Important MPS hearing tonight

by folkbum

This came through on the email this morning; you can get some background from the newspaper here.

Hello friends of MPS,

As you might have seen in the news, the MPS board took a needed step last week, the first step in a push back against No Child Left Behind's waste of our district resources. We voted not to hire a pack of overseers for the new federally-imposed DIFI bureaucracy until the federal government sent a check with dedicated funds to pay for these positions.

Not surprisingly, the money's been found and it's already in the district's pockets. (Ha!) An emergency meeting of the board's Finance and Personnel committee has been called for tomorrow night to approve the creation of this bureaucracy.

As a taxpayer and a mom who has invested a lot into the success of MPS and the children it serves, I'm sick of seeing our money go down the drain to meet increasingly more bizarre NCLB requirements. Because MPS has entered DIFI ("District Identified for Improvement") status, the feds are forcing the state to impose a series of interventions on us. Some of these interventions include creating a new bureaucracy to oversee the new mandated curriculum we'll be teaching during a new mandated school-day schedule.

Even if the feds were actually paying for these (and the many other) mandates -- which they're not -- it would still be wrong to approve these positions. NCLB is a distraction away from what really will help our children, like smaller class sizes and meaningful home/school connections.

If you can, please come tell the Finance and Personnel committee what you think:

Special Meeting of the Finance & Personnel Committee
Tuesday, Jan. 22nd at 6 p.m.
MPS Central Services * 5225 W. Vliet St.

Sorry for the late notice; I just found out about this this afternoon.

Jennifer Morales,
Member of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors

NCLB: Happy Anniversary

by folkbum

Or not.

Thursday Thumbs

Thursday Thumbs is a new regular feature wherein I express my approval or disapproval concerning news of the week, happenings, or other trivia through a cute graphic, rather than with my usual long, hard-to-follow, and humorless rants and rambling. Today's edition is the inaugural one. Be nice.

Thumbs up to going back to grad school. Scott's time will get tighter, but it will be well worth it in the end.

Thumbs down to AirTran. Midwest Airlines has something special about it, and it isn't AirTran's dirty airplanes and cramped seats.

Thumbs up to Mel Gibson. Yes, he's crazy, but at least he's able to own his insanity.

Thumbs down to Michael McGee, Jr. He can't seem to own his insanity.

Thumbs up to the McIlheran Watch growing ever wider. I'm telling you, he's a tricky one.

Thumbs down to everyone who over-hyped the "spying on Di" story.

Thumbs up to a swift recovery for Tim Johnson. Our thoughts are with him and his family.

Thumbs down to everyone waiting for Johnson to die. Really, FOX, that's low even for you.

Thumbs up to Dean, for crossing enemy lines.

Thumbs down to No Child Left Behind, which seems to be falling apart all over.

Thumbs down to Peter Pochowski, who said, "he estimates 25% to 30% of local teens are carrying" cell phones. That's about 70% to 75% off from reality.

A bunch of things to start your week

• Welcome USA Today readers! The article I was interviewed for about teacher bloggers is running today. I get two whole paragraphs. If you're here for the first time, you may want to read my reactions to being interviewed generally--and some of the issues raised by the reporter specifically--in this post from last month, as I go into much more depth than the article indicates.
  
  
• The USA Today story also has a great list of blogs in the sidebar, including some I read regularly. You should read them, too. One note: Ms. Frizzle has un-anonymized herself and is blogging her Fullbright exchange year in Turkey. (Hat tip to Edwise on that one. And, yes, I still haven't changed that link in my own sidebar, either.)
  
  
• New Rule: Anyone who thinks that conditions at Guantanamo Bay are so great--people like a certain pundit wannabe that some say I have an unhealthy obsession over--should spend time there. And not just like visit as a reporter, either. They should be kidnapped from their houses in the middle of the night, flown there in the company of people who don't speak their language and without being told what's happening or why, and forced to stay there without contact from their families, attorneys, or anyone more helpful than the Red Cross every few weeks. They could even take a detour on the way to some prison in Eastern Europe somewhere for treatments at the day spa waterboarding and more. After five years, without charge, we'll see if they still think it's the greatest place on earth. (The Journal Corp. blogging software is still returning errors when I try to link to specific posts, but the one I'm talking about is the "Ooh, it's so degrading" one.)
  
  
• The National Council of Teachers of English did a massive survey last spring about how No Child Left Behind is affecting (or not) teaching and learning in English teachers' classrooms. I participated, but I don't remember what all of my answers were. I can tell you, however, that my feelings are generally in line with the results:

  This study confirms findings from several recent public opinion polls that the more people know about NCLB, the more inclined they are to have an unfavorable opinion about its effects on public schools, teachers, and students.
  
  Virtually every poll shows public support for the four goals established by Congress when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001. But, literacy educators agree with the public that the law has failed to improve the education system for schools, teachers, students, and their families by not effectively meeting these goals. The table below shows a striking majority of literacy educators see NCLB as being ineffective when asked how well it was meeting its four stated goals:
  
  Based on what you’ve seen in your school and classroom over the past four years, to what extent do you think NCLB has been effective in reaching the four reform goals described by the U.S. Department of Education? [Number of teachers answering g]enerally ineffective (1 – 3 on a six point effectiveness scale).

  • Encouraging stronger accountability for results?--58%
    
  • Providing more freedom for schools and communities?--93%
    
  • Encouraging proven educational methods?--81%
    
  • Providing more choices for parents?--81%

  
  In addition, only 15% of literacy educators reported that NCLB has been effective in improving educational equity in their schools, a core rationale for passage of the Act in 2001.

  Read the whole thing, as they say, including some actual statements from literacy teachers about how NCLB has not improved literacy education.
  
  
• Michael J. Mathais has written probably the best post to come out of the Cheddarsphere in the last week:

  Although her picture stayed at JSOnline for two days at the start of this week, it seemed crowded away by the election news and speculation over whether President Bush had delivered too partisan a 9/11 speech.
  
  The picture was gone by Wednesday, but the story had garnered some interest. By 10:00 p.m. that day it was on a list of “most viewed” stories.
  
  Merideth Howard, an Army reservist from Waukesha, told relatives she didn’t know why she had been sent to Afghanistan, fretted about her training, and worried that, at the age of 52, she was too old to be in a combat zone.

  Please, please, please read the rest.
  
  
• Seth nails the budget debate between Jim Doyle and Mark Green:

  So getting back to the contradictions laid out by Doyle and Green in this current election race, the key to electoral success is really not what the candidates say about the budget -- they're both going to say contradictory stuff -- but rather how they say it. And on this point, so far, Green is getting slammed.
  
  A look at the JS article this morning tells us that Doyle's election year proposals would cost an estimated $66 million per year, while Green's would run at least $148 million per year. I bolded the "at least" because it's central to the problems Green has been having when discussing the budget.

  The significant difference on budgets, to me, between these two, is that Jim Doyle took office four years ago with a massive structural debt and budget shortfall from the Republican Thompson-McCallum years, and had to fix it. His fixes have been imperfect, but this state is now on a course that doesn't add up to insolvency. Mark Green, on the other hand, has been a part of Bush's Congress, where the mantra has been "cut taxes, raise spending." And look at where the national debt has gone. Is that the kind of budgeting experience we want in Madison? I think not.
  
  
• All those Republicans--I'm looking at you, Fred--who said they'd disapprove of ABC's phony "Path to 9/11" if it contained invented scenes about Bush, well, it does. I'll wait here for the condemnations.
  
  
• Along the same lines, a number of conservative bloggers are sure that the Valerie Plame outing controversy is over now that Richard Armitage has been revealed as one of Bob Novak's sources. But Novak keeps changing his story, so you gotta wonder what else he's hiding.
  
  
• Kudos to Fair Wisconsin for a good fight so far against the anti-civil-unions-and-any-substantially-similar-arrangement amendment. They've done some great organizing locally, and they have another knock-out ad (opens to a Quicktime movie).
  
  
• Those wacky white supremacists. Always rallying around something.
  
  
• In the Wisconsin 8th CD, where Steve Kagen is going to beat John Gard in a few weeks, the National Republican Congressional Committee is, as I first reported here, planning to spend a ton of money on independent expenditure ads. Carrie Lynch comments here, and Cory Liebmann suggests that the NRCC really needs to look at their own candidate before making ads against Kagen.
  
  Nationally, the story is much the same. As Chris Bowers points out, the Republicans so far have outspent Democrats, but the Dems have spent zero dollars in defense while Reps have spent 85% of their total defending seats like the WI-08. Chris has it laid out quite clearly in handy table format for you.
  
  
• The tax cuts didn't create jobs. Period.
  
  
• Anyone like me, who plans to do candidate advocacy on-line this year, should spend some time with the Net Democracy Guide.
  
  
• Finally, a question for Milwaukee-area iPod + iTrip users. What channel are you using? I've kind of settled on 88.5, but I still get static sometimes driving around town.

Tutor This

I have a few long posts in my head about the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's series on MPS high schools this week, but, given work things, I will start with a response to something from Sunday's "Crossroads" section instead.

Eugene W. Hickok, a paid shill for the "supplemental education services" industry, has an op-ed lamenting the fact that parents don't make use of supplemental education services. Kind of like the Jiffy Lube guy complaining that you get your oil changed at the dealer.

Leave aside for a minute that the guy in question, as an Undersecretary of Education, "was an architect of the No Child Left Behind Act" (the sort of thing that always reminds me of the marketing philosophy of "create a niche, then fill it"--the man created a cash stream for these SESes and now he's profiting from it). Leave aside the additional willy-generating fact that the company's business model is to lobby for changes in education law that benefit the private-sector companies that pay for their services (and people complain when NEA lobbies for the public schools!).

Consider simply the fact that the op-ed is bone-headedly offensive.

The basic idea behind the SESes in question is that schools identified as "in need of improvement" under NCLB must divert a portion of their federal Title I money to outside groups, which can include everything from for-profit companies to faith-based organizations, who then tutor children in the basics like reading and math. This is supposed to help the students not with their schoolwork, but to achieve better scores on state tests. And, given today's release to the public about Wisconsin's failing schools, you'll probably hear more about it soon.

Hickok doesn't live in Milwaukee and hasn't seen what goes on here; I do. I've seen these SESes in action. But first, here's his complaint:

These school administrators claim that of the 1.4 million children eligible for such tutoring during the past school year, only 233,000 (17%) had parents and guardians who found this offer worthy of acceptance. All the rest apparently declined free tutoring for their children.

That is simply preposterous. [. . .]

The law says schools [. . .] are to notify parents of their children's eligibility for the services, inform them of the names and varieties of tutoring services available, and make it easy for parents to enroll their children for the services.

But in far too many places this simply isn't happening. Why would only 17% of eligible children be enrolled in this program?

In far too many places, it's not the parents' fault or an oversight that's to blame. It is the people in charge of the schools, who, in far too many cases, think that the money set aside for free tutoring is money that ought to stay with their schools and districts instead--that it's their money to manage as they see fit. [. . .]

Too many children in this country are failing to get the education they need and deserve. What a tragedy it would be if, years from now, we learned that those responsible for providing that education to our children were the very ones responsible for their not getting it.

The omitted litany of complaints, though written from a cozy office in DC, is published in the Milwaukee paper, leading many, I would guess, to assume that these problems exist in Milwaukee--that MPS is trying to cheat parents out of an opportunity for their children. This is not true, and to imply it is an insult.

I've seen the district letter that goes out to parents about my school. Even though we have generally been improving in one or more areas every year we miss Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the letter pretty clearly makes the case to parents that our school sucks rocks. This year, when parents get their letter ('cause my school is on the list! yay!), parents will not be told that our math and reading scores were up ten or more percentage points over last year. Nope. Just like last year, they didn't hear about how we missed AYP simply because three too few special education students could be rounded up to take the test. Instead, parents just get a letter full of alarming rhetoric about how the whole school is doomed! Doomed, I tell you!

The letter does not set firm deadlines. In fact, though every year there's a supposed deadline, the SESes that inhabit my school keep recruiting kids year-round. They are in the lobby for the ninth-grade orientation. They are all around at parent-teacher conferences. The people running the programs are in the building constantly trying to drum up business.

Perhaps one reason why Milwaukee might have a low participation rate--in 2004-2005, it was about 20%, not significantly better than the national average Hickok cites--is because many parents never get their letters.

I was at one of the school-closing meetings (see this post) last week, and Tyrone Dumas, who's running the process, said that a mailing to every parent in the district that his office prepared had a returned-undeliverable rate from the post office of more than 1 in 5. That's 20% of parents who may not be getting the letters in the first place.

Another reason why participation may be low is something hinted at above: The "tutoring" is not supposed to help students be successful in school, but rather successful on state tests. For any student who is past November of his or her sophomore year, this tutoring--while it may be needed to brush up rudimentary skills--seems useless, since the test is over. I've had many students tell me that when they asked for help on work I assign, they can't get it from these tutors. This upsets students and parents, both.

The tutoring is also of questionable quality; at my school, I have observed or have been made aware of activities at these SES sessions that should worry parents:

• teachers ignoring tutoring students to conduct after-school, paid activities with different children (double-dipping, anyone?)
  
• incentives such as TVs and cash given to students for mere attendance, rather than performance
  
• tutors trying to recruit students from my school to attend the private school where they teach
  
• abuse, misuse, theft, and vandalism of school property during the after-school sessions
  
• students being called out of class during the school day for meetings about incentive trips to places like the Mall of America
  
• students missing days of school to attend such incentive trips
  
• teachers asked to evaluate students they have never personally worked with--on forms that would be filed with DPI!

This is not the sort of thing that would make a parent confident in the ability of these services to improve a child's basic skills.

I'm not suggesting that all SES providers everywhere are scam artists or completely useless. I just haven't seen enough to encourage me about their effectiveness, certainly not enough that an industry shill like Hickok can pursuade me.

Apparently, the state hasn't seen enough, either. Last August, the state raised red flags:

When asked if there is any current, objective way to judge whether kids are doing better in school or on state tests, Mary Kleusch, the assistant director for the Office of Educational Accountability, who oversees the program, said simply: No.

[. . .T]he law puts the task of approving--and evaluating--providers squarely in the lap of the state, not school districts.[. . .] Currently, the state requires providers to report the number of students they served, the degree to which they attended and how much progress the students made. "The limitation is that it's a self-report," Kleusch said.

This year MPS decided they would disrupt the learning even more at my school--and other sites served by SESes--by making us give more standardized tests during class time at the start and end of the school year. These tests were somehow supposed to tell someone somewhere whether the SESes were working. Why the burden fell on us--and not the groups being assessed--I don't know. I just know I lost four days of teaching this year because of it.

I have no idea what the results will show, or whether the state will ever develop any kind of a rigorous accountability model for these groups. But until they do--and until someone shows me data to suggest that the students in these programs are improving at something more than test-taking ability and that my tax dollars are being spent wisely--I will not sit idly by and let someone making a pretty penny off those same tax dollars blame me for the failings of his damned law.

Paging Dr. Pangloss

I teach high school. In Milwaukee. It is neither easy nor all that uplifting most days.

Considering how hard I worked last year trying to change my school’s fortunes on the state’s standardized test (a vain effort, as my school failed again), I was surprised to see a front-page headline in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel telling me I was getting off easy on No Child Left Behind.

Well, not me, personally, but Wisconsin in general.

A report by the think tank Education Sector takes us to the woodshed. Research and Policy Manager Kevin Carey has created what he calls the "Pangloss Index," so named after Voltaire's character Dr. Pangloss, who, in the face of evidence to the contrary, keeps insisting that we live in the best of all possible worlds.

“According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction,” Carey says, “the state is a modern-day educational utopia where a large majority of students meet academic standards, high school graduation rates are high, every school is safe and nearly all teachers are highly qualified.”

If you can’t tell, he’s being sarcastic. Apparently, none of those things is true in his world.

I’m no fan of No Child Left Behind. A tiny part of me is gleeful about our gaming the system. Another part of me wonders whether anyone learned anything from the phony “Texas Miracle” that spawned NCLB in the first place.

But most of me is thinking, “Hey, that’s my integrity being impugned, there.”

I read the rest of the report at Education Sector’s website. Carey is merciless towards Wisconsin, using more italics to express disbelief than even I do. However, Carey’s breathless takedown of Wisconsin’s DPI ignores how our students, even on measures external to DPI, do very well.

Just a week before, for example, the same newspaper buried a story on page 8B about how only three states perform better than Wisconsin on the National Assessment of Educational Progress science exam. Other NAEP data (click on our state) show that Wisconsin ranks in the top third in reading and math, too. Our ACT-taking students rank second in the nation. Census figures show that we are in the top 25% of states for adults with high school diplomas.

These are all data we can be proud of, and that indicate things are going well here. Utopia? Maybe not—but certainly not deserving of Carey’s critiques.

Another complaint is the notion that 99.5% of Wisconsin’s teachers are “highly qualified,” according to DPI. To DPI, “highly qualified” means you have a license in the subject you teach. Carey thinks this is insufficient. Clearly, he hasn’t gotten a teaching license in Wisconsin lately. The process includes not only coursework and practical experience (up to a full year of student teaching, depending on your license), but also a standardized exam in general knowledge and your subject area.

Maintaining a license isn’t as easy as it used to be, either. Gone are the “lifetime license” and easy renewal credits; instead, the law governing license renewal (called PI-34) requires rigorous self-assessment under the strict guidance of specially-trained mentor teachers. It is no longer true—if it ever was—that those who can’t do, teach.

Then there’s Carey’s utter horror that only one district in the state is labeled as failing (Milwaukee, naturally). Surely, Carey thinks, the rest of the state must be failing, too, and we’re just covering it up.

Well, it depends on how you really want to define failing. One of my biggest complaints about NCLB is the way its labels can create an inaccurate impression of student performance.

The report notes that only 28% of schools in Florida are making annual yearly progress (and the report praises Florida for its honesty). I don’t believe for a second that 72% of the children in Florida are getting substandard education. The NAEP data confirm my suspicions.

Schools can miss AYP—and be labeled as failing—when only a small percentage of their students perform poorly on state tests. Florida, apparently, is willing to take that to the extreme, an extreme that includes taking money away from the failing schools to hand over to unaccountable supplemental educational services, among other things. Wisconsin does not do that, figuring, in part, that continued investment in what works in schools is the better choice.

Do I think Wisconsin’s schools are perfect? No. But I also do not believe that DPI is blind to the state’s problems.

And I don’t think we should be criticized for our success.