Author Archives: Thomas J. Mertz

by | November 18, 2007 · 7:48 pm

Senate Hearing Video — Laura L. Vernon

Laura L. Vernon

Since the first video I posted was from a rural district, I thought it would be appropriate to make the second post from Milwaukee (video from Wisconsin Eye — the full November 15 hearing can be accessed here — , excerpts posted via YouTube, playlist of all hearing videos posted thus far, here).

Laura L. Vernon (click here for the video) from the Milwaukee Educational Assistants Association seemed like a good choice (it was hard to choose, check back to hear other important voices from Milwaukee and around the state).

Defenders of our current system will say that it works for most districts or children (only those who have a weak grasp on reality would say it works for all districts and children). I don’t agree with that statement, but even if it is true our children deserve a system that works for all.

At one point Senator Grothman speculated that the gap between high spending district and low spending districts has been shrinking (Senator Grothman did a lot of speculating and quoting questionable “facts”, apparently he’s too busy to railing against taxes to look at any actual research). There are many possible ways to assess this (data can be found here), based on a quick calculation it looks to me that since 2000 the standard deviation in per member spending has remained about 15% of the average, but shrunk slightly.

All of this is interesting in an analytical way, but as the MMSD Equity Task Force (and many others) have concluded, equity does not mean equal. The diverse and very real needs of districts and children require different resources based on these needs that dollar for dollar comparisons do not capture.

We hear about the uniformity in taxation clause of the Wisconsin Constitution as an impediment to school finance reform (although the current system is far from uniform and falls under one of the exemptions in Art. XIII, sec. 1), but we don’t hear so much about the uniformity of education clause in Art. X, sec. 3. Seven years ago in Vincent v. Voight the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the current system (barely) met this requirement, yet it is increasingly clear that when diverse circumstances are considered, each year the differences in educational opportunities based on residence continue to grow.

My point is two-fold; the current system exacerbates the inequalities that public education is supposed to overcome and that a system that fails to provide the necessary resources to any district or child is unacceptable.

Be it urban Milwaukee or rural Phillips, our current school finance system is failing many. It is past time to fix it!

Thomas J. Mertz

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Filed under AMPS, Best Practices, Budget, Equity, Gimme Some Truth, Local News, Pope-Roberts/Breske Resolution, School Finance, We Are Not Alone

by | November 17, 2007 · 7:52 pm

Senate Hearing Video

Randy Kunch

The testimony at the Senate Education Committee Hearing on the Pope-Roberts/Breske Resolution was beyond compelling. At times I was moved to tears. There was some anger too, but as I noted previously, the dominant theme was optimism, a belief that we (meaning the people of Wisconsin and our elected officials) can and will fix the shameful mess that is school funding in Wisconsin.

In the coming days and weeks I am going to be posting video excerpts from the hearing(video from Wisconsin Eye — the full November 15 hearing can be accessed here — , excerpts posted via YouTube, playlist of all hearing videos posted thus far, here). I chose Randy Kunch from the Phillips School District as the first post (click here to watch). Please take the five or so minutes to watch and listen to Randy and then sit down to write your elected officials or your local paper and tell them that someting needs to be done and the time is now!

Thomas J. Mertz

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Filed under AMPS, Best Practices, Budget, Elections, Local News, Pope-Roberts/Breske Resolution, School Finance, Take Action, We Are Not Alone

by | November 17, 2007 · 1:21 am

If only…

From The Onion:

Overfunded Public School Forced To Add Jazz Band
November 14, 2007 | Issue 43•46

MANALAPAN, NJ—Benjamin Harrison Middle School faculty members regretfully announced Tuesday that, despite their best efforts to prevent it, the school simply had too much state and federal funding to avoid adding a jazz ensemble to its music program.

“We did not want it to come to this,” principal David DeCarlo said after introducing students to Mr. Metheny, an award-winning jazz guitarist and the new school music teacher. “The children are the ones who are going to suffer. Especially little Sammy Orlovsky, who will have to play those drums where instead of using drumsticks you tap the cymbals with tiny brushes.”

The school plans to use its remaining $22.1 million budget to add a sculpture wing to the art department, triple janitors’ salaries, and purchase a second computer.

Thomas J. Mertz

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Filed under AMPS, Best Practices, Budget, National News, School Finance

by | November 16, 2007 · 7:48 pm

Half Full Glasses

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A new study on math and science testing would appear to offer high praise for America’s public education system. From the NYT‘s report:

American students even in low-performing states like Alabama do better on math and science tests than students in most foreign countries, including Italy and Norway, according to a new study released yesterday.

That, in case you missed it was the glass being classified as half full. If you thought success was high praise, you will learn that Wisconsin ranks in pretty good company, being at or above the league tables of most European countries.

But, according to the study’s author, “the bad news trumps the good because our Asian economic competitors are winning the race to prepare students in math and science.” The Times reporter accents this framing further by quoting Thomas Toch, a co-director of Education Sector, a group with it’s own half full/half empty conflicts, who says this study “shows we’re not doing as badly as some say. We’re in the top half of the table, and a number of states are outperforming the majority of the nations in the study. But our performance in math and science lags behind that of the front-running Asian nations.”

I get the Tom Friedman mantra to some extent, but doesn’t his global flattening thesis of digital communication look somewhat contrived in a doom and gloom sort of way, if it only compares a handful of education systems to the majority of other countries?

Leaving aside his sunny optimism regarding the war and the emergence of “the Friedman,” a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined to express his and others call for a continuing need for just six more months before success will begin to take hold, perhaps the answer to the above metaphor is to suggest that progress in math and science is truly a glass half full story. Pad ourselves on the back for once. There is a good story to be told about America’s public education system. Do we need to strive to do better, obviously. Approaching the future, not from a position of dysfunctionality but from an outlook of building upon our strengths, would seem to be wholly in line with America’s “can do” spirit, a strength we have always shown and should continue to exercise.

Robert Godfrey

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by | November 16, 2007 · 3:13 am

Simple Majority Declares Victory for Kids and Schools…Let’s Do the Same!

In the Election Roundup I wrote that the Simple Majority campaign in Washington State had lost. With more complete returns, victory has been snatched from the jaws of defeat. Congratulations to the League of Education Voters and the people of Washington!

I attended the Senate Education Committee hearing on the Pope-Roberts/Breske resolution today (more on that later), and I think there is a lesson from Washington for the Wisconsin legislature and the people of Wisconsin. In Washington, they fought against great odds and achieved a major and positive change is state school finance.

Everyone I heard testify today agreed Wisconsin’s system is broken and that each year we move further away from providing the education our children deserve. Most of those testifying were passionate and optimistic — they believe we can fix this and are committed to doing just that. However, some (not all) of the Senators seemed to be primarily interested in the difficulties and obstacles and 1,000 reasons why we can’t do better. This is the wrong attitude and they need to know that if they’d rather make excuses than do the job the Constitution gives them and the people demand of them, we will elect those who can and will.

The resolution itself, like the voters and advocates in Washington, rejects this kind of thinking. It simply asks for a commitment to try to do what almost everyone agrees is the right thing.

Is this too much to ask?

Thomas J. Mertz

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Filed under AMPS, Elections, Local News, National News, Pope-Roberts/Breske Resolution, School Finance, Take Action

by | November 14, 2007 · 3:51 am

Rank Ranking — The Pangloss Index

Get ready for “news” reports and blog posts (and here) from those eager to find fault with public education harping on the latest “report” from the Education Sector (more on the Education Sector on AMPS, here). In the recently released The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act Wisonsin is ranked at #1 (along with Iowa) as the state that is most guilty of “gaming NCLB’s accountability system.” Don’t believe them.

Among the many faults of No Child Left Behind — recognized even by those who have faith in the utility of compilations of data to capture the essence of educational quality and believe that high stakes testing is the best way to create educational progress (I’m not one of them) — is that the accountability structures of NCLB in these areas are deeply flawed.

The purpose of the Pangloss Index (named after Doctor Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide, who embodies baseless optimism) is to point out that many states avoid “accountability” (read the punishments doled out to schools that don’t meet the adequate yearly progress measures of the law) in their implementation and generally paint a rosy picture of the state of education. All well and good. If you believe in this stuff (as the Education Sector does) then you want it to be designed in a way that at least has a chance of being useful and documenting the flaws would be a good first step.

If you take the press releases (and here; I can’t resist highlighting this phrase from Kevin Carey: “even tightly constructed laws like NCLB,” “tightly constructed,” what planet is he living on?) at face value, that’s what the Pangloss Index is supposed to do. If you peek behind the curtain you will see that it is in fact a lazy and useless piece of garbage intended only to fan the flames of panic among those inclined to believe the worst about public education and “educrats.”

The whole thing is based on the absurd assumption that all positive data is wrong and all negative data is correct. Therefore, states that report good things get a high (bad) rating for “gaming” the system and states that report bad things get a low (good) rating for being honest and accountable. No effort (none at all) is made to assess the accuracy of any of the reported data or to correlate it with other measures. Don’t believe me? Here is what the report says:

This report is based on data submitted by state departments of education to the U.S. Department of Education through reports called Consolidated State Performance Reports (CSPRs)…The “Pangloss Index” found in Table 1 of this report is calculated by aggregating state rankings on 11 measures derived from the CSPRs….For each measure, states were ranked so that the states reporting the most positive results were ranked highest. For example, while states were ranked highest if they reported the highest high school graduation rates and highest percent of schools making adequate yearly progress, they were also ranked highest if they reported the lowest number of persistently dangerous schools and the lowest high school dropout rates.

This is just a stupid way to look at education policy and practice. The Education Sector has lots of money and a respectable reputation and should refrain from these kind of games if they want to keep the reputation (the money would no doubt continue to flow, money in education policy cares little about standards of honesty or scholarship).

Post of interest on last year’s Pangloss Index:

Jay Bullock: Paging Dr. Pangloss

Thomas J. Mertz

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Filed under Accountability, AMPS, Best Practices, Gimme Some Truth, National News, nclb, No Child Left Behind

by | November 12, 2007 · 4:59 pm

The political landscape of NCLB may be changing

It is increasingly looking likely that there will not be any legislative movement to reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB) before the next election. At the same time, it’s worth mentioning the results from the last Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll published in August (the grandaddy of polling American’s attitudes towards public schools for the past 39 years). In the conclusion sections you’ll see that the public is shifting quite significantly away from this public policy. One of the most encouraging results (see table 14 in the report) is the growing disenchantment with the increasing reliance on standardized testing. As the pollsters’ conclusions suggested, it is probably no coincidence that the criticism of standardized testing has developed since this form of appraisal became the principal strategy in implementing NCLB.

Robert Godfrey

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by | November 12, 2007 · 4:12 am

Bucking the conventional wisdom: The Science Education Myth

Forget the conventional wisdom. U.S. schools are turning out more capable science and engineering grads than the job market can support. A new report by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, tells a different story from the constant doom and gloom harangue from certain political leaders, tech executives, and academics who’ve claimed that the U.S. is falling behind in math and science education. We’ve heard much about poor test results, declining international rankings, and decreasing enrollment in the hard sciences. They have urged us to improve our education system and to graduate more engineers and scientists to keep pace with countries such as India and China. The Urban Institute’s Hal Salzman and Georgetown University professor Lindsay Lowell have a different story to report. They show that math, science, and reading test scores at the primary and secondary level have actually increased over the past two decades, and U.S. students are now close to the top of international rankings. Perhaps just as surprising, the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands.

An abstract from the study:

Recent policy reports claim the United States is falling behind other nations in science and math education and graduating insufficient numbers of scientists and engineers. Review of the evidence and analysis of actual graduation rates and workforce needs does not find support for these claims. U.S. student performance rankings are comparable to other leading nations and colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each year. Instead, the evidence suggests targeted education improvements are needed for the lowest performers and demand-side factors may be insufficient to attract qualified college graduates.

Robert Godfrey

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by | November 10, 2007 · 6:57 pm

What George Fails To Mention Could Fill a Book

From Richard Russell, via the Progressive Dane email list (posted with permission).

The op. ed. referenced can be found here. More on this story on AMPS here.

What George Fails To Mention Could Fill a Book

I used to be one of the “educrats” whom George Lightbourn belittles in his essay “School choice is working and should be expanded”. Now retired, I spent my professional career as an analyst for the Department of Public Instruction. For part of that time, my opposite number at the Department of Administration was a bright, insightful, competent (and, as it turns out, ambitious) young guy named … George Lightbourn. Yes, George fails to mention that he himself got his start as an “educrat”.

But that’s only one of many things that George — now in the pay of the corporate-backed Wisconsin Policy Research Institute think tank — fails to mention.

For instance, he insists that parents should have the right to choose the school their children attend. And so they do. Guaranteed by law. What he fails to mention is that the general public is under absolutely no moral or legal obligation to pay for it.

Even though WPRI now recognizes that parents aren’t doing a particularly good job of choosing schools for their children, George contends that they alone should make the call. Another thing he fails to mention is that raising children is a responsibility shared between parents and society as a whole. It’s the entire culture that insists that kids be immunized, fed, clothed, and schooled (and, in societies more enlightened than ours, provided with health care), and gets downright intolerant of parents who abuse or neglect their kids, or try to use them as cheap labor.

George also fails to mention that public-school choice is a direct competitor against the darling of the neocon movement: PRIVATE-school choice. And, while WPRI was happy to do a study showing the shortcomings of PUBLIC-school choice, the right wing has resisted every effort to subject PRIVATE-school choice to comparable scrutiny.

The reason for this is simple. When Milwaukee’s program was first instituted as a limited experiment, it had an evaluation component. After 5 years, the study (headed by highly respected UW-Milwaukee Education Professor Alex Molnar) had piled up lots of data, the reports were filed, and the private-school kids had done no better than their public-school counterparts. This was a far cry from the glories that had been promised when the “experiment” was begun. The reaction of Gov. Tommy Thompson’s administration? Declare victory, remove the “experimental” tag, expand the program, and eliminate the evaluation! To this day, the private schools are exempt from the kind of accountability that the public schools face on a daily basis.

George advances the corporatist party line that the invisible hand of the market will inevitably cause top-quality schools to bubble up to the top. Quality, quality, quality. That’s all anybody ever looks for in a school, according to the propaganda. The George Lightbourn of a quarter century ago would not have been so naïve as to presume (nor so disingenuous as to pretend) that this is remotely close to reality. I could cite several dozen reasons OTHER than quality that parents use in choosing schools, but just consider a couple of parallel situations: entertainment (vigorous exercise vs. violent video games) and nutrition (a healthy, balanced diet vs. junk food). Those choices are just as free and unfettered as they are with respect to the schools. Do parents invariably choose quality, 100% of the time? The correct answer is another thing George fails to mention.

George also fails to mention that WPRI’s cover has long since been blown. It’s clearly a front for the twin pillars of neoconservatism: corporations and churches. Neither of these institutions is primarily concerned with children as human beings. The former wants their money; the latter wants their souls. They’d be thrilled to see what they derogate as “government schools” close up shop altogether. But they DO foresee a role for government in the final picture: as an endless source of funding.

For the rest of us, their hope is that we’ll end up like George Lightbourn: glossing over the whole truth to focus on the party line, ignoring the big picture for the big bucks.

I suppose it’s POSSIBLE that WPRI could be the source of an honest study on education. It’s also POSSIBLE that the tobacco industry could have done honest research into the health effects of smoking. Sometimes honesty really IS the best policy, if it furthers your agenda. But keen observers will always want to know: Even if what you DID show us is true, what is it you’re NOT telling us? What do you fail to mention?

Now, these folks will undoubtedly counter that we advocates for the public schools have an agenda of our own. And they’re right. We do. It was best stated about a century ago by John Dewey: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children.”

George fails to mention that, too.

Richard S. Russell

The 5 greatest bargains in America:
(1) sunshine
(2) fresh air
(3) clean water
(4) public libraries
(5) public schools

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | November 10, 2007 · 12:17 am

Quote of the Day

We don’t usually venture into higher ed, but the local angle, the applicability to k-12 education and the fact that it comes from one of my favorite education bloggers (and historians of education) inspired this exception:

Wisconsin is essentially drinking the Kool-Aid of poorly-constructed standardized testing as a proxy for accountability.

Sherman Dorn

The context is the University of Wisconsin’s preemptive and premature embrace of an unproven and unwise accountability system.

Thomas J. Mertz

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