwaukee attorney Tim Hawks, who also represented AFSCME Council 40, AFT Wisconsin, AFT nurses and SEIU Healthcare, in last week’s case. Also appearing was Nick Padway, who partnered with Pines in representing Milwaukee Public Employees Union Local 61 in the original case.
Judge Colas specifically ordered the WERC to cease proceeding with union recertification elections, which in his earlier ruling were found to be unconstitutional. Act 10 mandated all public sector unions to hold annual elections to determine whether union members wished to continue with representation by the union. Act 10 prescribed that to win a union had to achieve 50% plus one of all eligible voters, not 50% plus one of those voting like all other elections. The elections were to occur November 1.

Bill Glauber:

ines helped spearhead the legal challenge against Act 10, which curtailed collective bargaining for most public sector workers. In a case involving Madison Teachers Inc. and Public Employees Local 61 in Milwaukee, a Dane County circuit judge struck down portions of the law.The case now goes to the state Supreme Court.
In another case involving Pines and Madison Teachers Inc., a Dane County judge struck down a portion of a law that gave Walker the power to veto rules written by the state schools superintendent. The case is now before the 4th District Court of Appeals in Madison.
Pines, representing the League of Women Voters, successfully argued in front of a Dane County judge that the state’s voter ID law violated the Wisconsin Constitution. The decision was overturned by the 4th District Court of Appeals, and the league has petitioned the Supreme Court to review the ruling. The voter ID measure remains on hold because of a ruling in a separate case.
“I believe that my law firm — because of the position we’re in and because of the work we’ve done — has disrupted the (Walker) agenda by using appropriate means and calling on the third equal branch of government (the court) to stop the majoritarian and authoritarian impulses of this Legislature,” he says.
The outcome of the cases is far from certain. But one thing is clear: Pines will keep up the fight.

Much more on Act 10, here.

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….

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

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

First, I provide some background on the private school voucher imposition proposal. Next, I list thirteen ways in which the proposal and its advocates are hypocritical, inconsistent, irrational, or just plain wrong. Finally, I briefly explain for the benefit of Wisconsin Federation for Children why the students in Madison are not attending failing schools.

Related: Counterpoint by David Blaska.
Does the School Board Matter? Ed Hughes argues that experience does, but what about “Governance” and “Student Achievement”?
2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2009: 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use. This program continues, despite the results.
2004: Madison Schools Distort Reading Data (2004) by Mark Seidenberg.
2012: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”
Scott Bauer

Almost half of Wisconsin residents say they haven’t heard enough about voucher schools to form an opinion, according to the Marquette University law school poll. Some 27 percent of respondents said they have a favorable view of voucher schools while 24 percent have an unfavorable view. But a full 43 percent said they hadn’t heard enough about them to form an opinion.
“There probably is still more room for political leadership on both sides to try to put forward convincing arguments and move opinion in their direction,” pollster Charles Franklin said.
The initial poll question about vouchers only asked for favorability perceptions without addressing what voucher schools are. In a follow-up question, respondents were told that vouchers are payments from the state using taxpayer money to fund parents’ choices of private or religious schools.
With that cue, 51 percent favored it in some form while 42 percent opposed it.
Walker is a staunch voucher supporter.

More on the voucher proposal, here.
www.wisconsin2.org
A close observer of Madison’s $392,789,303 K-12 public school district ($14,547/student) for more than nine years, I find it difficult to see substantive change succeeding. And, I am an optimist.
It will be far better for us to address the District’s disastrous reading results locally, than to have change imposed from State or Federal litigation or legal changes. Or, perhaps a more diffused approach to redistributed state tax dollar spending.

Laura Waters:

Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, has an editorial in the Wall St. Journal this week assailing the “explosive growth” in America’s public school work force. Since 1970, he charges, student enrollment has “flat-lined,” yet the number of teachers and instructional aides has doubled, from 3.3 million to 6.4 million, with concurrent increases in costs.
Coulson writes, “America’s public schools have warehoused three million people in jobs that do little to improve student achievement–people who would be working productively in the private sector if that extra $210 billion were not taxed out of the economy each year.”
But there’s a panacea readily available: create state voucher systems to send all our kids to private schools. (Also, elect Mitt Romney because President Obama’s education agenda is an “expensive and tragic failure.”)
Whoa, Nellie!
While it’s no doubt a challenge to squish a radical paradigm shift within the confines of the WSJ’s 600-word limit, that’s no excuse for specious logic or casual disregard for facts. Worse, this sort of inflammatory rhetoric gives education reform a bad name.
For example, let’s look at Mr. Coulson’s claim that American public schools hire too many teachers and aides (i.e., have too low a teacher/student ratio), and that private schools are cheaper and produce higher-achieving students.
He writes, “If we returned to the student-staff ratio of 1970, American tax payers would save about $210 billion in personnel costs.”

Madison School Board member Ed Hughes:

There is no mystery about the size of the overall pie. The last budget under Governor Doyle appropriated $5,025,190,300 for elementary and secondary school aids for 2009-10 and $5,271,555,900 for 2010-11. Under Governor Walker’s budget, this total was cut to $4,845,083,000 for 2011-12 and $4,913,986,100 for 2012-13. So Governor Walker slashed general state aid to schools by about $538 million over the biennium. This is hardly cause for celebration.
How next year’s $4.9 billion in general state aid is split up among the state’s 424 school districts is determined by the school funding formula. I describe how the formula works here. This year, to just about everyone’s surprise, the formula has turned out to be Madison’s friend.
Last year, application of the school funding formula resulted in MMSD qualifying for about $15 million in general state aid. This amount was increased to about $43 million by virtue of the hold-harmless provision of the law that capped each school district’s reduction in state aid at 10% of the previous year’s total.
How could it be that the same formula that calculated that MMSD was entitled to $15 million in state aid in 2011-12 would determine that the district was in line for $53 million for 2012-13?

Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding

• usgovernmentspending.com chart & data
• Wisconsin School Finance History
• PolitiFact on the current Wisconsin budget
• Wisconsin Budget Project
• Mike Ford on “Fair Funding for Our Future”.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (92K PDF):

Layoff: Seniority is a right that is earned under MTI’s various Collective Bargaining Agreements. Seniority is based on one’s years of service and provides protection from indiscriminate layoff.
Under MTI’s Contracts, seniority protects members of MTI’s various bargaining units from subjective or discriminatory layoff. When layoff is necessary, the Contracts provide an objective means, including tie-breakers for those with the same seniority.
Governor Walker’s Act 10 puts seniority in jeopardy because all collective bargaining agreements in Wisconsin covering school district employees will disappear in 2013 under Walker’s Act 10 (blekko, clusty, google news).
What can you do to protect your employment security? Get involved in this spring’s RECALL ELECTION. There are only 15 days until the RECALL PRIMARY ELECTION. Candidates Barrett, Falk, La Follette and Vinehout have promised to reverse Act 10 and to restore public employees’ rights to collectively bargain.
Without your help, there is no chance of reversing the negative impact of Act 10 on school district employees. Call/email MTI Assistant Director Jeff Knight (jknight@madisonteachers.org / 608-257-0491) to offer assistance via your Union.