The most important table in today's WASDA survey

by folkbum

I got the survey report last night (thanks, Anonymous Source!) and was told it was embargoed until after this morning's press conference. But the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has gone ahead and made it available to everyone (pdf), as it accompanies their story this morning, so I'm hitting publish now instead of later.

It's a survey of school district administrators--and this is an annual thing, so don't think that this is something new propagated by anti-Walker forces--that shows hiring trends, program availability, class sizes, and so on.

The key part of the survey for me, though it's not mentioned in Tom Tolan's write-up, is that it does account for whether school districts were bound by contract extensions or instead had full access to the "tools" that Walker and Republicans claimed would help schools balance their budgets without cutting staff or programs. The survey's finding? "Differences between districts that had contracts compared to those without union contracts were not statistically significant." In table form (click to embiggen):



The report shows that in or out of contract, most districts cut positions and that, in fact, districts without contracts saw higher student-teacher ratios as well as a faster increase in the student-teacher ratios. In other words, the districts with the greatest flexibility to use Walker's "tools" were the districts with the largest and fastest-growing class sizes.

This graph also kills me:



That's the three-year trend for job losses in Wisconsin schools. Combined with predictions from districts that next year's cuts will be as deep or deeper, we're looking at 10,000 jobs lost in public education between 2009 and 2013. That's just devastating.

Also Saturday

by folkbum

This is (partially) my meeting, so if you live in Bay View or near Bay View, I'd love to see you there.

GOP Priorities, in successive headlines

by folkbum

Finland's lesson for US education reform

by folkbum

I'm a bit late to this, but since the topic never goes away, I don't need to be completely timely.

One of the things that confuses me most about today's education reformers is that on the one hand, they point to international rankings where the US is low to create a sense of urgency, while on the other hand, these same reformers advocate a series of reforms that do not exist in the systems ranked above us.

For example, reformers rightly cite the example of Finland as a country that did something right: Over the last three decades, they worked their way up from middling rankings with significant disparities--an achievement gap, if you will--between wealthy and poor students. Today, no such gap exists and Finland sits atop the rankings.

So, what does Finland do? Is there a voucher system? Demoralized, deunionized teachers? Standardized testing every few weeks, some of which is high stakes for students and schools? Charter schools run by private corporations? Performance pay and value-added teacher rankings in the daily newspaper?

Nah, of course not. Pasi Sahlberg, in the Boston Globe, tells us what they do have:

Finland has a different approach to student testing and how test data can or should not be used. Finnish children never take a standardized test. Nor are there standardized tests used to compare teachers or schools to each other. Teachers, students, and parents are all involved in assessing and also deciding how well schools, teachers, or students do what they are supposed to do. Politicians and administrators are informed about how well the education system works by using sample-based learning tests which place no pressure on schools, and by research targeted to understand better how schools work. Parents and politicians think that teachers who work closely together with parents are the best judges of how well their children are learning in schools.

Another difference is that Finland has created an inspiring and respectful environment in which teachers work. All teachers are required to have higher academic degrees that guarantee both high-level pedagogical skills and subject knowledge. Parents and authorities regard teachers with the same confidence they do medical doctors. Indeed, Finns trust public schools more than any other public institution, except the police. The fact that teachers in Finland work as autonomous professionals and play a key role in curriculum planning and assessing student learning attracts some of the most able and talented young Finns into teaching careers. [. . .]

What could the United States learn from the Finns? First, reconsider those policies that advocate choice and competition as the key drivers of educational improvement. None of the best-performing education systems relies primarily on them. Indeed, the Finnish experience shows that consistent focus on equity and cooperation--not choice and competition--can lead to an education system where all children learn well. Paying teachers based on students’ test scores or converting public schools into private ones (through charters or other means) are ideas that have no place in the Finnish repertoire for educational improvement.

Second, provide teachers with government-paid university education and more professional support in their work, and make teaching a respected profession. As long as teachers are not trusted in their work and are not respected as professionals, young talent in the United States is unlikely to seek teaching as a lifelong career.

But, you know, that'll never happen. That would make sense.

Quickly Noted

by folkbum

Further to the complexity of teacher evaluation.

What, you mean Patick McIlheran is a liar? I am shocked, just shocked.

Speaking of shocked: The Journal Sentinel's editorial board continues today with its series of disappointed editorials lamenting the fact that the candidates they endorsed are pursuing exactly the policies they promised to pursue. Buyer's remorse does not look good on you, guys.

The $26,000 woman*; or, building a better teacher

by folkbum

I've been following with interest, for several reasons, the Journal Sentinel series on "building a better teacher." (The series seems not to have its own page, but here's part one, at which you can find links to all the parts published so far.)

The series is not done, and its last part--the part on the role of teachers unions in teacher evaluation and quality--promises to be perhaps its most contentious. We'll dive into that pool once it's full.

But I have a couple of reactions to share so far, with the series mostly done. One is from the part two Sundays ago by Alan Borsuk, about how difficult it is to get the best teachers to volunteer for the worst assignments. What you need to do, though, when reading that is read Borsuk's regular Sunday column from that same edition of the paper, where he writes about Florida's system of grading schools using A, B, C, D and F. Here's a bit from the latter:

There is a benefit to a school if it gets an A or gets a grade that is at least one letter higher than the previous year, namely that each school gets $85 per student from the state for the school to use as it chooses. Most of the money goes to bonuses for staff members.

And there are consequences for getting a low grade: The school doesn't lose any money, but the state takes extra steps to intervene in the school's academic program. And if the school gets Fs in two years out of four, students are allowed to transfer to high-performing public schools in that district. (Originally, they were allowed to transfer to private schools at public expense, but the Florida Supreme Court found that in violation of the state constitution in 2005.) [. . .]

[F]or teachers in schools that earn the high-grade bonuses, the grades can mean $500 to $1,000 extra a year.

I can't tell if Borsuk is endorsing the grading or not--the column's title ("State could learn a thing or two from Florida's school grading system") may not have been his and was ambiguous at best, and there's no clear "We oughtta do this here" line in the piece. But the column does make clear that something like this could be coming to Wisconsin under Scott Walker and his enablers in the legislature.

Which is why the piece a few pages over on pushing teachers to high-needs schools is a frustrating companion. Borsuk gives star status in the column to MPS principal James Sonnenberg:

West Side Academy's Sonnenberg has been outspoken in recent years about how difficult it has been to fill teaching jobs in his school, which serves poor minorities, a large number of whom are transient students from troubled homes in a high-crime area.

"If you've got openings that nobody wants, you're going to get a struggling teacher," Sonnenberg said. He praised the teaching staff overall, but said the joke in his building is, if you show up for a job interview, you get the job--unlike some suburban situations, where there can be hundreds of applicants for each opening.

While we currently do not grade schools (A, B, C, and so on), there's little question what schools would get what grades if we did; it's not a big secret. And if we adopted Florida's model, which offers $1000 bonuses to A-scoring schools, the incentive gets that much stronger for the best teachers to avoid schools like West Side Academy that will get an F.

Even if Wisconsin offered bonuses to schools that improve, there is no incentive to leave an easy-A school for an F school, because how can any great teacher be certain that the rest of the teachers would be just as good and just as focused on improvement?

A second reaction to these stories is that the comment sections are, well, insane. By that I mean the high proportion of people commenting who seem to have learned everything they know about schools from talk radio. Yesterday's story on teacher training programs, for example, attracted this comment:

You want good, dedicated, and very capable teachers?

FIRST: You eliminate the Federal Department of Education! Since Carter created this bureaucratic behemoth, the UNIONS have controlled the schools!

SECOND: You eliminate ALL University Schools of Educations, which are very little about teaching; and, all about leftist ideology and indoctrination!!

THIRD: You legislate strict limits on Teacher Union influence on curriculum and teacher continuing education!

This poor fellow's keyboard apparently doesn't have a working period, at the same time he doesn't have the faintest bit of working knowledge about schools or schools of education. The US Department of Eduction (not a Carter construct, by the way) is the smallest department by employment and a wee 3% of the federal budget; hardly a behemoth. (It is bureaucratic, and if I met Arne Duncan in a dark alley, I'd take him for coffee and explain the error of his ways.) The unions do not control the schools, and have little to no influence on things like curriculum, the structure of training programs, requirements for license maintenance and continuing education, or even teachers' placement in schools and districts once they're hired. While unions have influence over compensation and, to a lesser extent, working conditions, none of those other things are the subjects of collective bargaining agreements.

But you can find comments like that throughout the threads on all these stories: Blah blah UNION BAD blah blah. It's disheartening and not a little concerning that this is what passes for rational discourse about the complicated and nuanced subject of teacher preparation, evaluation, and retention these days. I cannot imagine what the comments will look like on next Sunday's story specifically about the unions.

Finally, I want to link to my most recent Bay View Compass column, which is about teacher evaluation in MPS, but it's not online yet. When it is, it will be at the top of the page here. Here's a bit of it, to whet your appetite::

Two things bother me about the current set-up, one personal and one systemic. Personally, I haven’t had a full-on formal classroom observation by a principal in nearly a decade. As a professional who takes my job seriously, I actually like feedback, and I miss it.

Systemically, there is no consistency to teacher evaluation--here, we’re a system of principals, not a school system. And, when far less than one percent of all evaluated teachers rate “unsatisfactory,” I have no confidence in how seriously the process is run.

So first, let’s take principals out of the evaluator role. I haven’t had a formal observation in forever not because my principals have been bad at their jobs; rather, principals have a thousand other jobs to do. Instead, keep principals--and give them district-level support--focused on helping teachers improve classroom practice without the pressure of putting a label on the teachers they’re helping. Teachers will be more receptive to principal interventions, even those based on sensitive data like test scores, when they know they’re non-evaluative.

There's more, including my suggestion for where the evaluator role should be if not in the hands of principals. If you can get a paper copy, it's there; it should be online any time now.

Update: Also.

* Title: The average starting salary in Wisconsin, and the fact that this profession is still attracts more women than men--cause and effect?

When you repeat the lie loud enough and often enough, people start repeating it back wronger

by folkbum

We have talked here, ad nauseum, about the misleading statistic perpetuated by the mgmt of the Milwaukee Public Schools, that for every dollar they spend on teachers' salaries, they spend an additional 74 cents on teachers' benefits. This is misleading, as I have explained, because it contains lots of things that you don't normally think of as "benefits"--defined as stuff you negotiate for as a perk of the job--and a lot of costs related to retirees, rather than current employees.

The issue is complicated, some might say nuanced, but the top line number is an easy one to repeat a lot if you have a radio show, press release vending machine, or newspaper editorial page.

So here's a comment from a story today noting that we MPS teachers have voted to ratify a new contract:

74 cents of every dollar taken from taxpayers goes to pay and benefits of the teachers. Think about that for a second, 74% of the MPS budget.*

The poor soul, going around repeating a number that he doesn't understand to attack some people he doesn't like, and just being wrong, wrong in the process.

My back-o'-envelope calculations put teacher salaries and benefits, including the misleading parts thereof, at something south of $700 million (someone willing to dig up the budgets could probably find the line item with the right number, but, really, it should between $650m and $675m). That sounds like a lot of money--and it is!--but it's only around 60% of the grand total MPS spends of its whole $1.15 billion-with-a-bee budget. You would have to add in all the other employees (from secretaries and janitors to the superintendent) to break 74%.

But here's the thing, or at least a thing: As poignant a point as this guy thinks he's making--ZOMG! Union goons eat my tax dollars!--where else do you want a school district's money to go than to the people? Desks don't teach your children; computers don't feed them; a photocopier doesn't clean up after them. All the real work of educating the students is done by people and supported by people.

And, yes, MPS spends a lot on, say, busing, or books, or even fancy-pants consultants who fly in, drop their bombs, and fly out. But at its heart, the Milwaukee Public Schools, like every school district everywhere, is in the business of putting teachers into classrooms and other caring personnel into schools to support those teachers.

* I keep a running tally of great examples of irony. It wasn't that long ago when Wisconsin conservatives were pushing the "70% solution," which would demand that 70% of a school district's budget be spent in the classroom, on things like ... teachers. You'd think they'd be happy if they believed we were hitting 74%!

What's life really like on Planet Duncan?

by folkbum

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, on changes he thinks schools might need to make to adjust to a "new normal" that includes harder economic times*:

He urged districts to consider "modest but smartly targeted increases in class size." As a parent, Duncan said, he'd much rather have his kids in a class of 26 with a really excellent teacher, than in a class with 22 kids, lead by a mediocre teacher.

I do not believe I have ever, in my near 15-year career, had an average class size of 22. It has been many years since I have had an average class size of 26. The last five years, when I've been keeping documentation just for kicks, I've averaged over 30 every year. This year, I'm at 32, skewed downward slightly by one small AP section (my other AP section is at 36).

Of course, Duncan also said this:

Duncan said he'd like districts to consider reworking contracts so that effective teachers (particularly those who choose to work with more kids) can make a lot more money, say $80,000, or even $125,000.

So if he thinks teachers who average 26 kids should be earning $100k or so (picking a number in the middle), what about those of us teaching 30+?

He said this at a forum sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, which hates public education to begin with. Duncan's kind of people.

Well then, what does work?

by folkbum

I noted yesterday that a recent study of performance pay (where "performance" means "your kids get higher standardized test scores) showed that even big-money incentives for teachers had little effect on students. So what will?

As I have written here repeatedly, we have a good idea what we need to do to improve achievement among our worst students, and all of the solutions are ones that a time- and resource-intensive. Significantly. The LA Times ran an op-ed from David Kirp yesterday that made this plain: "Effective education can't be accomplished on the cheap," he says. But he's not talking about paying me or other teachers more.

Instead, things that do work include high-quality preschools, keeping schools open more days and longer hours, much smaller class sizes, and better-funded schools in general. Beyond what's in Kirp's op-ed, we know that other models held up as great successes--things like SEED schools or the Harlem Children's Zone--do what they do in large part because they are supported in significant ways by funds not available to schools that consistently underperform.

If you want to make closing the achievement gap and improving education in the worst areas, make real investments in children's lives and communities rather than throw carrots and sticks at the teachers.

I doubt that

by folkbum

The lede of a Washington Post story on teacher merit pay:

Offering teachers incentives of up to $15,000 to improve student test scores produced no discernible difference in academic performance, according to a study released Tuesday, a result likely to reshape the debate about merit pay programs sprouting in D.C. schools and many others nationwide.

I don't doubt the first part, that such incentives, especially when tied to things teachers see as unimportant, like test scores, are ineffective. That resonates as a billion percent true with me.

It's the second part, that this study will have an effect on the debate, that rings false. Of course it won't have an effect on the debate: Those pushing merit pay almost exclusively do so for ideological reasons (gotta make schools like "the market"!), and reality simply never enters into their consciousness. So good luck changing that debate one bit.

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.

Where's my shotgun?

by folkbum

The zombie lies are at the front door again.

Seniority and Layoffs

by folkbum

It's really hard to know where to start on today's Alan Borsuk piece.

He's writing about the Milwaukee Public Schools layoffs (a common topic ... speaking of which, have you signed the petition yet?), with the near-ubiquitous commentariat point of view that layoffs should not be done based on seniority.

I oppose the layoffs, to be sure, and I know that among the 480 or so teachers lost, there were many great ones. (The home-ec teacher was laid off from my school, for example, and she had nearly 20 years in the district, and the kids and the rest of the staff loved her.) The best hope for bringing them back is a federal bailout--complain all you want about deficit spending, but at least this particular bill we'll stick our children with is going to be spent on them rather than on airlines or autos or banks. It would also be nice of MPS actually sat down at the bargaining table with its union instead of bargaining in the media. All of these are too much to hope for, I know, I know. But back to Borsuk.

Without seriously addressing the complications of changing a system--I'll get to them in a minute, because I believe they need addressing--Borsuk offers three bullet points suggesting why laying off the least-senior teachers solely for that reason is a bad idea:

• Dimming the appeal of teaching: Not hiring new teachers has ripple effects that go beyond the immediate situation. How do you draw high-quality people to teaching when they don't have confidence in the prospects for jobs, no matter how good they are at it, a college president asked me the other day in an informal conversation. It's hard enough to get people interested in teaching, particularly top-shelf college students. Widespread layoffs targeting new teachers only make that worse.

• Putting out the unwelcome mat: Finishing its first year in Milwaukee, Teach for America, the Peace Corps-like effort that places high-quality college graduates in high-needs schools for two years, has numbers to show that, overall, the members working in MPS moved their students forward at a good pace, often more than a year's progress in a year. Twenty-four of the 37--all who were not in special education or bilingual jobs, basically--got layoff notices. Many of them may end up in charter schools and alternative schools rather than general MPS schools. Fifty more members being readied to work this fall are likely to end up in special ed or in schools not staffed by MPS employees. Teach for America is controversial, and its members don't want to be treated differently than other young teachers. But TFA offers fresh commitment, energy and quality to MPS--an offer that is in danger of, in effect, being spurned.

• Disrupting school communities: Many MPS schools are losing at least several teachers. Ask principals how they feel about this happening with no attention to who among the staff would actually be best to keep around next year. You're not likely to get cheerful answers. One potential twist to this: Some teachers will get called back at the last minute and assigned to different schools or grades, starting the year with almost no chance to prepare. A successful school almost always has a staff that works well together. These kinds of disruptions hurt efforts to build that.

The seniority rules at MPS have no impact on any of these, or at least, if changed, would not have the opposite effect. For example, the first. This past school year at my high school, there were five student teachers in my department. All five spread applications far and wide across the state--that is, on the rare occasions open positions were posted around the state. Just one had a job last I heard. The current crisis in school funding and school staffing is not limited to MPS. In fact, I am certain that MPS will have more first-year teachers in its classrooms come fall than any other Wisconsin district, and probably more than all 25 of its neighboring districts combined. No one is hiring anywhere, and it can't be because the Milwaukee teachers union has its grubby mitts in districts everywhere, can it?

Or the second. I have come to appreciate Teach for America's recruitment and training regimen moreso than traditional schools of education, and I would like to see it used to recruit teachers who aren't on two-year contracts building a resume before hitting grad school or some other career. But you can't convince me either A) that an organization as savvy as TfA didn't know what it was getting into when it signed up for Milwaukee, with its budget and enrollment situation, or that 2) keeping the laid off TfA members for the second year of their two-year contract (and who, TfA's own data show, are likely then to leave the district anyway) is a better investment than keeping someone who has made a commitment to this city and its schools.

Or the third. Is there a way to remove any teacher without disrupting a community? And is there any reason to believe that "asking principals how they feel" will result in the best-staffed schools? Borsuk knows as well as anyone that the biggest example of rolling up the welcome mat in MPS in the last few years is what MPS did to New Leaders for New Schools. A national program designed to recruit, train, and retain top-notch school principals came to MPS at our urging, and bailed as of the end of this year. Why? Because MPS used and abused the "new leaders" and refused to follow the program's protocol. What MPS ended up with was, rather than a corps of energetic, young, talented leaders, a pool of principals perpetuating the poor leadership MPS has known for the last decade. Even when MPS managed to get one right, as happened at Dover St. School this year when a new leader actually did the job shadowing and training to take over from a principal who was retiring, MPS kicked the new leader out in favor of a displaced "leadership specialist" from Central Office (yes, some people there have lost their positions, regardless of what you may have heard about their job security). This has disrupted a school community, I kid you not.

But my point in all of that is that principals are not always the best impartial judges of who stays and goes. Principals bring with them coteries of friends and colleagues when they change buildings, if they can. (Some day I will tell you how I lost my department chairmanship the year I left Madison.) Principals will move squeaky wheels in favor of compliant ones. (I had a principal threaten me because I asserted my rights under the contract, about something not related to the classroom.) And principals do not take seriously their role in evaluating teachers. I personally was observed, in my first five years with MPS when observations and evaluations are mandatory, for a total of about half an hour. Not per year or per observation, but total. I have not been formally observed once, ever, by any of the last three principals I have served under, nor by any of their assistants, who can technically be deployed to do such work. I am supposed to be formally evaluated every three years; the last evaluation I signed was from the 2004-2005 school year. A colleague of mine at a school I will not name, up for evaluation this year, was not observed, and was told, in fact, "Well, I know how you teach." That colleague didn't see or sign an evaluation form this year, either.

In short, if ever you want to get teachers to concede that principals deserve input on who should stay or go in their buildings outside of the seniority structure, you need to make sure that principals are qualified to do that. Erin Richards's story a couple of weeks about about the layoffs featured the principal of Bradley Tech. I know him, having worked with him back when he was a teacher, and I am certain that if he approaches his principal duties with the commitment and quality he had as a teacher, then he is likely to be making very good decisions and judgments about the teachers in his building. But I cannot say that for every principal in the district that I know or have worked for, including some who were seen as rising stars and that the district now wishes they were rid of.

Further, there is no easy or good or objective way to know if, for example, a teacher that would have been let go from Tech is any better or worse than a teacher who might be staying at some other school. If Tech is working on a particular curriculum or challenge that one teacher may not like or be suited for, despite her ability, should that teacher be sitting at the unemployment office, pink slip in hand, because some other principal at some other school isn't as conscientious about holding teachers accountable or weeding out poor performers? (Because yes, there are steps to take to get rid of bad teachers and no, they're not that hard for principals to do, but no, principals don't take them as often as they should.)

Finally, in MPS as many as half its new-hires leave the district within five years. A first- or second-year teacher may be great, effective, dedicated to his students. But the data suggest that he may well be gone soon whether we lay him off or not; in fact, it's often the best teachers who get a few years under their belt--or have a child they'd rather raise in the suburbs--and take off for greener pastures outside the city schools. It seems kind of dumb to me to punish those who have taken the harder path, sticking with the challenging assignment and the residency requirement and the lower pay, in favor of an unknown quantity who may have one eye on the door.

Granted, a lot of this is generalizations (except, of course, for the specific cases). Every great veteran teacher was a young teacher once who would have been laid off if there had been layoffs at that time, so clearly not all young teachers will leave us anyway. And not every veteran teacher is great (no one seems to want to try to quantify just how many of us lazy, good-for-nothing, clock-punching pension-padders there are)--though I have never known a teacher who actively hates the job and the kids to stick around long enough to become a veteran.

I am long since on the record for being willing to change pay structures and even tenure rules. But Borsuk's commentary today--remember that? that's where we started 1500 words ago--is not an argument to do so, or even a particularly well reasoned attack on seniority. If you want to make the case for changing the system, you need something more than three weak bullet points.

--

Two related points that just didn't fit in above: One, it is a lie to say the private sector doesn't work on seniority. When my brother and my wife lost their jobs in this recession, both were the least-senior in their non-union. private-sector jobs. And two, it is ironic that the same people who bitterly carp about the failure of government in some way or another when the private sector lays off or outsources jobs are the ones crowing that layoffs have hit the schools. If, say, Bucyrus-Erie laid off 1,000 employees this month, you'd better believe that Sykes and Walker and Belling and the conservative blogs would be howling about the failure of the city or the state to save these jobs. I have two words for those people, the second of which is you.

Name That School

by folkbum

I am a bit slow to get around to this piece, from Alan Borsuk on Sunday, about the plight of an inner-city Milwaukee school:

It's been a difficult few years for the 56-year-old school. Enrollment declined from close to the building's capacity of 400 to about 300. Competition increased from [] private schools, charter schools and even suburban public schools.

The level of academic success at [this school] wasn't much different than [the average scores of the] Milwaukee Public Schools, which means it wasn't very good.

Some students who enrolled were far behind grade level and the school wasn't doing well in accelerating their achievement. The student body had become much less diverse--higher-income and white students had just about all departed, 90% of the students [met low-income requirements], and the student body was about evenly split between African-American and Hispanic.

Now, those of you who have already read the story or clicked through know the punchline, but be how many of you read that excerpt thinking, "What's so newsworthy about another failing MPS school?" The punchline, of course, is that the school is not, in fact, related to MPS. It's St. Joan Antida, and East Side all-girls Catholic school.

And yet every aspect of this school's story--with one or two notable exceptions--is familiar to MPS schools all across the city. MPS has seen its enrollment decline, and individual schools city-wide face empty seats and classrooms that put tremendous pressures on their site budgets. This is true because MPS faces fierce competition and loses more than 30,000 students a year to the burbs or vouchers or other competing entities. In fact, the notion of competition has poisoned MPS schools, pitting them against each other in ugly battles for students.

MPS schools have majority-minority enrollments which often creates conflicts in cultural expectations. MPS schools all have high poverty enrollments; 79% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and in many schools the concentration is much higher. (The part I elided above is about voucher enrollment, a slightly different measure of poverty.) And, of course, these factors and others combine to affect student performance.

The story even goes on to describe the school's struggle to add engineering courses and Advanced Placement courses, even against the odds of ninth-graders who enter well below grade level--more familiar challenges MPS schools face all the time.

One of the notable exceptions is special education. Borsuk's story doesn't mention St. Joan's special education population, but if it is like other voucher schools, there a few ex-ed students there affecting the school's atmosphere and scores.

The second notable exception is the actual subject of Borsuk's story:

How about this for strong medicine to improve a school: Ask every teacher and administrator to turn in resignations. Tell them they can reapply for their jobs, but there's going to be higher expectations from now on. Hire back less than half of the staff. [. . .]

[School president Cindy] Marino said all but one of 35 administrators and teachers applied to stay on after being told it was going to be a new day at the school. Some withdrew as the hiring process proceeded. A few positions were eliminated and some staff members were told they weren't going to be offered new contracts.

In the end, fewer than half will return next year. Marino said some just didn't want to change in the way the school was changing or didn't think they needed to go as far with the students in pursuing success as the leaders want.

This is what perhaps makes the St. Joan's story an interesting experiment for Milwaukee to watch. What's happening at that school is exactly what the punditerati wish would happen across MPS--fire all those lousy, lazy old teacher who because they have tenure don't give a crap about the students any more. (How many such teachers there are, or where one to four thousand replacement teachers might come from is never fully explained.) While I don't question the truth of the idea that the quality of the teacher is the single most important factor in the quality of the classroom experience; research bears this out.

And indeed the national trend is, as national trends often do, carrying this to the extreme. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, colloquially known as the stimulus, contained money for schools. But much of that money is contingent on punitive measures levied against the staff at the lowest performing schools, including removing half or more of the classroom teachers. What's happening at St. Joan's will undoubtedly start becoming the norm in even public schools all across the nation. However, this is not. supported by the data; in fact, as I have written here before data suggest that "reconstituting schools by replacing administrators, faculty or staff" in places where it's been tried has created "no substantial evidence [. . .] to indicate that such measures raise achievement."

In other words, despite the teachers' being so important to the functioning of a high-quality classroom, changing the teacher alone is not a guarantee that an unsuccessful classroom will suddenly turn around. There are many reasons for this--the study linked above talks about, for example, the negative effects of upheaval, for example, which often depresses scores further in the years after such reconstitution. Then there's significant amount of stuff that doesn't change within those students' lives, or within the wider school community.

So this St. Joan Antida experiment will be an interesting one to watch, as it may well be a good indicator of what kind of success this kind of reform will have. Because make no mistake: This is coming to MPS, and to public schools all across the nation if Arne Duncan keeps getting his way. For those who've done the research, the outlook for such a sweeping effort is not particularly optimistic.

For me, the situation Borsuk describes at St. Joan really lays bare what I have been saying all along: When, in Milwaukee as in other urban situations, schools face budget crises and high poverty and difficult-to-teach students, they struggle even with the best of intentions and best of teachers, the job is damned hard. Putting different people into a damned hard job isn't going to make the job any easier.

Next Generation Learning

by folkbum

Things are a bit slow around the blog, because I'm in Austin, TX, on the dime of the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Stupski Foundation for a conference. (And yesterday I had the a fantastic lunch here with blog comments regular apc--great conversation, great achiote.) I was a bit of a last-minute addition to the Wisconsin team that's looking at how to implement the "innovation labs" funded by a significant grant awarded us (and five other states) earlier this spring. I'm here with some actually important people, including State Superintendent Tony Evers, a couple of Milwaukee-area district superintendents, a bunch of CESA1 folk, and some DPI people, too. So far, so good. We seem to get along.

The basic premise of the whole deal here is that right now education in this country happens within a 19th-century system designed to meet the needs of 19th-century students in a 19th-century economy. And that worked reasonably well for more than 100 years. But now we're dealing with 21st-century students in a 21st-century economy, and the system is no longer working reasonably well at all, at least not for great big swaths of students. Many students still navigate the system well, sure; but even many of them do so in spite of what we do to them, not because of it.

So I wanna harness the power of the blog here for a minute: Imagine if you will that you're me, and you're here, and you have the blank slate in front of you. You can design a system--or at least a school or a cluster of schools--that is not bound by the antiquated traditions of things like traditional school calendars, age-based cohorts, "Carnegie units" for graduation, and so forth. A system that is designed not around schools and schooling but learners and learning. What does it look like? What happens in your imagination when you wave your magic wand?

How did the present system work or not work for you? How is it working or not working for your children now? How should it have been, how should it be now, to meet actual learner needs as opposed to the needs of schools and teachers?

Specific ideas will be most helpful here. The broad principle of the thing--that we need to decouple the notions of learning and schooling--is well established. (And if you want to do a bit of reading, check pages 9-17 in this pdf from CCSSO.) But it's ideas for specific implementations of next-generation learning that I'm looking for.

Which is not to say that I don't have ideas or that the talented tabelful of people here with me don't either. But "crowdsourcing" is one of those 21st-century skills that often produces better results than small groups of decision-makers removed from the people affected by those decisions. Leave me a comment or shoot me an email; I'll be checking in regularly this week for all your brilliant ideas.

Shorter George Lightbourn

by folkbum

Wisconsin should be more like Washington DC and increase per-student spending to $28,000 a year fire all those lazy teachers.

Shorter Owen Robinson

by folkbum

Wouldn't it be great if Article X of the Wisconsin Constitution didn't exist?

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.

The next bailout

by folkbum

I just wrapped a story for May's Bay View Compass on how MPS schools are being squeezed by this year's extra-tight budgets--chronic state underfunding, chronic federal underfunding, declining property values, state cuts to SAGE, unresolved labor issues have all added up to pretty much every single school in the district losing staff and programs. Even schools I talked to that plan to enroll significantly more students this fall still cut staff.

So I like Tom Harkin's plan:

As public schools nationwide face larger class sizes and cuts in programs, the Senate's leading Democrat on education issues proposed a $23 billion bailout Wednesday to help avert layoffs of tens of thousands of teachers and other school personnel in the coming academic year.

The bill sponsored by Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa), a potential sequel to the economic stimulus law enacted last year, joins the mix of spending initiatives the Democratic-led Congress will consider this spring on issues such as aid to small business and appropriations for the war in Afghanistan. [. . .] Education Secretary Arne Duncan estimated that school layoffs could total from 100,000 to 300,000 unless Congress acts.

This will no doubt be painted by Republicans as a giveaway to the teachers unions (they really need to open up new lines of talking point exploration; the current ones are quite worn) and opposition will no doubt be unanimous on their end.

However, this is the kind of investment worth making. Unlike, say, tax cuts for individuals or even businesses, studies show that direct aid to state and local governments (like schools) provide a greater return, long-term, than the funds invested. Keeping schools stocked with teachers--not just for small class sizes or whatever, but for things like music and art--is smart public policy and good for America's soul. I say, bring on the bailout.

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.