The Little Town That Could

By Keith R. Schmitz

Congrats to Marathon, Wisconsin, my wife's home town, population -- not a lot of people.

They won not one but two championships yesterday. Thanks to a strong finish in the 4th quarter, their boys basketball team took the WIAA Division 4 Championship trophy. It was their first state championship since 1977.

Great as this was, it was the second win that reached way out of their league. This public, small town school that has to essentially work with what it gets in terms of students, won the Wisconsin Academic Decathlon. They beat Brookfield Academy, a private school that can recruit practically any one they please by an incredible 4,000 points.

Good work you lazy, overpaid, union thugs.

Once more, with feeling

In comments to the post directly below this one, and elsewhere around the blogs (no offense, Game, but yours is just the most recent one of seen, though by no means the only one), I'm seeing confusion: People don't know the difference between public, charter, voucher, and private schools here in Wisconsin. (One commenter of mine even seems to think, despite the clear mention of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, I live in Michigan.) So, for the benefit of everyone--and not for the first time--I will do the list.

Schools in Wisconsin come in four basic flavors. Please don't confuse or conflate them.

1. Public schools. The public schools are required to have fully licensed ("highly qualified" is the No Child Left Behind terminology) teachers, assistants, and administrators. The public schools must administer standardized tests in grades three through eight, plus ten, and publish the results along with other NCLB-demanded data, such as attendance, graduation, and retention rates, and oodles of demographic data. The schools are fully funded through taxpayers' money (except for all the bake sales and fundraisers they have to hold to fill in the gaps). They are required by law to provide services to special education students, and students who are English language learners, regardless of cost. They are operated by about 420 districts throughout the state as mandated by Article X of the state Constitution, under various parts of state statutes 115-121.
   
   
2. Charter Schools. Charter schools are also public (and non-religious) schools. Really. Like public schools, they must have fully licensed professional staff, and they must administer the same tests and publish the same data as the traditional public schools. They are also fully funded by taxpayer dollars and authorized under state statute 118. The difference between charters and the traditional schools is who runs them: Charters are operated by independent, authorized groups who contract--or charter--with the local school district, currently only Milwaukee or Racine. (The Milwaukee Public Schools sometimes charters with itself to run its schools as charters; these are called instrumentality charter schools, as opposed to the non-instrumentality charters run by other groups.) The independence from districts theoretically allow charters to innovate and move more quickly in response to demands from parents. Read more on charters at the DPI.
   
   
3. Private Schools. These are schools, also covered by section 118, that get no (or almost no) taxpayer money at all. They can be established by pretty much anyone, can be staffed by pretty much anyone, can teach pretty much anything, and have only to meet minimum requirements to be allowed to function. They can admit whom they want, and are not required to admit or provide services to special-needs students. They don't have to give any tests at all or publish the results, or any other data about the school. Many private schools, though, choose to employ licensed teachers, teach special-education students, and to give standardized tests. See the DPI's page on private schools for more.
   
   
4. Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Voucher) Schools. These are private schools, mostly religious in nature. These schools set a tuition rate, and can pick and choose who attends among the paying customers. They can also, if they appy to the DPI, accept students who meet certain economic criteria and receive a voucher to cover their tuition, currently $6,501 (or less if tuition is lower than that). The voucher program is limited only to schools in the city of Milwaukee, and schools that accept voucher students face a few more hurdles than the private schools described above. They still don't need licensed staff, and still are not required to give any particluar tests (though they must adminsiter something) or publish any data about themselves beyond the attendance data submitted to DPI as a prerequisite for getting their voucher payments. They are required to admit voucher students based on a lottery, rather than any selection criteria, but are not required to provide any special education (or other) services to students they admit who might need them. And they must prove to DPI by later this month that they either have accreditation, or are working on it. The DPI has a section on voucher schools, too. (Updated 12/12 for accuracy on the testing part.)

It's confusing, I know. But it is important that you don't--as some people have today and recently--mix up the different kinds of schools. Hope this helps.

More on Public vs. Private Schools

by folkbum

Right Cheddarspherean Dad29 takes me to task this morning over a post of mine from last month. I wrote then about a Department of Education study released quietly showing that, when you correct for socioeconomic and other factors, private schools do not perform any better than public schools do. The feds held onto that study for months, added language dismissing its significance, and released it on a Friday afternoon hoping no one would notice. Clearly, this is because the results don't match the rhetoric from the Bush Administration since day one, which is that private schools are better.

Dad29 quotes at length from a Human Events Online story out a couple of weeks ago. HEO is a proud conservative publication (it's in the banner at the top of the page), so I was immediately skeptical. And for good reason: The HEO story was based on a study done by Harvard's Paul Peterson, a long-time voucher advocate and denigrator of the public sector.

Here's the original Peterson release; even after playing with the data enough to get the result Peterson wanted, he still wouldn't say it was the last word. His partner in the research said, "Our results are not offered as conclusive evidence that private schools outperform public schools."

Why would I think that Peterson is just playing around with the data? Because he has a history of doing exactly that to further his pro-voucher agenda (sorry for the long excerpt):

Peterson's research methods have proven to be completely unreliable, if not outright fraudulent, in both intent and execution. Important research by Peterson was never peer reviewed (or, rejected by his peers), and first published by the Wall Street Journal. Despite this lack of veracity, Peterson's results have been picked up and trumpted by the conservative movement across the country.

Take for example his research of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, begun in 1990. The State of Wisconsin's official evaluator of the program from 1990-1995 was John F. Witte, a Political Science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Using rigorous social science methodologies, and submitting his work to peer review, Witte found essentially no academic difference between school voucher students and regular Milwaukee Public Schools students. Indeed, in some very specific areas, the public school students actually fared better than their private school counterparts.

But in 1996 Peterson reported a re-analysis of Witte's numbers that he had done along with Jay Greene and Jiangtao Du, titled "The Effectiveness of School Choice in Milwaukee: A Secondary Analysis of Data from the Program's Evaluation." Actually, the study had been released before Peterson's court testimony supporting the Milwaukee program, giving opponents no time to adequately analyze his conclusions in time for the court appearance.

[T]hree years later, researchers [broke] down Peterson's "research" pointing out that, in Witte's words, "...the problems with this result are so numerous that I don't think anyone really believes it." Of course, there were earlier clues to the bogus nature of Peterson's research. First, the study had been submitted to an academic journal for peer review, but had been rejected! After the rejection, Peterson initially published some of his results in the Wall Street Journal [. . .].

Witte broke down Peterson's research in a long article in the journal The Phi Delta Kappan in September 1999, an article that has since been expanded into a book just published by the Princeton University Press, titled "The Market Approach to Education: An Analysis of America's First Voucher Program."

The political nature of Peterson's research cannot be overstated. Peterson's results have been picked up and amplified--most often taken as gospel, with no rebuttal--by the think tanks, journalists, and other operatives within the conservative movement, including right-wing ABC TV News reporter John Stossel.

Got that? Peterson, despite the Harvard letterhead, has long been passing off bogus research on vouchers and private schools for almost the sole purpose of providing cover for conservatives to push their pro-voucher agenda. Even when the fed study I wrote about was first published, Peterson was in the press right afterwards spinning the study's results, knowing that the movement was looking to him to provide something they could use. A Dayton Daily News columnist found that ironic.

(Even beyond Peterson's own suspect work, he's responsible for at least one other unforgivable sin: Giving the world Jay Greene.)

I was in Alaska when Peterson's study was released, or I might have said something then. As it is, I don't really have to say much more, because Kevin Franck has done such a nice job here. That one's worth the read.

Feds: Public Schools Outperform Private Schools

Here's one for all you supporters of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, who agitate against the Milwaukee Public Schools and for expansion of the voucher program. As it turns out, public schools outperform--or at least perform as well as--private schools on most fourth- and eight-grade measures.

In a Friday newsdump, the Department of Education released a a report (.pdf) that compared the results of fourth- and eight-grade reading an math tests between public and private schools. The report was competed last year, but, because its findings didn't really fit the ideological leanings of the administration, it went through six months of extra review and scrutiny, with all kinds of qualifying labels attached inside the report to minimize the significance of the findings.

Here's the New York Times from this morning:

The study, carrying the imprimatur of the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department, was contracted to the Educational Testing Service and delivered to the department last year.

It went through a lengthy peer review and includes an extended section of caveats about its limitations and calling such a comparison of public and private schools “of modest utility.”

Its release, on a summer Friday, was made with without a news conference or comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the union for millions of teachers, said the findings showed that public schools were “doing an outstanding job” and that if the results had been favorable to private schools, “there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about private schools.”

This study is similar, both in results and in how it was treated by the feds, to one I mentioned in passing last January, that found that students at charter schools, as well, typically do worse, or at least not much better than, their counterparts in the public schools.

What's important about this study for those of us in Milwaukee, though, is the way it was done. There is absolutely no question that if you look only at raw scores, private schools do much better than public schools. I won't deny that, and no one on my side should. The reasons for this are widely-known: Private schools tend to attract better students with wealthier parents, and private schools tend to have the ability to say no when someone undesirable (say, a special education student) asks for admission. Public schools have none of those options; schools like mine have to take any student who walks in the door, and we are held accountable based on that student's performance regardless of where that student comes from.

Hence, the report's methodology. From the report itself:

In grades 4 and 8 for both reading and mathematics, students in private schools achieved at higher levels than students in public schools. The average difference in school means ranged from almost 8 points for grade 4 mathematics, to about 18 points for grade 8 reading. The average differences were all statistically significant. Adjusting the comparisons for student characteristics resulted in reductions in all four average differences of approximately 11 to 14 points. Based on adjusted school means, the average for public schools was significantly higher than the average for private schools for grade 4 mathematics, while the average for private schools was significantly higher than the average for public schools for grade 8 reading. The average differences in adjusted school means for both grade 4 reading and grade 8 mathematics were not significantly different from zero.

The researchers did not simply make two bar graphs and see which one was taller. They looked at what happens when similar students go to public and priate schools by accounting for demographic factors. This allows researchers to say that students with a particular demographic profile would do very well in either a private or public school. A private school that, by its admission policies or because of the popluation it serves has a greater percentage of those students, will do better than the public school down the way without such a high saturation of them.

For Milwaukee, the question of whether the MPCP is truly effective in increasing student achievement rests not on whether private schools in general outperform public schools, but whether individual students would achieve better in the voucher school than if they had stayed in MPS. This study, though not about Milwaukee specifically, suggests that generally, there is no benefit to moving to a private school and, in fourth grade, at least, students in private schools might be at a real disadvantage.

I know that I have complained previously about the kind of sampling and demographic matching that this study did; my complaints, then, however, were in a different context. That context was one of "holding voucher schools" accountable, which is not at all what a statistically-sampled look at voucher schools would do. It would only tell us--as this new Deptartment of Education study does--in general whether the voucher schools were doing any better or worse than the public schools. The whole point of accountability--at least, in my point of view, the point of view of the Milwaukee Public Schools, the point of view of the state Department of Public Instruction, and the point of view of the DoE and No Child Left Behind--is that parents and the community can see how well or poorly individual schools do with their students. No sampling study can ever tell a parent whether the voucher school or the public school in her neighborhood is the better place for her child.

What a study like the one reported today can tell us is whether it is a good idea to keep soaking the Milwaukee taxpayers and siphoning money away from the public schools to keep funding an unaccountable shadow system of schools of indeterminate quality.

I have for a long time said no, it's not worth it. This study confirms that.

(Via Maha.)

Voucher Schools: The Hits Just Keep Coming

Yesterday a fifth school this year in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was cut off officially by DPI for cheating taxpayers:

In an order kicking the [Sa'Rai and Zigler Upper Excellerated Academy] out of the program, state officials said they noticed in March that student applications submitted by the school appeared to have forged signatures. [. . .] Zigler denied that the school had forged any signatures, calling the state's accusations "a smokescreen" to cover up the fact that "once again, we are a black school being targeted."

Earlier this month, leaders of a half-dozen voucher schools accused the state Department of Public Instruction of targeting black schools for closure, a claim that Deputy State Superintendent Tony Evers says he categorically denies.

After suspecting forgery, department officials asked for the original student applications for the families attending Sa'Rai and Zigler using vouchers. But, according to state officials, the school submitted only 39 out of 90 original student applications, and failed to provide any evidence that it had checked W-2 or other forms to ensure that the families met the income guidelines of the program. To be eligible, family income must not exceed 175% of the poverty level.

State officials allege that, in one case, the school accepted voucher money for a student in a family of three with a total income of $50,900, but the maximum income for a family of three to be eligible in 2005 was less than $29,000.

But Zigler argued that the department decided to give his school the boot to avoid paying Sa'Rai and Zigler $57,000 he claims is overdue.

What's interesting to me--and what could probably have been predicted as the DPI begins to crack down on the schools that are breaking the rules--is the way this is becoming a racial issue. The accusations started at the beginning of this month when DPI cut off Woodson Academy, also for forgery, even though that school had been in the program for more than a decade. (It also had been in trouble off and on for that decade.)

The vast majoity of schools not run by minority personnel or organizations are the religious schools, those run by the archidiocese or the Lutherans. These are long-established schools without as much need to inflate their numbers (considering how many non-voucher students they can draw). They also tend to be run by people with years of experience in school administration and monitored closely by an overseeing organization.

The new schools that have been started, while they definitely fill a void in the community (the need to fund them by shorting MPS is an entirely different question), do not always have the history, the experience, or the oversight behind them. They also don't have a natural base of students who can pay outright instead of needing a voucher. That creates a dangerous situation--whether those schools are run by African Americans or not.

Even back during the discussion of--and eventual passage of--a requirement that all the voucher schools get accreditation, I knew that it would hit the minority-run schools hardest, since almost all of the non-minority-run schools already have accreditation. This fight is only going to get uglier.

Public School Teachers and Private Schools

From the mailbag:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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