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.

"If I had a million dollars, I would buy my grandmother a kidney."

by folkbum

I had a good conversation yesterday afternoon with Erin Richards, who's taken on the Milwaukee Public Schools beat at the Journal Sentinel since Alan Borsuk took the buyout.

She's got a series coming up starting with an article in Sunday's paper about the intersection of poverty and education, which I am looking forward to, as the topic is an interest of mine. (UPDATE: Richards has let me know that the series will run starting Sunday, 10/4, instead.)

One of the things we talked about really got me thinking: Should teachers organize, Richards wondered, around a goal like eradicating poverty or improving the neighborhood and the community? If teachers see, as we do, the effects of poverty in the classroom, what responsibility do we have to take leadership roles in the community and actively try to change the conditions outside the classroom? And if this is a necessary task for teachers, who organizes it? Who trains us? How do we maintain such activism without affecting the time we already have to put in before and after school to do what we do well?

I don't have an answer for that. On the one hand, it seems to me that one group should not be responsible for fighting the battle on every front; on the other, it makes sense to organize from among a group that has a vested interest in the results.

Which leads me to the quote at the top of the post. This was the first sentence--the first sentence!--of one of my students' pre-test essays from a couple of weeks ago. And it went on from there--her uncles who were sick, her mother who couldn't pay the bills, and so on. She never even got to the "and I would spend some of that million on nice stuff for me" part of the essay that you have to expect. Such pressure! How do you go through your life at 17 with that kind of weight and responsibility on your shoulders? And while her paper was by no means representative, it was also not the only million-dollar fantasy constructed around helping family overcome the effects of poverty and the bad economy and lack of health care.

It's overwhelming, really, to start thinking about the effort it would take within the community to change these conditions. Is it our place as teachers to do it? If no one else is stepping up, it may be.

More on Education and Poverty

by folkbum

Far from refocusing the debate at a grand national or state-wide level with my JS op-ed, all I've managed to do is bug myself. Or, rather, allow myself to be bugged by those who will not get it.

I already noted Milwaukee Alderman Bob Donovan, but there were a few others. For example, Kevin Fischer. I do not regularly read Fischer, as I teach freshmen most of the day and don't need to deal with more of that. But Fischer is on lately about some bone-headed project of his whereby he sets about to prove the liberal bias of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He managed to set the criteria so narrowly he can't help but win. (For example, Fischer writes of one op-ed, "[The author] writes about a bipartisan proposal that has the support of the MMAC" and then calls the piece "liberal." Sheesh.)

The day my piece ran, Fischer of course labeled it "liberal." Which confuses me a little: I remember fairly clearly being in college (unlike some of the people I went to college with, I suspect) and having these debates in my education classes about the proper role of education. I'm pretty sure that the "conservative" position in those debates was that schooling should not be the means to societal change. In my piece, I clearly argued that schools cannot, and cannot be relied upon or demanded to do so, adequately overcome the effects of poverty and other societal ills in the wider community. Which, as I suggested, is in my view a fairly "conservative" notion.

Whatever. Fischer signs off on his description of my op-ed with "It is also insulting to suggest poor children are incapable of learning because they're poor." I suggested no such thing, of course, but it should not really surprise you that Fischer is willing to willfully misinterpret what I wrote.

Monday's paper also featured another letter to the editor on the subject. Our writer here says, "Poverty is not and never will be the cause of poor Milwaukee Public Schools results. If so, we would not have, now or throughout history, the many, many citizens who came out of slum conditions to gain wealth, fame, notoriety or even a good middle-class life."

Like Fischer's deliberate mischaracterizing my piece to suggest I believe that poverty makes children "incapable of learning," this writer suggests that the many success stories of poor students overcoming the odds prove that there is not a strong correlation between poverty and poor educational achievement, and that, as the editors' titling of his letter put it, "poverty is too often an excuse."

Let me be absolutely clear about this: Poverty and its effects create a cluster of challenging conditions that schools, with their present level of resources, cannot overcome for all students at all times, particularly in urban or rural areas with high concentrations of poor students. Furthermore, it is ridiculous and to demand that schools be the institution to fix those conditions and to punish schools when they fail to do so.

And yes, of course there are exceptions, particular confluences of teaching, parenting, and learning that buck the general trend. But such exceptions are simply not easily replicable to all--if they were, don't you think we'd be doing it by now? But the fact is that there is not one single urban school district with high concentrations of poor students that is performing at anything like the rates its suburban neighbors do. No one has found that silver bullet.

And let me also be clear about this part: I am not suggesting in any way that poverty creates an inability to learn, just the conditions under which learning becomes very difficult. Consider this partial list of the effects of poverty on children:

• poor children start school with significantly reduced vocabularies
• poor children's brains develop differently
• poor children are less likely to have private music, art, or foreign language instruction, all of which can increase IQ and achievement later in school
• poor students are less likely to participate in organized sports, which can help children learn appropriate public behavior
• poor students are more likely to have lead poisoning, asthma, diabetes, and other health problems that affect learning or school attendance
• poor students are more likely to change schools more often
• poor students tend to forget more over the summer vacation than do their wealthier peers

And that's just off the top of my head this morning.

Clearly, not every child who grows up poor has to deal with all of these factors, and experience suggests that many poor students will overcome disadvantages to graduate and succeed. But the data are also clear that in general that success is just plain harder to get. That's why I keep saying it's ridiculous that people expect MPS alone to overcome all of these deficits for all of our students, at least not without a significant change in the amount of and how we spend our resources.

And to be even more crystally clear: I am not suggesting, as MPS school board candidate ReDonna Rodgers commented here last week, that any of this is pretense to surrender, or "a nice safe excuse for doing nothing." If I believed that, I would not work anywhere near so hard at my job as I do, and I would not be so passionate about the issue.

Bravo Channel

By Keith Schmitz

Local labor activist Ellen Bravo popped up in the New York Times letters column yesterday.

Alas, “welfare as we know it” was ended by those who’d never known welfare or poverty.

For low-wage workers ineligible for unemployment insurance, welfare was how you made do when you got laid off or fired, including for being pregnant. It often supplemented inadequate wages.

For many, it gave a path out of violence. It represented a way to care for a newborn or a dying parent, get health insurance or avoid having to leave young children home alone.

Welfare recipients would tell you in a heartbeat that the system needed reform. But their wish list grew out of one goal: getting out of poverty. That was never the purpose of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, and it certainly wasn’t the result.

We’ll resolve the problem only if we name it correctly: the need to reform work and value caregiving.

This is a nice lead in to the perfect cynicism of Congressman Mark Green. Since I heard it in front of a group of businesspeople, I imagine he has picked up the theme of how our state programs has led to some of the worst poverty in the nation within the city of Milwaukee.

The problem is this is like an arsonist describing why your house is on fire.

Programs passed by the GOP have led to manifold problems for Wisconsin's poor, but in the world of these hammerheads all the world consists of nails and of course the remedy is...hold your breath...TAX CUTS!

Ellen Bravo of course describes one problem, which is the so-called "welfare reform" program. It is jay dropping burt last Friday Wall Street Journal editor Steve More equated this brain-child with the great Badger ideas of workmens' compensation and social security.

To end "dat welfare" was of course the cherished dream of barflies everywhere, brought to life by the lord of the barflies, Tommy Thompson. The trouble is this poorly thought through solution has thrust thousands of families deeper into poverty as Ellen describes. What's more this program gives scant chance for these mothers to work their way out of the pit.

On the male side we have the explosion of incarcerations, which never looks good on anyone's resume. Building prisons we didn't need was the one and only idea of Scott Walker that propelled this beautiful mind back to the legislature, thanks to his grateful constituency.

Of course we have the constant drumbeat every night on our local news of the string of homicides that take place in Milwaukee, far from the cul de sacs of New Berlin but yet it makes the easily afraid in these and other distant suburbs to send off crime fighters like Walker to Madison.

The only problem is it costs us -- and the convicts of course -- royally. Our cost of incarceration far exceeds that of our neighbors, but there is one thing our two GOP AG candidates will never tell you. Our violent crime rate is the fourth or fifth lowest in the nation.

On top of that we have businesses locating their jobs far beyond the Milwaukee bus lines.

The way we treat our poor and minorities is a shame in light of our PROGRESSIVE tradition, putting us right down there with the redneck realms in the South. There is no way we are going to hack our way out of this forest with tax cuts.

Some randomness, since I'm skipping Drinking Liberally tonight

First, give.

Among the good articles about my life in the paper lately, here's a good one on special education. If you really, really want to know where the money's going, it's going to make up for what the underfunding of IDEA legislation has done to districts like mine.

David Riemer and Deborah Blanks had an op-ed last weekend, "It's time to get serious about reducing poverty in Milwaukee":

[A]lready, several directions seem clear:

• First, we need to do a far better job of helping poor, unemployed, single adults--mostly men and disproportionately minorities--find jobs. Tragically, the only systematic program that provides some of these men with work, adequate nutrition and affordable housing is the Wisconsin prison system, and we can't bear to see more of our young men go to prison.

• Second, we need to take a look a good hard look at whether or not there are enough jobs to go around in the regular economy. If not, we should look at options to get people work experience and entry into the work force. [. . .]

• Third, we need to strengthen our system of work supports. The mechanisms in place for training the unemployed and placing them in jobs in the private sector leave much to be desired.

The Earned Income Tax Credit has proved to be a successful tool for encouraging the unemployed to take jobs and making work pay for those who do. But the EITC does almost nothing for childless adults, and its phase-out inadvertently creates a work disincentive and a marriage penalty for those trying to move higher up the job ladder.

And finally, tens of thousands of Milwaukeeans have no health insurance, which makes it hard for unemployed persons with health problems to find work.

I've written before about the unavoidable correlation between poverty and challenges in education. I'm working on more about that, once I get some more sources in order about it. I'm not convinced that a "serious" conversation ever solved anything, but talking about the problem--and how, specifically, to address the four things Riemer and Blanks note above--is better than just having the problem.

Health care in Milwaukee is still expensive.

Did I mention, you should give?

Here's as concise a summary as I've ever read of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney's, um, relationship.

I'm thinking it's time for a massive Cheddarsphere blogroll update. I have a long list of new Wisconsin lefties that I need to cement in place, and some others I know need to be removed for inactivity. Lemme know of anyone I should add.

Diet update (for those of you wondering): 21 pounds.