Hey, Walker and Mitchell: We're Waiting for Your Outrage

by folkbum

Now that a budget compromise has been worked out, we can see that the final plan lacks the Tom Barrett-Jason Fields "fix" to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program "funding flaw." It seems there is something--the Milwaukee Public Schools must use part of the additional money the budget does aim their way to offset property taxes--but not what people like Scott Walker and George Mitchell so desperately want.

I know this, because Scott Walker has devoted two editions of his (non?) campaign's Walker Weekly to a non-vote in the Joint Finance Committee (yeah, their budget sure went places, ain'a?). You can find the gory details at this earlier post, if you want, but Walker is trying to blame Lena Taylor for not putting forward one particular fix to the flaw, when, in fact, she supported a different fix and more funds for MPS that not a single GOP member of the JFC voted for. Apparently, voting for more money for Milwaukee is, in Walker's mind, tantamount to betrayal. Taylor, by the way, is Walker's opponent, assuming he decides to run for re-election as Milwaukee County Executive.

George Mitchell, of School Choice Wisconsin fame, has carried Walker's Taylor-attack water on the blogs, including mine (see the comments to the post I linked above, for example). Mitchell has gone after Taylor and Pedro Colón (running for a city-wide office now and, therefore, a fancy new target) with incredible aggression. But Mitchell has not voiced a critique of his allies in the Republican-controlled Assembly who managed to pass a budget that lacks not only the Barrett-Fields "fix" but any "fix" at all! That makes me suspicious that, as with Walker, this is less about a "fix" than about Taylor.

The last comment Mitchell left here reads,

Jay, [y]ou imply above that this is about defeating Sen. Taylor. But, of course, if there is a school choice funding fix--my objective--it is a political win for her. Only if the budget includes no fix does she face political consequences.

It's now been about 72 hours since the announcement was made outlining the compromise bill. The Walker Weekly will show up in my inbox sometime overnight, so who knows, maybe Walker will rail against Doyle, Huebsch, and Robson for not including a "fix." The School Choice Wisconsin website is as-yet silent on the lack of a "fix"--Mitchell's "objective," remember.

So, to George Mitchell and Scott Walker, I offer up this space. Post a comment or email me with your outrage over this deal and those who brokered it--Lena Taylor and Pedro Colón had nothing to do with it!--and I will post it here for all to see. Whenever you're ready.

Public School Teachers and Private Schools

From the mailbag:

I am a retired Madison teacher and formerly a 25 year member of the MTI negotiating team.  I have been trying to find out some information for some time.  Maybe you can help me.  On public radio this week, there was an advocate of choice schools reciting some statistics.  He said that a study by MTEA found that 29% of Milwaukee teachers send their kids to voucher school.  Do you know that the actual numbers are?  I have heard various numbers like that ranging from 14 to 50%.

The program he heard was the Joy Cardin show with George Mitchell, the one I called into and wrote about Tuesday. And it's true--Mitchell said that "29% of MPS teachers with children send their children to private schools," calling it a long-term tradition.

But, because I am attentive to my readers, I took this fellow up on his question, and did some looking into it. As I found in my own conversation with Mitchell, it turns out he was not telling the whole story.

The 29% figure is real, if debatable. The number comes from a study by pro-voucher researcher Denis Doyle, published through the Fordham Foundation. The figure is based on Doyle's analysis of 2000 census data; just to give you an idea of where he's coming from, Doyle's analysis of 1980 census data was published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and his work on the 1990 data was funded by the pro-voucher Center for Education Reform.

Doyle's analysis had two components, studying the difference between public school teachers and the general public nationwide, and teasing out the data for America's 50 largest cities, including Milwaukee. Doyle found that in the nation's 50 biggest cities, 21.5% of public school teachers send children to private schools, about 4 percentage points more often than parents overall. Milwaukee's 29.4% of teachers sending kids to private schools was six percentage points higher than Milwaukee parents in general. Milwaukee ranked 20th of 50 cities in terms of difference between parents and population, and the study made no distinction between private schools and schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

But there are some other things going on here. Gerald Bracey, a crusader on the side of public schools and teachers, gave Doyle and Fordham one of his coveted Rotten Apple awards in 2004--the “If at first you don’t succeed: Fudge, Fudge Again” award, in fact:

When Doyle finally got around to showing the data, the 1990 data revealed that 12.1% of public school teachers use private schools compared to 13.1% of the general public. In his analysis of the 2000 census, the figure is down to 10.6%, and it’s only 7.9% if you don’t count teachers who send their kids to both public and private schools. For the general public it’s 12.1%, 9.4% dropping out parents who use both. [. . .]

Doyle calls public school teachers education “connoisseurs.” One would expect private school teachers to exhibit the same level of expertise, yet fewer than a third of private school teachers pack their children off to private schools, 29.5% in 2000, down from 32.7% in 1990. In fact, although 54.1% of private school teachers in 2000 had family incomes of more than $84,000 a year, only 31.1% of this group had children in private schools.

Of course, Bracey can't break down the private-school number by city, so we cannot make the direct comparison between Milwaukee's public and private school teachers, specifically. But it is important to note that the 29% number would probably be lower if you take out parents who send their children to both public and private schools, as Bracey found for the study overall. Plus, when George Mitchell said that it is 29% of Milwaukee Public Schools teachers, this is not what the report says; it refers only to public school teachers who live in the city, who may not all teach for MPS. More importantly, the number for Milwaukee is not significantly different than the number for private school teachers nationwide. If the public schools are good enough for 70% of private school teachers, why can't they be good enough for 70% of public school teachers without its being an issue?

But there's more to it than that: If you go back to discussions (see here and here, for example) about the creation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher program in 1990, two proponents, Annette Polly Williams and Howard Fuller, were claiming--based on what, I admit I don't know--that fully half of MPS teachers were sending their children to private schools. These claims were a big part of the push behind the program's creation. If that 50% number is true--and, again, I'm just taking their word for it--that means that between 1990 and 2000, there was a 40% drop in the number of MPS teachers sending their children to private schools. I have no idea what the number might be now, but the trend seems to be downward.

Finally, and, cautiously, given my discussion of sampling the other day, a note on Doyle's methodology. It's actually worth reading the "Methodology" section in the report, since it talks about the census data being used. The Census Bureau releases 5% of the data for an area--like the city of Milwaukee--for study; the authors say that the incidence of teachers with children in the population is 2% of households. In other words, all the data on public school teachers in this study comes from just 0.1% of households in Milwaukee.

Exam Week

I have to slow down the blog a little bit twixt now and the weekend, with exams and gearing up for new classes next week. But I have something in the pipeline for later today, and another meeting with 8th CD congressional candidate Steve Kagen this afternoon to keep me extra busy.

But here's an existential question: Am I making a difference? I've blown who knows how many hours and how many thousands of words on vouchers and the politics of it and the mechanics of it in the last ten days, and I can't tell if it's been worth anything. I can't even get a dismissive sneer from Sykes for accusing him of hypocritically playing the race card.

I will tell you that I am slightly afraid George Mitchell knew who I was on WPR the other day: I'm the only caller he addressed by name . . .

UPDATE: Apparently I am making a difference, as someone nominated me for a Koufax award. Last year I cheated and nominated myself, but this year I didn't get around to it. Thanks, whoever it was.

And I should add that the fine folks at Wampum are still looking for financial support to run the left blogosphere's biggest awards show, so if you have a little extra coin, drop some in the "make a donation" basket over there.

Another Pre-emptive Strike: Accountability

Sorry this is so long. The topic is complex.

Yesterday I talked a little bit about the changes in Milwaukee Public Schools funding provided in the Sinicki bill addressing the issue of Milwaukee Parental Choice Program caps. Today it's accountability, as the Sinicki plan--which mirrors the plan Governor Jim Doyle proposed in November--radically changes the accountability structure for voucher schools.

Now, I need to be honest again up front: I do not like standardized testing. As I have written here many times before, I do not think the regimen of testing imposed by No Child Left Behind provides an accurate assessment measure for either students or schools, and to use standardized test scores as the sole basis for judging the public schools is bad public policy and bad educational practice. As I have noted, I would be a hypocrite to advocate the kind of testing that I despise in my own school for voucher schools. However, my own plan for accountability seems not to have drawn any sponsors. That leaves the two choices on the table--the Sinicki bill or the Darling/ Vukmir bill. Again, I point you to Seth's place for a comprehensive side-by side (also note Seth's follow-up).

While I would not wish testing like this on my worst enemy, on the merits, the Doyle/ Sinicki version is the one I side with, under protest. There are many reasons why I would rather have that one, but first I want to look at present levels of accountability and the changes under the Darling/ Vukmir proposal; I will end this post with a discussion of the Sinicki bill.

As it is now
Up until 1995, the state received an annual report from John Witte, a respected and unbiased professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at the UW-Madison's LaFollette School. But for the last decade, there has not been a single independent analysis of the program. Anything we know about voucher schools comes from information that the schools themselves choose to release to the public. MPCP schools are not required to release any data except the number of students attending in the program (and schools have been caught inflating that number). So, with the exception of selectively released information, the schools are or can be utter black holes when it comes to graduation rates, truancy rates, achievement and proficiency levels, or anything else that you can think of. (I am not suggesting all or any specific voucher schools would show poorly in those areas, just that any information we get from schools in those areas is likely calculated to make the schools look good. If you don't have to make public bad test results, you probably won't.)

A number of outside studies of quality have been done since 1995 by arguably biased researchers; those who like vouchers generally have found that the program does well while those who dislike vouchers find that it is not any better for kids than MPS. Several studies, though, have been done on process, and accountability that accrues through that process. The Public Policy Forum, in particular, has done well with this. For example, despite the news that 92% of voucher schools give some flavor of standardized test at one or more levels, the PPF discovered that many of the data collected are never made public, or even provided to the parents of students in those schools.

In fact, the pro-voucher Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in its excellent series on the MPCP last spring, found that concerns over academic quality just don't factor into parents' decisions to send their children to particular schools as often as we might like. Howard Fuller, president of one of the groups now advertising hard against Gov. Doyle, admitted that the marketplace idea--the idea that accountability inherent in the free market's process for rewarding success and punishing failure--has failed when it comes to MPCP. The Public Policy Forum identified one solitary school that had been shut down by parents' decisions in the first 12 years of the program.

That is not to say that schools don't shut down--they do, sometimes because the sponsors pull the plug or sometimes because the state's Department of Public Instruction steps in. DPI can shut down a school for basically three reasons: the school does not offer a safe physical environment for students (including checks on employees); the school does not have a sound business model or attempts to defraud the state; or the school does not meet the minimum statutory definition of a "school." This does not give me much of a sense of certainty regarding the quality of the schools that remain.

George Mitchell, when he was on WPR this morning where I could call in and question him, said that there were "many requirements that schools must follow" to continue in the program--but aside from the three I mentioned above, the requirements are quite thin. Basically, schools have to do one of these: advance 70% of voucher students one grade a year; claim that voucher students attend at least 90% of the time; assert that 80% of the voucher students make "significant academic progress"; or involve 70% of the voucher parents. The standard basically is, create your your own standard and then say you met it.

What's of greatest concern is that for the schools shut down by DPI--just a handful overall, and most of them in the past 18 months--parents didn't get involved in closing them, and on occasion have been dismayed that the schools closed. I will never forget the words of a parent interviewed following the shuttering of Academic Solutions about a year ago. She was upset at the closure, as her daughter--previously a failing student in MPS--was getting A's at Academic Solutions. But as DPI and even the Milwaukee Police Department made clear, there was no learning going on at the school--the A's earned by the girl were meaningless by any objective standard. Yet the inflated grade gave the mother, and possibly her daughter, an inflated sense of the quality of Academic Solutions.

The plural of anecdote (like the one above) is not, of course, data. But therein lies the current conundrum: There are no data. There is nothing to show that any of the present levels of accountability do anything to guarantee that the state is getting good returns on its investment in the MPCP.

Their proposal
In late 2003, the Republican legislature sent Gov. Doyle a bill that included a long-term study of the voucher program using standardized testing data. There were a number of problems with that bill. Despite what George Mitchell said to me on WPR this morning, that study would not have provided the level of comparable data that the Doyle/ Sinicki bill would. I discussed that at the bottom of this long post. But the same ideas are being recycled in the present Darling/ Vukmir proposal. There is an article in paper this morning about the study gearing up:

The study would be conducted by the School Choice Demonstration Project at Georgetown University, with Patrick Wolf, a well-known researcher in education policy, as the lead figure. Jay Greene, a professor at the University of Arkansas who has written numerous research works favorable to voucher programs, would be a partner with Wolf, as would University of Wisconsin-Madison professor John Witte, who was the main researcher in the studies in the early 1990s and who is regarded as more neutral on the merits of vouchers.

Wolf said the study was expected to cost $9 million and last five years, with funding to come from private foundations. He said about 40% of the money had been lined up from foundations such as the Walton Family Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Joyce Foundation. Other major national foundations are considering funding requests. Researchers are seeking funding from a variety of sources, hoping the results will be regarded as even-handed and scientifically sound.

A major part of the research would be using a randomly selected sample of students in MPS, in charter schools in Milwaukee and in private schools that are in the voucher program to analyze and compare the educational success and progress of each group of students. Scores on Wisconsin's battery of standardized tests called the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination would be used in the analysis. [. . .]

The questions that the research would aim to answer include how well voucher students are doing academically, how their performance compares with other students and what are the explanations for the findings, Wolf said. The researchers would also aim to identify and describe the traits of schools that are the most successful.

Here we see some of the potential problems: The funding for this study, as was planned in the 2003 bill, will come entirely from groups which are not exactly disinterested. I mean, the Waltons and the Joyces are to vouchers what Orville Reddenbacher is to popcorn. Jay Greene never met a voucher program he couldn't skew data to support. Most importantly, the program will only test a representative sample of students from MPS and voucher schools.

Now, I am not a statistician, but I know enough social science to recognize that representative samples can produce valid data. But I have serious concerns about that part: For one, I am concerned that schools will be allowed to opt out of the study. The sampling is supposed to cover that, I know, I know; but if the only schools participating are ones with above-embarrassing test scores, the researchers will have to work hard to make the sample representative.

For two, and perhaps most importantly, while the study this time (as opposed to the 2003 proposal) involves the state WKCE exams, the study will not in any way at any time provide any kind of comprehensive picture of how individual schools perform on those tests. While the samples will provide an idea of whether the voucher program overall is better or worse or comparable to MPS, the study does not one damned thing to paint a picture of how well the individual schools that parents have to choose from are doing at present or over time.

Right now on the Milwaukee Public Schools home page, you can find the district's report cards. And this isn't just the big document that tells you how the district is doing overall; you can download the reports for any school and for any racial or other subgroup. You can find data, and then find it again flipped upside-down around and backwards, the district is so thorough with its reports. If this study of the voucher program goes through with sampling of data, there will be no comparable set of data for the schools in the program. When parents hear whatever the answer is from this study, whether it be that voucher schools are great or that they are weak, they will have no way to know whether or not the particular school they are choosing is reflective of the program as a whole.

MPS has some dynamite programs, many of them. Even within bad schools, there are pockets of success in distinct programs that draw from that population. It would simply be a fallacy to suggest that because MPS's fourth-grade reading level, as a whole, is low, that every MPS school fails its young readers. The same will hold true if this voucher study is the only information we have--it would be a fallacy to suggest that any individual school a parent wants for a child is as good or as bad as the overall study results show the program to be. Yet the pro-voucher folks insist that there is no need to collect or make public data on voucher schools the way we must, by state and federal law, do in MPS.

The Doyle/ Sinicki plan
As I said above, I reluctantly back the Sinicki bill's accountability measures. I do not do so because it involves a No Child Left Behind-style testing regimen, but rather in spite of that. As the plan indicates,

MPCP schools must administer the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) Criterion-Referenced Tests in grades 3-8 and grade 10. DPI must report the results for MPCP schools so parents and taxpayers can compare the academic performance of choice schools with public schools. In addition, the scores of MPCP pupils will determine whether schools meet adequate yearly progress objectives or are labeled “in need of improvement” under the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act--just like under-performing public and independent charter schools.

Note that this plan requires the testing of all students in all schools, not just a "sample" from schools that did not opt out. This is key, because then there is no other way for the taxpayers, the public, parents, or the state to know the quality (as much as a standardized test can judge that) of individual schools in the program. Even if you feel, as I do, that standardized tests are not valid and authentic assessments, this plan provides two important bits of data. One, we will be able to track schools' performance over time, and gauge the "value-added" effect of these schools. If they really are able to take students who are failing miserably in the public schools, two or three or four grade levels behind, then we should be able to track whether or not the school is effective in identifying and remediating the problems. Two, if the voucher schools are giving the same tests at the same time as public schools, there can be some real, legitimate comparative data. Even if we know that "proficiency" is an arbitrary and useless benchmark, we still will be able to compare the achievement on "proficiency" of voucher schools to those of public schools and, perhaps more importantly, to each other.

But this extensive and far-reaching NCLB-style testing plan is not without its detractors on the other side. If the funding piece I talked about yesterday will generate mind-blowing spin from the right, the accountability piece is equally dangerous to the state of our craniums. For example, when I pressed George Mitchell about accountability this morning, he was shocked--shocked, I tell you!--that anyone would dare suggest that every school administer the same test. "The idea that the state's test should to be mandated on more than 100 different schools in Milwaukee, I don't think is appropriate. Schools ought to have the option of choosing which of many acceptable standardized tests they desire to use." I wanted to shout into the phone about how nutty it is that MPS's 200 different programs have to all take the same test! Where is our freedom to choose how and when we test? Hm?

This is something I'm toying with calling the "Accountability Paradox": Conservatives who cannot mandate standards and testing fast enough for the public schools absolutely abhor the idea of applying those same standards and tests to private schools that take state money.

Campus Tavern's Ryan Alexander points to a couple of Marquetters' thoughts on the matter displaying this paradox. Law student Steve at Eminent Domain explains,

A lot of this testing talk is just a means to control the private schools. Let's say that Doyle gets his way and his chosen test is used to measure the quality of the private schools. The private schools don't want to look bad based on these test results. They will abandon their chosen curriculum in order to "teach for the test" as it has been called. That kills the whole idea behind school choice: parents should chose the kind of school that they want for their kids. The private schools that once offered a diverse range of educational programs will now be forced to teach for Doyle's test or look like they are "failing". And believe me, if they look like they are "failing" based on the test, school choice opponents will be happy to claim that as proof that school choice doesn't work.

This is different from the way people use the test to label public schools as "failing" . . . how? Steve himself complains that he doesn't want his "tax money being wasted in the public school system as it currently is." How does he know it's a waste? Could it perhaps be because the test data (or other data collected by MPS but not voucher schools) show that the schools are "failing"?

Even more to the point: Should the creative and varied programs in MPS be forced to "teach to the test"? Is it right to take away the choice of parents to send their children to unique programs within MPS? Is it possible that NCLB and its requirements are stifling the kind of innovation that would make the voucher program unnecessary? Okay, that's a little much with the rhetorical questions, but you have to ask them when Marquette Prof. John McAdams can write,

Even if the testing doesn’t have a tendentious political agenda, it’s likely to be burdensome. The bureaucrats imposing the testing will likely have a “public school” mentality. They will care more about “standards” and “outcomes” and “assessment” and “procedures” than about actually teaching kids.

They will tend, in other words, to undermine the distinctive ethos of private schools.

Don’t parents looking for a school in which to enroll their kids have a right to know how effective the school is? And don’t parents with kids enrolled in the school have a right to know how their kids are doing?

The answer is simple: in a competitive market, all schools will be under pressure to show that they are effective, but there are different ways of doing that.

Schools may choose to administer some form of standardized test, but will be free to pick a test that reflects their educational goals and philosophy.

Parents will want to know how their kids are doing, but this might involve sitting down with a guidance counselor to discuss scores on standardized tests, or it might involve having parents review all their children’s graded assignments.

The key thing to remember is that public school bureaucrats will, either by design or because they don’t know how to think any other way, subvert the benign organizational culture of private schools.

But it's all right to entrench a monolithic culture, through testing, upon the diverse--some would say "distinctive"--ethos of more than 200 different public school options in the city of Milwaukee? And, professor, the straw men in that post . . . unacceptable from someone who should know better. "Do the private schools fail to teach kids in junior high how to use condoms? They may be found to violate educational 'standards.' Do religious schools fail to teach that gays are the victims of 'homophobic' prejudice? Same thing." You of all people, professor, ought to know how to Google up the state Model Academic Standards, none of which cover condoms or homophobia. I hope they cover the logical fallacies, though. As much as people like Steve will say that "Hasn't it been the political Left that has done nothing be berate standardized testing for years? Now it's the lynchpin of school choice regulation?" in some kind of mock disbelief, I can just as strongly question how the pro-testing side is running away from their standards here. At the very least, I hope I can expect to see Steve and Professor McAdams at the next anti-NCLB protest.

More seriously, there is more to this than just a simple what's-good-for-the-goose proposition on my part and the part of Chris Sinicki and Gov. Doyle. If voucher schools are teaching to the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards, then at least we know that there is something more to the school than just a drawerful of paper work. And if a school chooses not to teach to exactly those standards, they can freely explain why their results don't matter, or rest secure in the knowledge that their quality, innovative program's success will shine through even if they don't "teach to the test." After all, good students with a good education ought to be able to perform up to the level of "proficiency" in reading, math, or other core subject areas. There should be nothing in the test results that schools will want to run away from--and if there are results they want to run away from, I think we, as taxpayers funding these schools, are owed an explanation.

In the end, that's the crux of the accountability matter: We are the taxpayers. We are paying for these schools' existence, and we deserve some assurance that the trains are running, even if not on time. If these schools were completely private, and parents' private funds were all that got invested in them, then I could (and happily do) stomach the idea of schools that don't follow state standards or open meetings laws or special education requirements. But, as I've explained before, the vouchers signed over to these schools are not just parents' money. The money is their money, my money, your money, all of our money. Even Charlie Sykes throws a few pennies into the hopper for every voucher student. And even Charlie Sykes deserves better than the non-specific, long-term study proposed (for the second time around) by Republicans in the legislature.

George Mitchell on WPR

George Mitchell, who is the George half of GeorgeandSusanMitchell, the entity that has brought you everything from School Choice Wisconsin to the Alliance for Choices in Education and its predecessor, the American Education Reform Council, was on Wisconsin Public Radio this morning. (You can find the audio archive here; look for 01/24A.) I was able to get in as the first caller, questioning Mitchell about accounatability. He said some things that were not quite true, but since today is Voucher Accountability Day at fr&r, I'll save that for later.

But I was able to catch part of his response to the caller after me, who asked about special education, before I went inside where I don't have a radio and can't make the live streams work. Mitchell said something technically accurate, but misleading. The caller stated that schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program do not have to take special education students, and asked how this was fair. Mitchell said this was not true, that voucher schools do have to take any and everyone. What he didn't say--at least in the part I heard before I got out of the car--is that voucher schools are not required to provide special education services. A school may accept for admission a deaf student, for example, but the school does not have to provide sign language translation or other aid. Parents would be insane to send their deaf child to a school that will not provide the service.

By default, then, most special needs students--especially the most severe, and those with severe health impairments--inevetably end up in the Milwaukee Public Schools, where by law, we muct provide all accomodations no matter how expensive. As Mitchell went on and on about how voucher schools did the work at half the price, I kept thinking about how the cost of a voucher student (~$6300) is not significantly lower than MPS's per-pupil spending on non-special needs, non-college bound (AP and IB are expensive programs, and the bureaucracy to support those programs and special ed is huge) students. If MPS didn't have any special needs students, our cost would be much, much lower.

Update: I just listened to this part of the program again, and I was right. Two other notes: Mitchell said that some MPS schools exlude special needs students. This is false. Every single MPS school must accept and educate special needs children. Period. Also, Mitchell told us, as is true, that voucher schools can't exclude low-performing students from admission. But these same schools are not excluded from kicking these students out--as long as they feel they can afford it--later in the year. The MPS schools that do screen (for example, Rufus King High School, or Roosevelt Middle School of the Arts) for academic performance are still required to take in neighborhood students even if (I believe) there is a waiting list for admission district-wide.

Seth has a link to the state guidelines about special needs teaching in voucher schools.

Also, props to sometime-contributor Sarah Fadness, who was the first caller after the news break!