Shorter Aaron Rodriguez

by folkbum

Teachers* are not "people of means," so they deserve a voucher to send their kids to private school, even though they don't deserve a union and should have to pay a lot more for their pension and benefits.

* He doesn't say teachers, but a starting teacher in the Milwaukee Public Schools with two children can qualify for food stamps. If a starting teacher in MPS heads a family of four, she can qualify for food stamps through her fifth year of teaching.

McIlheran Watch: Busting his own myth

by folkbum

I'm still lucky enough to get an email once or twice a week from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's serial calumnist (so many thanks to iT for coining that) Patrick McIlheran. One was in my inbox this morning, regarding Sunday's column (not yet online as I write this here). The subject line was "The bargain that taxpayers may be about to lose," and if you know McIlheran's habits as well as I do, you probably have already speculated that the "bargain" has something to do with the Milwaukee Parental Choice (i.e., voucher) Program. And you are right!

McIlheran is the Milwaukee media's leading proponent of the "half-price myth," the canard that whatever the results produced by voucher schools, they're worth it because a voucher is worth half what the Milwaukee Public Schools spends on a student. This is a myth I have dealt with before (with graphs!), but the conclusion is worth repeating: MPS is mandated or obligated to spend money that voucher schools are not, and it is this unlevel playing field--the way voucher schools, for example, do not have to provide special education services--that creates a half-price appearance. When you examine what MPS considers that base cost of educating the average child, it is nearly identical to the cost of a voucher.

So what's McIlheran's plaint this week? Oddly, that voucher schools aren't getting enough taxpayer money:

Choice schools’ funding had been rising, too, until in 2009, Gov. Jim Doyle actually cut it by $165, from $6,607, per child, even as spending overall rose by about $3 billion.

There it stays, too, and that has consequences. Paul Bahr, principal at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, where about half the 681 students attend on vouchers, says the school had to cut back on spots for poor students. This year, it could only afford 59 choice freshmen.

The problem is raising enough money. It costs the school about $3,000 more per child than the voucher brings, “and that would be significantly higher if our teachers were paid what they’re worth,” said Bahr. It charges about $7,300 a year for children from tuition-paying Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod congregations, and those churches kick in another $1 million or so in subsidies to cover the school’s losses. Other choice schools must do similar fundraising, if they can.

My best response this is simply punctuation: !!!!

The second-largest agglomeration of voucher schools--the Lutherans--can't educate a voucher student for the voucher price. Lutheran schools are subsidized by the donations of church congregations to make up the loss.

Indeed, adding the "about $3,000 more" to the voucher's about $6,500 value gives us a total of about $9,500. How much does it cost to educate a child in MPS? McIlheran helpfully includes that in his piece, warning that if the inadequate funding continues for vouchers, "[t]axpayers statewide then will pay more. Children may instead go to charters, at higher price, or into MPS, where finance officials have said the cost of an added student is at least $10,000 per year" (my emphasis). I'm not a math teacher, but my basic cyphering skills suggests that $9,500 is not significantly different from $10,000.

Now, the "MPS finance officials" added an "at least" qualifier, given the added costs of special education and such. Much to the Lutheran schools' credit, they do provide special education services. (Most voucher schools do not; there are more identified special-education students at a single MPS school, Hamilton High School, than in all of the voucher program combined.) But MPS is also required by law to do a whole slew of things the Lutheran schools are not--including not limiting how many students it takes in in a year.

The voucher program was sold to us on promises that it would provide better achievement for poor students in the state's worst district. When that didn't pan out, we were told that it's a bargain, providing equal achievement at half price. And now, we're told it's not a bargain, but rather too too lean--voucher schools are going to start packing it in unless we pay them more. With the state's Republican Party prepared to approve a major expansion of vouchers in the coming budget--beyond Milwaukee and beyond poor students--any pretense that this is some great public good is now gone.

McIlheran Watch: Patrick McIlheran's Irrelevant Burst of Distraction

by folkbum

All day yesterday I waited for Patrick McIlheran's response to the news that students in Milwaukee's voucher schools didn't perform better on the state assessment in 2010 than students in the MIlwaukee Public Schools generally, or even than MPS's economically disadvantaged students--the ones who, based on income, would qualify for the voucher program.

The reason I was waiting is that McIlheran is a voucher dead-ender. Whatever the news about vouchers, he has an excuse ready to go if vouchers seem to be losing or a snide remark about the public schools if vouchers seeming to be winning. He regularly stammers out that voucher schools are of course teaching special ed students (They can't turn them away!, he blubbers) without ever acknowledging that MPS has seventwelve times as many--and qualitatively more challenging--special ed students (or that the voucher schools that do really well with special ed students seek out extra funding). And, most gallingly, McIlheran was a pioneer of the "half-price" myth--a bar-lowering of epic proportions that I'm sure embarrasses the hell out of all the people who honestly believed that Milwaukee's voucher schools would be the shining stars in a galaxy of school-choice programs around the country. That galaxy never materialized, and the sad "they do just as sucky but at half the price" I'm sure spins Milt Friedman's corpse like a top.

Now I know what the wait was about. McIlheran blogs today and implies a conspiracy that Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction timed its release to pre-empt the release of another annual installment of results from the School Choice Demonstration Project, which was revealed today. As far as I know, there was no conspiracy, and schools like mine--a public school (whose results were uniformly up over 2009, thankyouverymuch--had been looking forward to yesterday for months as the day that the figures would become public and go live on DPI's website.

As I was saying, McIlheran implies--no, wait, he doesn't imply. He comes right out and says it's a conspiracy:

On Wednesday, results come out from the fourth year of the long-term study comparing children in choice schools to those in Milwaukee Public Schools. If the results are similar to what’s happened in the past, they’ll probably show that there’s not a great deal of difference between the two groups as a whole, at least on the basic reading and math scores.

Which doesn’t quite do the trick for the anti-choice lobby, which is most likely why state schools superintendent Tony Evers, long an opponent of choice, released figures Tuesday that he claimed were an “apples to apples” comparison of choice and MPS, ones that he said showed MPS outperformed choice schools.

McIlheran goes on to complain that a release of test data, like DPI's yesterday, is worthless: "[T]he numbers simply compare how children in choice schools and those in MPS as a whole did at one particular moment. It’s a snapshot of where the children are, no matter where they started." Welcome to the anti-testing movement, Pat! We're glad to have you aboard. But then he gets absurd: "This [i.e., where they started] is, broadly, not the same place for choice schools and MPS." His reasoning? That the parents who choose voucher schools know their children are already way far behind. He claims. His evidence for that is nowhere.

But it's an insult to suggest that the students I teach in MPS aren't way far behind, and that somehow I'm lucky to get to teach such smart kids. That my colleagues whose students start out far behind, whose class sizes are swelling, who don't have the ability to expel the troublemakers (as Brother Bob Smith, a voucher stalwart, put it, “make the right decisions, or make them somewhere else"), whose very rights are being assaulted in front of their eyes, are on easy street. That MPS doesn't have to take all comers, even those whose voucher schools closed mid-year because the teachers quit when they stopped getting paid, or whose voucher school lied to them about what special education services would be available and had to leave, and educate them.

But the biggest kicker of all is that McIlheran is completely wrong about what the two sets of results show. The Demonstration Project's report (available here, see report 26) shows that, as McIlheran predicted, matched samples of voucher and MPS students achieve about the same. But the fact is that the report there uses fall 2009 test data. DPI's results from yesterday, which include a low-income (i.e., voucher-eligible) student sample from MPS to compare, uses fall 2010 data. The Demonstration Project's data are a year old already. MPS, under new leadership and with a new literacy plan (and in the thick of a successful new math plan) made gains. Period. And voucher schools did not. Period.

So McIlheran's anti-DPI screed is worthless. It's distracting. It fails to address the facts at hand. Kind of the way you might expect from a dead-ender.

GOP rush to dump voucher-school WKCE requirement explained

by folkbum

(light of day update to point to the real reporters' story on the issue)

The headline on DPI's press release says it all:

Overall MPS results higher than choice schools on statewide exams

I will start again with the usual caveat that I think test scores by themselves are no way to judge a student, teacher, school, or district. Indeed, test scores from a meaningful test measured over time can produce a picture of one aspect of schooling, but by themselves as a single snapshot they should not be the only metric.

Which doesn't mean that the Almighty Test Score isn't the only metric, because, really, it has become so. Fortunes are won and lost based on that single number for schools and districts and states all over the country. So we have to talk about the numbers, and when it comes to the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program, we should really be talking about comparable numbers to the Milwaukee Public Schools, whence MPCP draws students and funds.

So in a reasonable application of an unreasonable tool, the state legislature a couple of years back mandated that schools participating (with the state's money) in the MPCP administer the state's test to their voucher students. Fall 2010 was the first time that all voucher students took the test. If Republicans have their way--this is in Scott Walker's proposed budget and the legislature has given no indication that they will change it--Fall 2010 will be the only time all voucher students take the test.

Now we know why. To repeat:

Overall MPS results higher than choice schools on statewide exams

The release from DPI goes on:

Results from the first administration of statewide exams to students participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) show lower academic achievement in choice schools than performance by students attending Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Results also show that both MPS and choice schools have significantly lower student achievement than the statewide average, including for students statewide who are from economically disadvantaged families.

“Clearly for the children of Milwaukee, whether in MPS or choice schools, dramatic improvements in academic achievement are needed,” said State Superintendent Tony Evers. “While both systems have some good schools, our statewide assessment data shows, with very few exceptions, that the choice program provides similar or worse academic results than MPS. For the sake of the city and the state, MPS and MPCP results must be improved. And, these results reinforce the need to continue using the same test for all students.”

To the right, you have it in graph form (and, yes, I wrote most of this last night so I was using the embargoed press release; click to embiggen). Note that MPS occupies two of the last three positions--not to mention coming in for some harsh critique from Evers--so this is not some sort of a smug, braggery thing. But, particularly in math, voucher schools are behind even comparable (low income) MPS students.

Pro-voucher solution? Stop requiring the test that shows this to be true.

Digging deeper into the data shows that MPS students (or, separately, the MPS low-income students) outscore voucher students at every grade in math and most grades in reading. These complete test results follow years of sampled data showing that, on balance, voucher schools do not do much better or much worse with their students than MPS does with its. (The latest round of those results, from an outside study group, are due any day now.) The verdict continues to be that vouchers aren't a solution and, in some cases like math, a detriment.

Math scores have been on the rise in MPS for years (though slightly down this year). And that's another galling thing about Walker's proposed budget: As MPS math scores have risen over the past few years, everyone in the know recognizes the reason--the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership. Walker defunds that grant, cutting the equivalent of 99 math teachers' of funds from MMP and MPS. (This at a time when the GOP wants to use your tax dollars to "level the playing field for private schools" all across the state.)

Further data will be available later today from DPI. I don't have all of it as I write this, such as individual MPS schools' scores. I do have the voucher schools' scores and, as will undoubtedly be true of MPS, there are better schools and worse schools. Many of the older, long-established schools have pretty good scores. (Marquette University High School had all of its parents opt out of the testing ... hm.) However, it seems true that the worst places to be schooled in Milwaukee are some of the new voucher schools, founded with the sole intention of attracting voucher money. Schools I have never heard of, even, are on this list, and scoring miserably.

So, the take-away: Voucher proponents have got to be doing some soul-searching this morning. (As a godless union thug, I have no soul to search. Archives, yes; soul, no.) I expect the "yeah, but it's half-price" thing to pop up very early in the response process. Also: It is clear, again, that there must be some force outside of the school walls that leads to the kind of results that are so pervasive across schools of all different flavors. To continue to ignore the effects of poverty, segregation (by race and class), and other social ills on students' preparedness for the classroom and ability to perform is suicide for this city. There's no magic bullet, people. We have to buckle down and fix Milwaukee first.

Walker cribs education plan from Duncan's failing notes

by folkbum

Here's a chunk of an article about Scott Walker, Tosa Ranger's education "plan":

Failing schools would be required to sign a contract aimed at turning them around. In exchange for receiving more resources, school boards and administrators would have to select one of several models for improvement.

In one model, administrators would be replaced; in another, administrators and half the staff would be replaced; in a third, the school would be closed and replaced with a charter school; and in another, the students would be sent to other schools.

Now, for contrast, here's a chunk of an article about current US education policy, under the Democratic appointee Arne Duncan, as applied in Wisconsin at the present moment:

At the persistently low-performing high schools, MPS must implement one of four turnaround measures to receive the money:

• Firing the principal and at least half the staff and re-opening with new staff.

• Allowing a charter management company or other educational management company to take over the school.

• Replacing the principal and taking other steps internally to improve how the school operates.

• Closing the school, and sending the children to higher-performing schools in the district.

Aside from the fact that one is in bullet-points and the other isn't, can you spot the difference? No? I couldn't either.

I am no fan of the Obama-Duncan Department of Education, and, as I have noted before, these reform models do not have a history of success. Duncan himself does not have a history as success, nor a significant background in education beyond a badly failed Chicago 2010 initiative.

So why on earth would Walker be 1) so lazy as to copy, wholesale, the Duncan master plan and think we wouldn't notice and, 2) interested in perpetuating a system doomed to keep failing schools deep in failure for years to come?

Oh, wait:

In Milwaukee, Walker would lift the cap on the choice program, which allows taxpayer money to be used for private schools, including religious schools. The cap is now 22,000 students.

There's the devilish detail: He is interested in driving more public dollars to prop up the financially challenged system of parochial schools and other fly-by-night voucher institutions. Got it. Keep Milwaukee's public schools in a death spiral and use tax dollars, shock-doctrine style, to enrich the private sector and his religious supporters.

FSM help us if he gets his mitts on our tax dollars.

These goalposts won't move much further, fellas

by folkbum

"Moving the goalposts" is a pretty clever shorthand way of making a real point about human nature: We often compromise what we really want or believe in order to accommodate a reality that makes our ideals impossible. "This house will be spotless by the time my mother gets here" is replaced by "The downstairs will be spotless and Mom won't need to go upstairs" is replaced by "If all my various piles are neat, that's good enough, because Mom raised me and knows I've always been a bit of a--oh, crap, the doorbell."

The problem is that people in a position to advocate policy and spend your tax dollars like to move the goalposts, too, and it affects much more than just your mother's incredible disappointment in you. It means "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" becomes "We're spreading democracy" becomes "We fight them there so we don't have to fight them here" and so on. Eleventy billion dollars later, we're down to, "If we leave, it will fall apart; they can't even run an election." Democracy inaction!

Closer to home, we've seen the goalposts move pretty steadily on the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program. It began, of course, as a way to help struggling poor and minority students achieve at the same levels as the wealthy, white students whose families could afford private school. But as independent analyses have shown, voucher students on the whole aren't yet--20 years into the program--outpacing their Milwaukee Public School peers. So the goalposts have moved over the years, settling most recently at "Voucher schools do equivalent work at a lower price." As we have discussed here previously, though, this is true only because voucher schools don't have the same layers of state and federal bureaucracy to deal with and virtually ignore Milwaukee's special needs population. And the original goal? Long surrendered to reality. Trouble is, voucher advocates are still content to spend your money to support their pet project and prop up a religious school system that would have been bankrupt long ago absent your tax dollars.

Charles Murray--yes, that Charles Murray--had an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday along these same lines. He notes the mediocre test results and then picks up the goalposts:

So let’s not try to explain [the test results] away. Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers--measured by changes in test scores, each has failed to live up to its hype.

It should come as no surprise. We’ve known since the landmark Coleman Report of 1966, which was based on a study of more than 570,000 American students, that the measurable differences in schools explain little about differences in test scores. The reason for the perpetual disappointment is simple: Schools control only a small part of what goes into test scores.

First, let us first pause to consider the irony of Charles Freaking Murray downplaying the importance of a test score.

And then let us step back and remember why we're even talking about test scores in the first place: Public schools, unlike private schools, are veritable fonts of data. And among the data--in fact, some would even call them the most important data--are the scores on the tests that measure whether students are meeting or exceeding the state's academic standards. Now, believe me, I do not disagree here; I have always maintained that standardized tests scores are among the worst means to judge students, teachers, and schools. But it is those very test scores that have spurred proponents of vouchers not just here in Milwaukee but across the country to push for every conceivable means of yanking tax dollars and students out of public schools. And now that test scores, not just of Milwaukee's voucher students but of charter schools across the nation, have shown that those public-school alternatives are not, in fact, the answer to schools' ills, the proponents are scrambling. Murray:

[A]ll I can say is thank heavens for the Milwaukee results. Here’s why: If my fellow supporters of charter schools and vouchers can finally be pushed off their obsession with test scores, maybe we can focus on the real reason that school choice is a good idea. Schools differ in what they teach and how they teach it, and parents care deeply about both, regardless of whether test scores rise.

Here’s an illustration. The day after the Milwaukee results were released, I learned that parents in the Maryland county where I live are trying to start a charter school that will offer a highly traditional curriculum long on history, science, foreign languages, classic literature, mathematics and English composition, taught with structure and discipline. This would give parents a choice radically different from the progressive curriculum used in the county’s other public schools.

I suppose that test scores might prove that such a charter school is “better” than ordinary public schools, if the test were filled with questions about things like gerunds and subjunctive clauses, the three most important events of 1776, and what Occam’s razor means. But those subjects aren’t covered by standardized reading and math tests. For this reason, I fully expect that students at such a charter school would do little better on Maryland’s standardized tests than comparably smart students in the ordinary public schools.

So much goalpost movement ... starting with a radical redefinition of why charter schools are necessary. It has nothing to do with the original theory that charters could provide innovative programs to better serve the needs of hard to reach students and more nimbly respond to challenging situations. A bunch of white suburbanite kids taking "a highly traditional curriculum long on history, science, foreign languages, classic literature, mathematics and English composition" is hardly challenging or innovative. And if choice and charter schools don't get good tests scores, it must be because the tests are biased against the schools' gerund-heavy curricula!

In the end, the goalposts are left standing at the weakest point they've ever been. It's no longer about improving the educational lot of the neediest and furthest behind children. Instead, Murray says, the "real reason" we need choice and charters is to placate know-it-all parents. What a world!

See also Barbara O'Brien.

More about the new (same-old) voucher study

by folkbum

For those who need to catch up on the matter, see Friday's post.

Via Matt Yglesias, it seems that pro-voucher (and American Enterprise Institute think-tanker) Rick Hess is spinning and spinning what he calls the "non-effects" of Milwaukee's voucher program:

What to make of the results? First off, 20 years in, it's hard to argue that the nation's biggest and most established voucher experiment has "worked" if the measure is whether vouchers lead to higher reading and math scores. Happily, that's never been my preferred metric for structural reforms--both because I think it's the wrong way to study them [. . . and], more importantly, because choice-based reform shouldn't be understood as that kind of intervention. Rather, choice-based reform should be embraced as an opportunity for educators to create more focused and effective schools and for reformers to solve problems in smarter ways.

If that leaves you saying, "Wha?" then get in line behind me, Yglesias, and other observers like Kevin Carey:

Since “more focused and effective schools” are properly defined as “schools where students learn more” i.e. “schools with higher reading and math scores,” if vouchers didn’t result in more such schools then vouchers failed. One might argue that vouchers created the opportunity for educators to create such schools and educators didn’t take advantage of it, but what’s the difference? The whole point of structural reform is to change incentives and conditions; if the change was insufficient to create desired behavior then ipso facto the reform failed. A purely structural metric for evaluating purely structural reforms misses the point altogether.

What Hess is attempting to do is what Milwaukee's pro-voucher faction did for many years: define mere existence as success. Back when no real metrics were available to gauge vouchers' success--the bulk of the middle of the program's 20-year history--supporters would point to growing enrollment as evidence that the program worked. "See?" they asked. "If the voucher program were such a massive failure, parents wouldn't be choosing these schools, would they?"

This, of course, overlooked a number of factors, many of which have been made plain by the Public Policy Forum's work on vouchers over the years. For example, it became clear that market forces never shut school doors: Even when huge waves of parents would abandon bad schools (most years there was turnover between 1/4 and 1/3 of the students), there was a bigger wave of parents behind them willing to sign up. Parents, it was revealed, did little if any research to determine what voucher school to send their children to, or even if the voucher school they wanted was really any better than the local public school. And PPF has consistently found than many voucher parents would be sending their children to religious schools regardless of the existence of the program. In fact, in years when enrollment requirements changed and numbers soared (after the 1998 court decision, after the 2006 deal raising the enrollment cap), the biggest growth in enrollment came from students already attending voucher schools but paying previously paying tuition.

So even trying to claim existence as success was a misleading effort.

(The current, and getting very tired, effort to redefine success as something other than success is the whole "voucher schools do it for half price" myth--which Hess even tosses into his post. But, again, see what I have written previously on that.)

Thankfully, Carey and others, including the authors of the study that was out last week, recognize that defining success down--defining success as anything other than solid student achievement--is a fruitless exercise.

Our annual voucher study post

by folkbum

Sing with me ... third verse, same as the first two!

The state-mandated study is out comparing students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program with students in the Milwaukee Public Schools and their performance on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, and, the topline numbers reveal, there is little substantive difference between the two groups.

There are some other interesting things hinted at beyond those topline (pdf) numbers, but the really interesting part is, again, the right-wing insistence that the report vindicates the voucher program because MPCP does an equivalently mediocre job with difficult-to-educate students as MPS does, but at half the price or so.

As I have explained here before, and last year in the Compass (with a graph!), this is a misleading, if not completely false, sentiment. The cost of education your average MPS child is approximately the same as the cost of a choice voucher. The difference comes almost entirely in the costs associated with being a large public school district: busing, programs for the academically talented and expensive college-prep programs, bureaucracy to meet state and federal mandates that voucher schools are not required to comply with, summer and after-school programs required by law, services for English language learners, and--the big one--special education services. None of these things are costs voucher schools must incur, but MPS must by law.

Still, the usual suspects--McIlheran at the daily paper and Schneider at WPRI--play up the half-price myth. Here's Schneider (skipping over his bizarre psycho-sexual fantasies about store clerks):

[C]hoice schools are spending 46% as much to get the same results as the public schools. This is not insignificant, given the constant pressure applied by public schools to tax more in the name of “the kids.”

At which point the goal of all of this becomes clear, defunding public schools in the name of WPRI's ever-present mission to shrink government and save all the poor, poor rich folk from the burden of taxes.

Schneider goes on to get a number of other things utterly wrong: "The report demonstrates," he writes, "that fourth graders in the MPCP actually enter the program with lower reading and math skills than their MPS counterparts. By the eighth grade, that disparity has flipped, with the MPCP students scoring slightly better." Not so; the fourth-grade WKCE results are not some kind of entrance exam; instead, they measure the amount students learn as third-graders--a result which actually is damning for the (voucher) schools that produce the lower results. On the other hand, these results show what I as a high school teacher have known for a long time, that middle school is a giant black hole in MPS.

Schneider, again:

MPCP schools can be much more nimble in reacting to the data presented in the report. Need to improve test scores? Fire some teachers and hire better ones. Are schools underperforming? Close them down or pull them out of the program. Are there programs out there statistically proven to increase student achievement? Get off your butt and implement them. All of these options are unavailable to the monolithic public school system, which is suffocating itself with bureaucracy and cumbersome teacher union contracts.

And again, not so. The report pointedly does not disaggregate results by school, so no one voucher school has any idea whether it is failing as a result of this report. And he's also wrong that MPS doesn't have the wherewithal to make changes, as recent work on math initiatives and the new literacy plan show. (Also showing in this comment: Schneider and WPRI's long-standing disdain of the working-class union families who built this country into what it is.)

This is not, of course, the first time I have had to lay some reality on WPRI related to vouchers. In fact, the last time I did it, WPRI honcho George Lightburn was busy complaining that voucher schools might be asked to meet some of the very same mandates that public schools have to, mandates that make the half-price myth just that, a myth.

At any rate, I don't suspect that next year's results will be much different, either in test scores or in continued promulgation of falsehood and myth from pro-voucher, anti-public school forces.

That makes two choice provisions Doyle should veto

by folkbum

I am not a fan of the Milwuaukee Parental Choice Program, and if I could snap fingers and have it disappear tomorrow, I would.

However, that doesn't mean Democrats in the legislature need to be stupid:

Democrats who control the state Assembly voted Thursday to cap participation in Milwaukee's parents' choice program at 19,500 students for the next two years - about 500 fewer students than the number who now attend private schools at state expense.

If it becomes law, the change would reverse a 2006 compromise that would have allowed participation to grow to 22,500.

There are any number of things that could be done to draw parents out of the program and back into the public schools, but this is just a way to build animus where there does not need to be more.

Sen. Rep. Fred Kessler, whose idea this seems to be, has floated a much better idea, which is to spin off the MPCP into its own district, divorcing it from MPS and the Milwaukee tax rolls. He should be pursuing that, rather than this piddly little stuff that won't actually solve anything.

(The second thing that needs vetoing is the dumb bilingual provision. Sorry, Pedro.)

Mudd and Norquist are wrong about vouchers--still

by folkbum

John Norquist and Susan Mudd, the former mayor of and wife-of-the-former-mayor of Milwaukee (and current residents of Chicago), have an op-ed in this morning's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel complaining about the new regulations that will be placed on private schools that receive tax money to educate children through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, colloquially known as the voucher program.

These new regulations are essentially the same ones that I wrote about here, when another non-Milwaukeean, George Lightbourn of the WPRI, called them "onerous enough for the choice schools that they will be forced to opt out of the choice program." Actually, it's not even all of those regulations, as some of the proposals were stripped from the current bill making its way through the legislature after Democrats met with voucher leaders and compromised on some of the harshest of provisions.

You can read about the current version of the proposals through Alan Borsuk's reporting here, and voucher advocates' response to them (spoiler alert: they don't care for the regulation) here. The gist of the changes are these:

• scheduling the same number of hours of instruction each year as required in public schools,
  
• administering state standardized tests and reporting the results,
  
• requiring all teachers and administrators in Choice schools to have a bachelor's degree, and
  
• requiring bilingual education in schools with a threshold number of English language learners.

All of these things are currently required of every single school that uses tax dollars to educate children in the state, whether traditional public schools or charter schools, with the exception of the 110 or so voucher schools in MPCP. Every. School. In. The. State.

And yet, somehow this is going to torpedo the voucher program, according to the pro-voucher camp.

What's more, some of the most sensible and responsible of the requirements--in my opinion as an educator and education writer--were dropped. (Compare the list above to the list from my Lightbourn post, linked above.) Gone is the requirement that schools demonstrate their capability to educate (via accreditation) before we cut them a check or put our children in their hands. Gone is the proposal that schools that take and spend your tax dollars open up their meetings and their records for the public to see. Gone is the requirement that schools develop and internally consistent written policies for passing and graduating students. And there never was a provision to require voucher schools to offer accommodations for the special-education students they accept.

Mudd and Norquist, though, cannot believe how powerful is the hammer that is about to come down on the program, and, in a near-textbook example of unwarranted extrapolation, blame Jim Doyle and legislative Democrats for the end of western civilization as we know it:

Nonetheless, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle has included in his biennial budget bill new regulation cloaked as "accountability." Democrats on the Legislature's budget-writing committee last week added funding cuts and requirements for bilingual programs to the new mandates. [. . .] Will this improve education? No. Private schools in the choice program will need to shift scarce remaining resources from educating kids to administration.

Our cities--indeed our nation--will not thrive if we, unique among all advanced industrialized nations, rely solely on an under-producing government school monopoly and deprive citizens of the freedom to choose the schools best for their children.

OMG! Schools will have to "shift scarce remaining resources from educating kids to administration"! Let's hope no one tells Mudd and Norquist about the new burdens coming down on MPS for not making AYP again!

Aside from the histrionics, Mudd and Norquist also offer up a number of questionable assertions and, just as bad, allow anecdote to become argument. They write:

Educational innovation is giving parents more of what they want. Before school choice, Milwaukee had two public and two private Montessori schools. Now there are seven public and eight private Montessori schools and one private Waldorf school, which our son, Ben, attended.

Results are not the issue. Three studies show that choice students graduate at higher rates than students in public schools. Research also shows public schools improving because of the competition school choice brings to bear. Even public school teachers have benefited; as performance has gained importance, Milwaukee Public Schools and the teachers union have focused bargaining more on pay and classroom conditions to retain skilled teachers and less on pension and severance issues for those about to leave.

Problems abound. For one, the "studies" do not say what Mudd and Norquist say they say. The studies of high school graduation rates (I've written about most of them before; click on the "Milwaukee Parental Choice Program" tag at the end of this post and they'll be in there somewhere) were flawed in various ways. Some counted the four-year graduation rate (many MPS students are on the five-year plan or finish at MATC); some did not account for differences in demographics or just the fact that students whose families opt out of MPS tend to be the kind of families whose children also graduate, on-time and easily, from MPS--not the kind of families that tolerate or encourage truancy and drop-outs.

Further, the first two years of state-mandated studies have shown that voucher students and MPS students achieve at about the same rates--which understates the far-too-frequent catastrophic failures of voucher schools (by my count, the state had closed six in this school year for various reasons). Plus, the state-mandated study, authored in part by long-time voucher advocate Jay Greene (who also did at least one of the graduation studies cited by Mudd and Norquist), that found that competition had improved MPS was flawed and showed, at best, "the practical effect of competition through vouchers appears to be small, if not negligible" (.pdf). Mudd and Norquist offer the classic post hoc argument for an increasing diversity in educational options within MPS, ignoring similar diversification has happened in places like Chicago, Minneapolis, and, locally, Madison, all without the threat of vouchers. (Mudd and Norquist also omit the Urban Waldorf School, an MPS school.)

Finally, Mudd and Norquist offer the anecdote of their son Ben's experience as being somehow representative of what voucher students across the city experience:

We chose Tamarack Community School, a K-8 school whose enrollment of 212 includes 141 choice students, because we value the way the school seeks to educate the whole child, first focusing on imaginative play and later teaching reading. Our son had the same teacher for six years. He learned well and earns superior grades at a demanding private high school in Chicago. Almost all of his former classmates are succeeding as well.

Believe me: There was probably nothing typical about the education of the mayor's son. I also have a hard time believing that the advantages of having two college-educated, relatively wealthy white parents had nothing to do with Ben's educational acumen. I have written repeatedly here about how poverty, more than anything else, is the best predictor of student achievement. Standard disclaimers apply: not every poor kid fails, and not every rich kid succeeds. But when you're the mayor's son, there are enough other factors at play to suggest success; if even half my current students had half the privilege of Mudd and Norquist's son, my job would be a thousand times easier.

Moreover, Tamarack School is hardly typical of voucher schools generally. Its long-standing program and time-tested curriculum (90 years or so since Rudolf Steiner started the Waldorf system) is a far cry from the kind of fly-by-night operations that usually populate the lists of schools applying to the program every year. If all voucher schools were like Tamarack, efforts to regulate the program more tightly would not be necessary, and the program would not have between a quarter and third of its students turning over every year.

Mudd and Norquist frame the argument as a specific attack against Democrats making these changes. Mayor in Milwaukee is a non-partisan office, but it was no secret that Norquist was a Democrat and they were active in the local party. The title of their op-ed makes it clear: "Disgracing our party's own ideals," it's called. There is a whole other post or two or three in knocking down the "liberal" argument for vouchers (as one Norquista described it, wealthy white families have always have had a choice where to go (as it turns out, they settled on the suburbs), and African American families shouldn't allow poverty to make that choice for them). I won't get into that here.

However, the internecine fighting sure perks up the Journal Sentinel's right-wing talking-point dispenser conservative Patrick McIlheran, who celebrates the pie fight on his blog today. Of course, he's also dedicated his column ths morning to bemoaning the same regulations as Mudd and Norquist, since these requirements are so terrible that it takes two columns to cover the enormity. (The balancing opinion, explaining why such regulation is a good idea, is provided by, well, nobody. The closest you get is what you're reading now, far removed from jsonline.) So, thanks, Susan and John, for throwing the Republican dogs some red meat. The Democrats you've left behind sure appreciate it.

The Half-Price Myth

by folkbum

Home sick today (and still laptopless), but there's a new Compass to be had, including a column by your humble folkbum.

I go away for a few days, and the WPRI goes off the deep end

by folkbum

Not that WPRI was that many centimeters away from the edge to begin with. But seriously, consider that on just one day, you get both Christian Schneider blaming Wisconsin's high income tax rate (which is not that high comparatively--I mean, we're not so bad as those liberal havens of Arkansas and Nebraska, thank jeebus!) is to blame for the Packers' dismal season and this piece of drivel from WPRI honcho George Lightbourn.

In that piece, Lightbourn goes ridiculous in a number of different ways. First, he insists that reforms to the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program are "onerous enough for the choice schools that they will be forced to opt out of the choice program." You know what regulations he's talking about? These (.pdf):

• adopting academic standards,
  
• scheduling the same number of hours of instruction each year as required in public schools,
  
• administering state standardized tests,
  
• requiring all teachers and administrators in Choice schools to have a bachelor's degree
  
• developing written policies for promoting a student from one grade to another and granting a high school diploma,
  
• maintaining student progress records,
  
• requiring all participating schools to attain accreditation by August 1st, instead of December 31st, of the school year in which the school first participates in the program, and
  
• increasing transparency and disclosure of information about the school to parents and the public.

I'd like Lightbourn to explain exactly which of these are "onerous," and why, if they're so awful, voucher proponents like Howard Fuller support most or all of them. Also, then, if they're so "onerous," why should every public school in the state have to do these (or requirements more strict, like having licensed teachers, not just teachers with a bachelor's degree). And, frankly, if I were a parent and my child attended a school where these things were not already true (with the exception of high-stakes testing), I would be incredibly worried and consider pulling my child out.

So, on top of disparaging these "onerous" requirements that will send voucher schools into a death spiral, Lightbourn also feels the need to dump on MPS:

Why the push to move these children back into Milwaukee Public Schools? [. . .] To make matters more confusing, last week Governor Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Barrett released a consultant’s report that detailed just how grim fiscal condition of Milwaukee Public Schools is. In releasing the report, the Governor and mayor said, …the unfortunate reality is that academic outcomes throughout MPS remain unacceptably low.” They added, “MPS has serious academic challenges at the same time it is facing a serious long-term financial problem.”

This is rich, considering that the financial problems of MPS are in large part caused by the existence of the very voucher program Lightbourn extols. Even beyond the obvious--the voucher program leaves MPS with a higher concentration of more-difficult students), the very same report that Lightbourn cites credits the voucher program with sucking funds away from MPS through the various funding flaws and contributing to the district's declining enrollment.

I think what makes me most angry about Lightbourn's drivel, though, is the way he couches himself as the Protector Of The Poor And Minorities. "[T]his group of poor, minority parents is being treated quite shabbily," he opens, and he continues to talk about these parents as if he knows them personally: "They are confused as to why the Governor wants to take away their ability to choose." Doyle wants to do no such thing, of course, but that doesn't stop Lightbourn's Green Lantern fantasy. In reality, he can't wait for MPS to fail and dissolve into bits, which is the last thing an already struggling city full of the kinds of people Lightbourn wants to protect really needs.

More on LaBrew's alleged abuse of children

by folkbum

I got forwarded the following letter, by Glenda Haynes, about LaBrew Troopers Military University School. There was an email attached to the letter (Haynes emailed later to offer an edited-for-typos version):

I was the K5 teacher at Labrew the school that I have worked to close down after seeing daily abuse of the children; sponsored by our tax dollars. I wrote President Obama, Gwen Moore, Feingold, the Mayor, Governor and DPI. I had the building inspector notified, the health department and called child protection and gave the names of almost 17 children; but there are hundreds more that have been abused. I have contacted an attorney for a class-action law suite for the children. Child protection went to the police on last 3/27/09 and the police came to talk to me that same day. I have provided recordings of the meetings concerning the abuse and video. Myself as well as two other teachers have come forth on the kids behalf. And with all this the police tells me that because none of the children have been injured where they have gone to the hospital they may not pursue it, and this was said to me before they had even talked to children, teachers, or listened to my tapes. They say they may just go after him for money fraud concerning the use of the voucher and food monies. I am angry.

As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this morning, the school is indeed closed, and has been since March 9, apparently because the withholding of nearly $400,000 in voucher funding has left the school without funds to continue. This is different from what Haynes says here--and what she told me on the phone--which is that investigations begun by Milwaukee's Child Protective Services and the Milwaukee Police Department her contacting the city (corrected) halted operations. I mean, not that either one of those is a good thing for the school, not at all. But I should note the discrepancy.

When I talked to Haynes this afternoon, she was very emotional and upset. Upset in part at Alan Borsuk's MJS story focused too much on the financials and LaBrew's staff denying the charges of abuse, and that she and other parents come off as "disgruntled," when really the charges are more serious than that. (Interestingly, when I talked to Borsuk this afternoon, he said he'd just spent an hour on the phone with Shan Owens, "Commander" at the school, who was convinced Borsuk was a "tool of WEAC" and ran the story to try to influence the state superintendent election next week. Can't win for losing some times.)

But Haynes was also upset that this story, which she has apparently been trying to tell for some time, has not attracted the kind of attention that Daniel Acker's alleged abuse has. Haynes complained that one 30-years-later allegation of abuse was all it took to get the ball rolling against Acker, who worked with white suburban kids; but dozens of allegations from African American families against this school are going unnoticed.

And the allegations below are pretty shocking. She told me of the videos and recording mentioned there, including, she claims, LaBrew employees--"Drill Sergeants," they are called--admitting to serious physical abuses on tape. This treatment was hinted at in Borsuk's story, and he told me that he did indeed meet with Haynes and others and heard what he indicated were poor-quality recordings. This is not the first time that Labrew has been criticized for the way it treats its students. The school was called on the carpet about two years ago for punishing students by feeding them bread and water--and taking the full reimbursement for school lunches from the state.

Obviously, law enforcement is going to look into what there is, and if something is prosecutable, I would hope that those charged will be pursued to the fullest extent of the law. Haynes stressed, though, that if LaBrew keeps getting away with this abuse--and she was clear in calling it child abuse, repeatedly--that it merely teaches the lesson that as long as you don't break any kids' bones, you can get away with it.

Here's her letter, dated March 7. I'm pretty sure I'm the only "media" outlet with it so far:

My name is Glenda Haynes. I have been working and volunteering in the community with youth for over 25 years. And I am writing to you to ask for your help in preventing the private (voucher) school “Labrew Troopers University School” owner Shan Owens from ever operating any school dealing with children; due to the serious physical , mental, and verbal abuse done to the children. There are also the dangerous conditions concerning sanitation of the day to day operations of the building.

I began working with “Labrew in Oct. of 08, as a temporary job for myself as I awaited a position with the Sheriffs dept. It wasn’t long after working there that it became apparent that things were not right. Children were getting their arms bent as far up their backs as they could go, smashed face first into walls and a full run, dragged, arms pulled up into the air and then their wrist is bent trying to force their fingers to touch their wrist, and verbal abuse.

Also, concerning the sanitation conditions, this building has no windows, no ventilation system to bring in air or circulate air. The bathrooms are filthy and we can go weeks without soap in them. There is no sink in the kitchen. I saw the cook washing two serving spoons in the girls bathroom sink. I video taped the cook washing the serving food pans in the slop mop sink. There is so much more, but it all can’t be put into this letter.

I am requesting your assistance, as well as others. I am writing the President, going to the Journal, and calling child protection to go and get the stories of the children for abuse charges. When my efforts to try and change this place and making demanding complaints fell on deaf ears I started to collect evidence to take for help. I have tapped our last staff meetings and the video of the dish washing. But before I could get more the school has taken an early spring break (Mar. 9 – 23) due to owing the state over 200,000. What I understand is that they plan on closing and re-applying as another private voucher school. This can not happen please! I have already contacted my K5 class where I became the teacher. All the parents are willing to allow their children to tell their stories. Please I need your help, the children need your help.

Glenda Haynes

If Rose Fernandez were running a voucher school, she'd be kicked out of the program

by folkbum

The news this morning includes word that one of the more high-profile schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program, LaBrew Troopers, has been cut off by the state:

LaBrew suspended operations abruptly March 9 because of a dispute with state regulators over money. At least 51 of its 200-plus students have enrolled in the Milwaukee Public Schools since then. What others are doing is unknown. [. . .]

LaBrew was scheduled to receive $377,259.70 from the state in February, one of its four payments in this school year. But Michael Thompson, interim deputy state superintendent of public instruction, issued an order Feb. 23 to hold back the money because the school owed the state $315,684 to refund past overpayments and to settle other disputes. [. . .] State regulation allows almost no oversight over the programs in the private schools, short of the health or safety of students being threatened. LaBrew is not required to release any information on test scores or other data about student performance, and it has not done so.

But the state does require schools to meet a list of requirements for business practices, such as filing financial reports. It's on the financial side that there is a dispute.

For the entire life of the voucher program, up until January 1 of next year when an additional piece of piece of paper (accreditation) kicks in, the only recourse the state Department of Public Instruction has had to address problems in voucher schools has been through, basically, accounting. Teachers not qualified? No problem. No books, no computers, no playground? No problem. No paperwork? Problem. This has been nearly the only protection taxpayers have had against abuse of the system.

I can see some of the logic there; if a school is so disorganized that it cannot manage to file a handful of reports to the state, then there are probably larger problems with the way the school is being run. Still, it is not, in my opinion, where we ought to be drawing a line.

Cory Liebmann had different news yesterday:

We already know that Rose Fernandez did not leave the Wisconsin Coalition for Virtual School Families in the most organized fashion. Apparently when she was leading the organization, she never set a system in place to comply with important IRS disclosure rules. In a previous blog posting, I detailed the odyssey that I was forced to go through just to obtain the organization's IRS form 990's. These documents are supposed to be readily available upon request and it was very clear that she had never established a process by which her organization could adequately respond to a request for disclosure. This lack of organization led to a formal complaint, because these disclosure rules are important and complying with them should have been very easy.

While I was trying to locate the missing 990 forms, the registered agent for the organization suggested that communication with its leaders has always been a challenge. I assume that this includes the time that Rose Fernandez used to lead the organization since she only recently stepped down. Since one of the primary responsibilities of a registered agent is to keep the organization's documentation updated, I decided to check the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions records for the Fernandez-run organization. A quick glimpse at the information offered on the DFI site seemed to confirm a disorganized theme. The record shows that the virtual schools organization first registered with DFI in 2005 and promptly is marked as "delinquent" as soon as 2007. That "delinquent" status appears to have continued all the way until earlier this year. The only thing that DFI needed the Fernandez-led organization to do is simply provide an annual report and pay a fee. Apparently that was too hard to manage.

That's right; Rose Fernandez, who wants to expand the voucher program state-wide, failed to meet the kind of requirement that DPI, the organization she wants to lead, has had the authority to use to protect taxpayers. If the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families were a voucher school, DPI could have shut them down for non-compliance.

On a related note, Aaron Rodriguez at The Hispanic Conservative is attacking Tony Evers--the good guy in the DPI race--again, using cherry-picked data from one of Wisconsin's 400+ school districts to suggest that electing Evers would be disastrous for the whole state. He writes that Evers "must logically share in some the blame" for the failures of the Milwaukee Public Schools. He does not offer Evers any credit for things like the 280% increase in 8th-grade MPS math scores since Evers took the job as Deputy State Superintendent, or an 16% increase in MPS's graduation rate in that same time--credit which Evers must "logically share in" as well. No, just blame for the same problems in MPS that you see in every single other poor urban school district in the country.

If Rodriguez is willing to blame Evers for failures in MPS, of which Evers was not actually in charge, I wonder how willing he is to blame Rose Fernandez for her own failures to manage the organization of which she was indeed in charge?

--

(Aside: Two of the many things Rodriguez harps on about MPS are our expulsion rate and our truancy rate, two things over which MPS has little control. The vast majority of students MPS expels, for example, are expelled because they brought either weapons or drugs to school. We do our best to keep problems from outside the schools on the outside, but I am not sure what Rodriguez thinks we should do with students who can't manage that. I for one am not willing to compromise the safety of the other 99.6% of students to make our numbers look better.)

McIlheran Watch: Pardon me, but your straw man is showing.

by folkbum

As sometimes happens, my inbox was graced this afternoon with an email from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Patrick McIlheran, who retains a place of high regard in my rogues gallery even if I don't bother writing about him much anymore. (Tom Foley has taken up a lot of the slack.) The email is pimping his column in tomorrow's paper, which is about the study of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program that was released earlier this week, which I wrote about here. Here's a line from the email:

Anyhow, in Sunday morning's paper, I'll look at the idiot notion that the school choice study results mean the program ought to be shut down.

Which threw me for a loop: I've followed the release of the study, the reaction, and the news about it, and I haven't read or heard a single person use the study as the basis for a call to shut down the program.

I mean, I think there are plenty of reasons to shut the program down: It socks Milwaukee taxpayers, it artificially props up religious entities that could not survive without the tax dollars the program throws their way, too many kids get lost in the shuffle of fly-by-night operators and MPS has to deal with the aftermath, voucher schools can't or won't provide services to the most challenging special-education students--you can stop me any time here, you know.

But what did I write on Thursday, in response to the study's release? In a post called "Imagine me doing an 'I told you so' dance," I complained that the level of accountability provided by this study was still not enough:

Many voucher advocates long have argued from one side of their mouths that parents must be allowed to make the best choices for their children and then argued with the other that the data to inform parents' decisions must be kept out of parents' hands.

Now we know why: There is a perception that voucher schools are or must be better. If parents were aware of reality--that there is, in fact, no difference in achievement--then the popularity of the program may well start to wane. And if the data revealed that some voucher schools are, in fact, no better than day-care centers or holding pens, then the advocates would have a serious PR problem on their hands, too--much worse than just the news that voucher schools aren't the panacea they promised two decades ago.

Got that? I wrote, pretty clearly, that the study shows that the schools need more transparency, which would give parents the look at they program that they need to make informed choices--and for many, the informed choice will be their local public school, not the voucher school trying to sell them smoke and mirrors. I said "I told you so" because for years--years, now--I have been advocating better, tighter accountability for a system that, whether I like it or not, we're stuck with.

So imagine my surprise when I saw the lede of his column when it became available on jsonline this evening:

It took, by my estimate, about 8.4 seconds for critics of Milwaukee's school choice program to achieve outrage after news that choice students progressed about as fast as Milwaukee Public Schools students.

"I told you so," said one noted blogger and MPS teacher as of 6 a.m. the day the story broke. "Taxpayers should be outraged," said one MPS official shortly thereafter.

Because, hey, if the kids aren't doing any better . . . 

Did you see that? The "noted blogger and MPS teacher" is me, my friends. (Nice how the online version of his column has links embedded throughout--but not to my post, so people could see how he's misusing me.) (He also doesn't note that I almost always post before 6 AM because I do almost all of my weekday blogging in the mornings, before work, and I was not merely extra eager to write on this topic.) The "MPS official" is Director of Research Deb Lindsey; this report from WisPolitics is shockingly messy, but I pieced it together, and the context is that "less money is going to voucher schools, yet the local taxpayers still have to pay more." But the same thing could have been said--probably has been said--by people like Tom Barrett who have been riding the "funding flaw" horse for years now--Milwaukee taxpayers are paying tens of millions more every year for the vouchers than we would if those same kids were in MPS.

There's a lot more McIlheran that Fair Use won't allow me to share with you, but you can read it yourself and see that no one he cites is demanding the program be discontinued. He slips in a little hypothetical "If critics are eager for a live-or-die decision . . ." (my emphasis) before he gets to this:

So why would anyone want to kill the program now? Well, it uses taxpayer money, as that MPS official noted. [. . .] Other critics say the state catches God cooties if anyone takes its money to a school with a chapel. [. . .] Or, say others, there's some value to getting as many kids as possible into a common set of schools - it'll somehow infuse civic values.

So where are all the people who hold "the idiot notion that the school choice study results mean the program ought to be shut down"? Nowhere, as far as I can tell. He doesn't even cite one specific person who is calling for the program to be shut down at all!

I'm off to write my letter to the editor now, what with having been used and abused for his amusement in the column (Deb Lindsey was nearly libeled, she was so badly misquoted). The link to write your letter is here, if anyone else is interested. Hint, hint.

Somebody Get Annette Polly Williams a Time Machine

by folkbum

MIlwaukee's poor, minority students deserve the opportunity to attend successful private schools cost too much.

Voucher schools need a "turnaround team," too, I guess

by folkbum

Cory Liebmann is my hero:

Recently an analysis verified what many well informed people already knew, that Milwaukee voucher schools performed at just about the same level as Milwaukee Public Schools. People like DPI candidate Rose Fernandez and others on the extreme would have us "voucherize" the entire state claiming that these schools are somehow superior to public. This new study provides a much needed dose of reality for anyone that really cares about education in this state. One of the main [tenets] of the Fernandez campaign is to create what she calls a "Turnaround Team" for Milwaukee Public Schools. Since the voucher program is working as good (or as bad) as MPS, why hasn't Rose Fernandez proposed a "Turnaround Team" for the voucher program? And while I'm asking questions, is she proposing that we spend half as much on MPS or twice as much on the voucher program or both?

Go back to the original press release touting a turnaround team for MPS. It lists ten things that a turnaround team would be empowered to do (nine of the ten can already be done by the present, elected board). Let's see how many of these "powers" are currently held by the schools in the voucher program:

1. Hire and fire the School Superintendent: There is no superintendent of the voucher program. So, no.
   
2. Reform the curriculum to ensure a rigorous focus on the basics, beginning in Kindergarten: Check! Voucher schools have incredibly wide latitude to design their own curricula. They must meet very basic standards, such as minimum hours of instruction, and they must have some (potentially arbitrary) goals set for promoting and graduating students. But the details are all up to the schools.
   
3. Reduce administrative overhead: Check! The fact that voucher schools do not generally have to follow many state and federal laws puts them way ahead in this category.
   
4. Negotiate work rules, pay and benefits with the Milwaukee Teachers Associaton teachers: Check! (No unions here!) Every employee is on his or her own, paid and retained at the whim of the schools.
   
5. Review and potentially structure a new pension agreement for new employees: Check! Well, it would be a check, if voucher schools offered much by way of retirement bennies.
   
6. Issue RFPs for certain services: Check! I assume the voucher schools have, you know, services.
   
7. Cancel existing vendor contracts: Check! With whatever legal ramifications that might come with that, I suppose.
   
8. Assess and secure school safety at all MPS buildings: Check!
   
9. Prepare quarterly ‘Turnaround Progress Reports’ for families, teachers and principals to review: NO! In fact, one of the biggest flaws, in my mind, is that voucher schools are allowed to keep virtually everything they do secret. They must make enrollment and demographic data available, but test scores, attendance rates, meetings of their governing bodies--those can be secret!
   
10. Determine whether to break MPS into smaller districts []: Check! The voucher program currently is, essentially, small districts now. You have the Catholic schools, the Lutheran schools, and a few other loose coalitions, but right now, there's no large governing structure.

So, wow. The voucher program already has nearly everything a turnaround team would bring to MPS. And, yet, MPS performs as well or better with demographically comparable students. Time to make that second turnaround team a key part of the platform!

--

Look, okay, being serious for a second: I think the thing that the study released this week most clearly shows is that the kind of schooling, public or private, that a child in or near poverty receives is generally not going to have an effect on the achievement level of that child. Even considering that the parents of voucher students are almost certainly more dedicated and willing to push their children--something this study could not and did not control for--has no great effect.

Which, standard disclaimer here, is not to say that there are not exceptions. Clearly, some schools with voucher students do well with those students. (I suspect, though because school-level data are not allowed to be released to the public, that those are schools which provide better socioeconomic integration, which is proven to correlate to poor students' success.) The same is true within MPS. And many poor students overcome barriers and challenges just fine to go on to do great things. I am speaking here of Milwaukee's children in aggregate. Individuals always show great variation.

What I have been saying all along remains just as true now, and is even solidly reinforced by the results out this week. Change the dismal facts of the city, change the achievement level in school. Fix Milwaukee first.

Imagine me doing an "I told you so" dance

by folkbum

Actually, don't. It's probably not attractive, even in your head. But, still, I told you so:

Summarizing a comparison of how matched groups of voucher and MPS students did across two years of tests, the researchers wrote:

"The primary finding in all of these comparisons is that there is no overall statistically significant difference between MPCP (voucher) and MPS student achievement growth in either math or reading one year after they were carefully matched to each other."

A second study, which looked at broader, but not scientifically matched groups of MPS and voucher students, found that the percentages of fourth-graders in voucher schools who met the state's definition of proficiency in reading and math were lower than percentages for low-income MPS fourth-graders. For eighth-graders, the proficiency rates were about the same.

Additionally frustrating regarding this study, which was supposed to be the big "accountability" measure in the mess of a compromise bill a few years ago that allowed the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to expand to its present size, is that there are no school-specific data available. Republicans in the legislature and the voucher proponents pushing for expansion flat-out demanded that school-specific data must not be made available to the public.

MPS releases detailed report cards every year for every program, breaking down test scores, retention rates, truancy rates, graduation rates, and so on. Parents cannot get that data about the voucher schools, and that's by design. Many voucher advocates long have argued from one side of their mouths that parents must be allowed to make the best choices for their children and then argued with the other that the data to inform parents' decisions must be kept out of parents' hands.

Now we know why: There is a perception that voucher schools are or must be better. If parents were aware of reality--that there is, in fact, no difference in achievement--then the popularity of the program may well start to wane. And if the data revealed that some voucher schools are, in fact, no better than day-care centers or holding pens, then the advocates would have a serious PR problem on their hands, too--much worse than just the news that voucher schools aren't the panacea they promised two decades ago.

Another victory for the free educational marketplace!

by folkbum

It seems that once again, involved and discerning parents demanded the highest academic standards from a school in the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program--and when they didn't get that quality, they shut the school down:

A high school that joined the city's voucher program this year has been removed from the program by state officials because of building code violations that render it unsafe for students.

Wait! I must be reading that wrong. Voucher proponents assure us that parents will vote with their shoe leather and close down these sorts of bogus operations. Clearly it's not the state at work here, but the market forces. Let's try that again:

R&B Academy, 5150 N. 32nd St., is the third publicly funded private school to be launched by Ricardo Brooks and subsequently shut down by the state Department of Public Instruction because of problems.

No, no, no, no! That's not right! It's the demands of the market that shut down this bad apple, not the state. It must be. Just like restaurants that lose customers when the food poison people or recent TV shows by Stephen J Cannell. Once more:

At issue is whether this mid-semester closure will force the DPI to reconsider what's known as the "bad actor" rule. The state agency had kept a list of people banned from being involved in a voucher school for seven years, and Brooks was placed on that list after two voucher schools he started, Academic Solutions and Northside High School, were forced out of the program because of questions about their academic viability and safety. [. . .] The absence of such a rule infuriates Anthony Shunkwiler, who taught at Brooks' Northwest High School for four months before it was closed by the state in 2006. Shunkwiler, who now lives in Texas, said Thursday that he was never paid for the time he worked there.

He described Northwest as a chaotic place where students rolled marijuana cigarettes in class and brought firearms to school without fear of punishment. Classrooms lacked textbooks and Brooks was primarily concerned about maintaining a flow of cash from the state, Shunkwiler said.

Well, shut my mouth. I guess this really was the state, and not the market. I don't understand how that could be; the great promise of "choice" was that parents would lead, not the state. Oh, well. There's a lot I don't understand anymore, I guess.

MPS outperforms Voucher schools on state tests

by folkbum

Thomas J. Mertz lets us know that the Legislative Audit Bureau's analysis of test score data from the first year of an "accountability" project has been released. (Full report--27 pages of .pdf.) Mertz reproduces this graphic, which pretty much says it all:

(Click for the larger version if you cannot read the numbers.)

Now, we already had an idea that this is what the data would look like. In February, the university researchers conducting the longitudinal study released their first report on exactly these data and concluded, as the table above seems to indicate, that voucher schools and voucher students do not automatically outperform the public schools. The key new information in the LAB's report released yesterday is the addition of the nationally-normed test data, which I'll get to in a second. But I do want to make a handful of quick points about the WKCE data:

1. MPS has aligned its curriculum to the state standards which are, in theory, what the state test tests. Voucher schools may be doing a good job of teaching things not covered by the state standards--which may be either good or bad depending on how you feel about our standards.
2. These data represent aggregates. Individual students will still thrive or fail in different environments for different reasons, and anecdotal evidence suggests that there are indeed students who "make it" at voucher schools who wouldn't have in MPS. There are also plenty of world-class students in MPS.
3. These data are still the "baseline" year, based on tests given two years ago in November of 2006. They show that in year zero of the study, MPS outperforms voucher schools. We should have, any moment now, the researchers' report on the 07-08 test data, which may or may not show the same results.
4. The WKCE data here (as well as the nationally-normed test data below) tell you nothing about how well an individual school does on the testing. Lucky for you, MPS has a full suite of downloadable "report cards" for each school (also available at the schools or central office on paper) so that you can see how an individual school performs on the state tests, and how those scores break down by race, sex, poverty, special needs, and so on. (From the MPS Portal, click on "Schools" in the left sidebar; each school's profile contains a link to the last few report cards.) Voucher schools are not required to provide that information to you or to the researchers for this study, so you have no way to know whether your neighborhood voucher school does any better with your tax dollars than your neighborhood public school.
5. Speaking of special needs students, check out the ratios in Table 5; less than 10% of voucher students tested were identified as having disabilities, while more than 20% of the matched MPS sample were and more than 25% of the random sample were. And the random sample performed best!
6. Test scores are not the best or only measure of student achievement, but they do provide an equal basis for comparison.

Here's the graphic of nationally-normed reading test scores at the voucher schools that submitted them:

(Again, click for a bigger image.)

I selected reading because it was the first graph (there's also math and science), not because it makes voucher schools look low-performing. The other scores are not any better--voucher students at these schools are generally performing well below the national average. (MPS does not administer these tests--by law, it administers the NCLB-approved state WKCE test--so there is no comparison.) This last point reinforces what I have been saying all along, so often that you can probably now say it with me: The problems in the Milwaukee Public Schools are not school problems as much as they are Milwaukee problems, something I tried again to get at a couple of weeks ago. Yes, there are things MPS can and should be doing better, and goodness knows I bust my own behind every day to help my students beat the odds. But the solution to low educational achievement in Milwaukee is not simply the dismantling of MPS or the transplanting of MPS students into private schools.

Who knows; maybe the long-term data will prove me wrong about that, although after almost 20 years of vouchers, you'd think that they would be beating MPS by now if they were really the solution.

(I wrote this post instead of a response to Patrick McIlheran's column this morning about a potential boarding school in Milwaukee. The success of such boarding schools in urban settings around the country reinforces my thesis above: If you remove students from a disruptive environment outside of school, they can learn better in school. Ironically, McIlheran has long been pro-voucher, though the data seem clear (to date) that vouchers alone don't do enough to create large-scale change. A 400-seat boarding school won't do much for the other 84,600 students in MPS, either.)