Category Archives: Gimme Some Truth

by | December 5, 2009 · 2:10 pm

Mayoral Control Links and Thoughts

I haven’t had much time to blog lately and the items are piling up, so it is time to catch up a little.  Here are some links to and comments on some relatively recent items on Mayoral control.

From the Chicago Tribune, “Chicago school board begins 2nd internal investigation.”

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s handpicked Board President has committed suicide, his handpicked Board is under investigation for misuse of funds for the second time and has refused to release documents requested by the media.  That’s good management and open governance Chicago style.  That’s the model that Arne Duncan and Jim Doyle want to bring to Wisconsin.

Advocates for Mayoral control keep telling us that the change increases accountability by giving ultimate responsibility to a single elected individual –  the Mayor.  I have yet to hear of an instance or see a poll that indicates any Mayor in a Mayoral control district’s election has been decided by their management of the schools; I know that Mayor Daley will continue to be re-elected no matter what happens with the schools.   That’s not accountability.

A lot is happening with the resistance to mayoral control in Milwaukee.  Here’s a video on some of it:

Henry Hamilton of the NAACP Executive Committee and Christine Neumann-Ortiz — executive director of Voces de la Frontera — had a good recent column in the Journal-Sentinel: “In takeover, your vote silenced.”

Friend of AMPS and former candidate for State Superintendent Todd Allan Price has a long piece at CounterPunch that is worth the time: “Milwaukeeans vs. the Privatization Pandemic: Milwaukee League Comes to the Defense of Public Schools.”

Todd and I also co-wrote a Jerry Bracey inspired piece for FightingBob that includes some things on Mayoral control: “Bracey’s last stand”

Dominique Paul Noth’s lengthy “Barrett’s ‘cynical’ decision puts city Dems in bind” at the Milwaukee Area Labor Council is also worth the time spent.

Meanwhile the education DINO elite insider organization Democrats for Education Reform (DEF) has opened a Wisconsin office staffed by political lifer, convicted thief (see the Wisconsin State Journal, August 20, 2002), former strip club and school voucher PR flack Katy Venskus.

Alan J. Borsuk has a post up contrasting a recent DER event with the unanimous testimony against mayoral control at a recent public hearing.

Borsuk also covered Mayoral control researcher turned advocate Kenneth K. Wong’s recent visit to the state.  At the event and in the interview on WPT’s “Here and Now” below Wong offers a lot of double talk about elections and accountability, simplistically equating higher turnout at Mayoral elections with greater accountability on education matters.  This is only true if education is a decisive issue, otherwise it is nonsense.

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I think this quote from the Borsuck piece is revealing on how much Wong cares about keeping the public in public education:

It is best to have public support for mayoral control, he said, but it can still work even if it’s passed over major opposition.

“Nothing is easy,” he said. As for Milwaukee, he said, “It has to happen fast. . . . They should make it effective January 1.”

This crisis mentality is dangerous, especially when we are talking about a reform that by Wong’s own calculations will have a minimal impact on education in Milwaukee.  In his book The Education Mayor the achievement gap between Milwaukee and the rest of the state is pegged at 2.4 standard deviations; his research shows that “strong” mayoral control has produced gains of .2 to .33 standard deviations.  Accepting his data and the causality, that means that the best case Mayoral control scenario leaves Milwaukee students over 2 standard deviations behind the state.  As Wong himself states, “This is not a silver bullet.” So why the hurry?

In a not unrelated matter, people concerned about accountability should be talking about DINO Reform poster girl and DC Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s effort to intervene in an Inspector General’s investigation of her fiance, the charter school operator and now Mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson.  The IG was subsequently fired by the accountability loving Obama administration.  Links here and here.

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | November 25, 2009 · 1:06 pm

Pocan and Miller at the MMSD Board Meeting

The agenda for the Monday November 30th Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education meeting lists a “Discussion with State Joint Finance Committee Co-Chairs regarding K-12 Funding in Wisconsin and the Impact of the State Budget on School District Finances.”   So State Representative Mark Pocan and State Senator Mark Miller will be talking money with the Board.  They were two of the most powerful individuals in the passage of the recent state budget that hit the schools in Madison and around the state so hard.  It will be interesting to hear what they have to say.

I do hope they are more forthright and and forthcoming than they have been previously on this topic.  Pocan’s column in the Tenney-Lapham Neighborhood Association Newsletter (page 16) was particularly bad in this regard.

The meeting is at 5:00 PM in room 103 of the Doyle Building.  There is no public testimony, but if you are interested I’d plan on showing up because the last time the Board met with legislators is the only meeting in recent memory that was not broadcast or recorded.

Thomas J. Mertz

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Filed under "education finance", Budget, education, finance, Gimme Some Truth, Local News, School Finance, Uncategorized

by | November 4, 2009 · 6:53 pm

The Cost of Commitment

Commitment

President Obama gave a speech at Wright Middle School in Madison today (text here) outlining his education reform initiative for the nation’s schools, called “Race to the Top,” sometimes referred to by some of his critics as the “Race off the Cliff.”

As Thomas Mertz has pointed out earlier, the amount of funds being discussed here for Wisconsin are relatively meager.

Make no mistake that this is cake, a treat, not life-sustaining bread.  The amount being discussed for Wisconsin is $80 million and this relative pittance would all be targeted for specific programs and when the $80 million is gone, Wisconsin would be stuck with more things that we can no longer afford.

So what type of reform would we be getting in this initiative, along with the modest dollars to come our way, and what would we be giving up in return? That was the crux of a letter sent yesterday by State Senator Mark Miller, chair of the Joint Committee on Finance, to Secretary Arne Duncan. He is worried like others in similar policy positions, that with all the current economic challenges out there blowing huge holes in states’ budgets across the country, that:

We do not have the fiscal resilience to sustain another long-term financial commitment based on the mere possibility that we may be awarded one-time federal dollars in the future. Once these proposed educational policy and fiscal changes are enacted into law, Wisconsin legislators and taxpayers will be responsible for the accompanying financial commitment regardless of the outcome of Wisconsin’s Race to the Top application. This promise to fund new requirements without the promise of federal dollars puts at risk other social safety net programs that rely on adequate state funding to operate.

He cited the example of costs associated with the implementation of a “Children’s Zone” in Wisconsin based upon a model developed for Harlem that could ultimately have ongoing costs to Wisconsin of more than $400 million. If you make such financial and policy commitments you must be able to have some good assurances that you can continue to pay for them. He likens the exercise in not knowing how the grant dollars will be allocated and for how long, to a gambler “trying to draw to an inside straight.”

The National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report offering recommendations on how to revise the funding guidelines and regulations of Obama/Duncan’s $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” grant program, and is well worth a read. Interestingly, the report all but neglects to mention charter schools, which are a major component of RTtT. You can read something I wrote on that subject the other day, here.

In a press release for the Academy’s study, they applauded the step of encouraging states to create systems of linking data on student achievement to teachers, since, as they noted, it is essential to conducting research about the best ways of evaluating teachers.

One way of evaluating teachers, currently the subject of intense interest and research, are value-added approaches, which typically compare a student’s scores going into a grade with his or her scores coming out of it, in order to assess how much “value” a year with a particular teacher added to the student’s educational experience.  The report expresses concern that the department’s proposed regulations place excessive emphasis on value-added approaches.  Too little research has been done on these methods’ validity to base high-stakes decisions about teachers on them.  A student’s scores may be affected by many factors other than a teacher — his or her motivation, for example, or the amount of parental support — and value-added techniques have not yet found a good way to account for these other elements.

The report also cautioned against the use of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a federal assessment instrument. While effective at monitoring broad trends, it will not be able to detect the type of specific effects of the targeted interventions that the RTtT hopes to fund. This infatuation with data can lead reformers, philanthropists (case in point, Bill Gates’ team up with RTtT-type initiatives) and bureaucrats to become unquestioning supporters of using test scores as indicators of real learning and teaching. As the study pointed out:

The choice of appropriate assessments for use in instructional improvement systems is critical. Because of the extensive focus on large-scale, high-stakes, summative tests, policy makers and educators sometimes mistakenly believe that such tests are appropriate to use to provide rapid feedback to guide instruction. This is not the case.

The report also urged caution when trying to apply such a blunt instrument towards making international comparisons.

We note that the difficulties that arise in comparing test results from different states apply even more strongly for comparing test results from different countries.

They conclude the report with a reiterated point, “careful evaluation of this spending should not be seen as optional; it is likely to be the only way that this substantial investment in educational innovation can have a lasting impact on the U.S. education system.”

And in another side note related to federal education financing, the Obama administration’s latest and most detailed information yet on the jobs created by the stimulus, noted that of the 640,239 jobs recipients claimed to have created or saved so far, more than half — 325,000 — were in education. Most were teachers’ jobs that states said were saved when stimulus money averted a need for layoffs.

Robert Godfrey

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by | October 29, 2009 · 5:40 pm

Reform Is In The Air

reform1832

Mike Rose at Truthdig has noted that following the extensive and unprecedented federal reach of No Child Left Behind, the Obama administration is attempting to extend this iniative further by putting some some serious money behind a number of education initiatives that invite states and districts to compete for federal dollars. In the K-12 education world, they want, in part, to stimulate better state standards and tests, including the better measurement of teacher effectiveness, while turning around failing schools. One way they want to accomplish this is through an increase in the number of charter schools. At the same time, a third initiative wants to spark innovation and scale up the best of local academic programs.

As Mr. Rose acknowledges, this is a moment of real promise for American education, from kindergarten through college. But he also sounds a note of caution.

Reform is in the air. But within many of these reforms are the seeds of their undoing.

He pointed out that the Education Department has put a lot of stock in charter schools as “engines of innovation,” while noting, importantly, that DOE will not consider a state’s funding proposal if that state has a cap on charters.

Yet a number of research studies — the most recent from Stanford — demonstrate that charter schools, on average, are no better or worse than the regular public schools around them. To be sure, some charters are sites of fresh ideas and robust education, but so are magnet schools, and, lest we forget, so are our regular public schools, ones with strong leadership and a critical mass of good teachers. For the “reformers’” however, charter schools are the recipients of the highest accolades, the rest – not so much.

The Stanford University study shattered the myth of charter school superiority. According to Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, students at only 17 percent of charter schools do better on math and reading tests than their demographic peers in regular public schools. Thirty-seven percent do worse, while 46 percent of charter school kids, almost half, perform at approximately the same level as their traditional public school counterparts.

The author of the report concludes:

This study shows that we’ve got a 2-to-1 margin of bad charters to good charters.

The results are especially significant, given that charter schools have built-in advantages – starting with parents that are engaged enough in their children’s education to put them there, in the first place. Yet the actual outcomes, in most cases, fail to live up to the hype.

President Obama and his administration are committed to charter schools. In no small part this policy is driven by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who was a cheerleader for charters when he ran the Chicago school system, and has threatened to withhold federal education money from the 10 states that don’t yet have charter schools and the 26 other states that put limits on enrollment in charters. Such raw coercion, especially given the results of the Stanford study, seems strongly misguided. This comes in spite of the acknowledgement of the Stanford study on the part of Sec. Duncan, which, he suggests, merely points to the need for greater vigilance. “Charter authorizers need to do a better job of holding schools accountable.”

This administration has said that charter schools are key to educational “reform,” and provide “competition” for traditional schools. But that’s utter nonsense if the educational outcomes are no better, and in many cases worse, than in the regular public schools.

Speaking of “holding [charter] schools accountable,” one would of thought that that was a central argument for the need for charter schools in the first place, an institution free of those ill-principled and wretched teacher unions. Unionized teachers are blamed for much of the ills of education; it’s not a reasoned argument, but a matter of faith – and political prejudice. Charter schools are not private (at least not entirely, if you consider they are chartered by the state), but they are the privatizers’ foot in the door, a wedge issue to demonize unions. And that third leg of the reform movement, so to speak, measurement of teacher effectiveness, is also front and center (see the latest continued plea from the Wisconsin State Journal).

One approach being piloted in a number of education systems around the country is by the non-profit Hope Street Group, and developed by a team of teachers across the U.S., who have proposed recommendations for a smarter evaluation system, imploying more ‘objective’ measures of student achievement, ones that aim to attract and retain teachers, and put America’s schools back on top internationally.

“Policy 2.0: Using Open Innovation to Reform Teacher Evaluation Systems” suggests that in K-12 education, any teacher evaluation system should have the input of teachers and administrators and not solely come from researchers and policymakers. Their specific recommendations include the suggestion that evaluation systems should be frequently revised, that teaching advocates need to be involved in this process, and that any in-class observations for assessment must be done by teachers with sufficient experience.

Lets hope the coming “seeds of change” are not broadcasted, with great hope, onto marginal soil. There is too much at stake for education in this new century.

Robert Godfrey

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by | October 25, 2009 · 12:55 pm

Who are they kidding? “State Representatives Strive To Continue Wisconsin’s Legacy of Education”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Video  and story from WSAW (sorry about the advertisement)

There has been a lot of hot air, half truths, spin and misinformation about education funding in the 2009-11 Wisconsin biennial budget, but this story from Wausau takes the prize (for a recent, local entry in this sweepstakes of dishonor, see this column by Madison Rep. Mark Pocan, page 16 of the pdf).  Democratic Rep.  Thomas Nelson and Republican Rep. Jerry Petrowski claim in this report that their parties are constant champions of education who have placed educational excellence on the Fall legislative agenda.

The editing by the reporter may have  skewed things, Nelson and Petrowski may be capable legislators; I really don’t know.  What I do know is that what appeared in this story needs some critical attention.

Time for some fact checking.

So far the only Republican initiative of note is a proposal from Sen. Alberta Darling and Rep.  Brett Davis on “merit pay” for teachers.  Right now the proposal is nothing but a press release.  It is worth noting that previous school reform plans (and here) by Brett Davis never made it past the press release stage.

The announced Democratic Fall agenda is silent on education; Governor Jim Doyle has some ideas, but not much to say about funding these ideas or even the quality of education that Wisconsin has boasted of in the recent past.

Nelson  touts tripling sparsity aid to some rural districts.  What isn’t mentioned is that the resulting $11.18 million for the biennium is a drop in the bucket and doesn’t come near to addressing the unique diseconomies of scale of Wisconsin’s “small but necessary” districts.  Nelson also doesn’t acknowledge that this increase in a categorical aid was accompanied by a much larger decrease in general aids resulting in a substantial  net loss for all (or almost all?) districts receiving sparsity payments (to get the picture compare this list of sparsity distribution estimates with this list of general aid estimates for all districts, or just read this wonderful editorial from Frank Murphy in Florence).  I’m all for an increase in sparsity aid, but that alone does not make for  adequate school funding.

Petrowski is correct when he said “In the last budget that Democrats passed, was a cut for local school districts… and I’m afraid these cuts will affect [property] tax payers.”  What he doesn’t say is that the GOP stance throughout the budget process was to claim taxes and spending were too high and that at no point did the Republicans attempt to increase state education funding.

Enough of the back-and-forth, the real howler is in the closing lines of the story:

But at the end of the day no matter what side of the isle [sic] State Representatives are on..

“Democrats and Republicans in good economic times and tough economic times have always made the consistent decision to fully fund our schools,” says Representative Nelson.

Amazing…after 16 years under our current school finance system, after a Governor’s Task Force, a Special Joint Committee, an independent task force, proposals from Republicans ,  Democrats and advocacy organizations (and here) all agreeing that school finance is broken and needs to be fixed; after a biennial budget that cut state education investments by $535 million, increased the school levy credits — money that never goes near a classroom, but is counted by Wisconsin as “State Aid — by $352,852,200, a 26% increase bringing the total to $1,697,625,200 for the biennium… Nelson asserts a long term bi-partisan consensus for full funding of education.   Who is he kidding?  Who are they all kidding?

For a refreshing (and depressing) dose of  truth see this recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story: “”State aid drops to many school districts” (or just click around in the AMPS archives).

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | October 21, 2009 · 3:37 pm

Gerald Bracey Will be Missed

Sad news for anyone concerned with honesty and accuracy in education research and reporting, Jerry Bracey has died unexpectedly.

No news reports, but did get a confirmation from Susan Ohanian.

Jerry fought the good fight, with the Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency (EDDRA), on the Huffington Post, in books, articles, columns, calls and notes to editors and reporters, anywhere and anytime that education research was being misused and abused or was simply badly done.

I never met Jerry, but I’ve been a participant in his EDDRA Yahoo Group and have exchanged private messages.  He was combative, friendly and good humored, with a passion for truth and the power of knowledge and education.

One thing that always impressed me was the depth and breadth of his knowledge.   He could always call up and cite relevant reports and articles, new and old,  with apparent ease.  That can’t be replaced.

He will be missed.

Some links to other blogs noting this loss.

DairyStateDad.

EdWonk.

Mike Klonsky’s Small Talk.

Education Notes OnLine.

Giving Jerry the last word (he always seemed to want it), his Nine Myths About Public Schools.

Nine Myths About Public Schools

None of this will likely strike you as particularly new, but it might be good to have a bunch of myths lined up and debunked all in one place.

  1. The schools were to blame for letting the Russians get into space first. Granddaddy of all slanders and a great illustration of the absolute nuttiness with which people talk about education.
    Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, launched on October 4, 1957. On September 20, 1956, Werner von Braun’s Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched a 4-stage Jupiter C rocket from Cape Canaveral. After the first 3 stages fired, the rocket was 832 miles in the air and traveling at 13,000 miles an hour. The 4th stage could have easily bumped something into orbit. The 4th stage was filled with sand. There were a number of reasons for this including the fact that the Eisenhower administration was determined to keep its weapons rocket program and its space exploration project separate and von Braun’s rocket was clearly a weapon. Its primary intent was to incinerate Russian cities with nuclear warheads. Ike worried how the Russians might react. His Assistant Defense Secretary Donald Quarles actually said “the Russians did us a favor” because they established the precedent that deep space was free and international.Most US engineers in the space program in 1957 would have graduated high school in the 1930s, but in the media, the schools of the 1950s took the hit for Sputnik. Ike was quite puzzled by this.
  2. Schools alone can close the achievement gap. This is codified in the disaster known as No Child Left Behind. Most of the differences come from family and community variables and many out-of-school factors, especially summer loss. Some studies have found that poor children enter school behind their middle class peers, learn as much during the year and then lose it over the summer. They fall farther and farther behind and schools are blamed. Middle class and affluent kids do not show summer loss.
  3. Money doesn’t matter. Tell this to wealthy districts. Money clearly affects changes in achievement although levels of achievement are more influenced by the variables just mentioned. Most studies are short term and look only at test scores, a very foolish mistake. Economists David Card and Alan Krueger also found investments in school show a payoff in terms of long-term earnings of graduates.
  4. The United States is losing its competitive edge. China and India ARE Rising. As economies collapsed all around it, China’s economy grew a remarkable 7% last year. On just humanitarian grounds, we should not wish China and India to remain poor forever, but the more they grow the more money they have to buy stuff from us. As China and India prosper, we prosper. The World Economic Forum and the Institute for Management Development have consistently ranked the U. S. economy as the most competitive in the world. Education is only one part of multi-factor systems in rankings. WEF is especially keen on innovation. Our obsession with testing makes testing a great instrument for destroying creativity.
  5. The U. S. has a shortage of scientists, mathematicians and engineers. This was a myth started oddly enough by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s in a study with assumptions so absurd the study was never published, but the myth lingers on. In fact, Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute and Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University found that we have three newly minted scientists and engineers who are permanent residents or native citizens for every newly minted job. Within 2 years, 65% of them were no longer in scientific or engineering fields. That proportion might have fallen during the current debacle when people are more likely to hang on to a job even if they hate it. An article in the September 18 Wall Street Journal reported that before the economy collapsed, 30% of the graduates of MIT–MIT–headed directly into finance.
  6. Merit pay for teachers will improve performance. Bebchuk & Fried Pay Without Performance. Adams, Heywood & Rothstein, Teachers, Performance Pay, and Accountability. Bonus pay is concentrated in finance, insurance, and real estate. In most of private sector hard to determine and often leads to corruption and gaming the system. Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
  7. The fastest growing jobs are all high-tech and require postsecondary education. “Postsecondary education” is a weasel word. A majority of the fastest growing jobs do, in fact, require some kind of postsecondary training. But, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they account for very few jobs. It’s the Walmarts and Macdonald’s of America that generate the jobs. According to the BLS, the job of retail sales accounts for more jobs than the top ten fastest growing jobs combined.
  8. Test scores are related to economic competitiveness. We do well on international comparisons of reading, pretty good on one international comparison of math and science, and not so good on another math/science comparison. But these comparisons are based on the countries’ average scores and average scores don’t mean much. The Organization for Economic Cooperating and Development, the producer of the math science comparison in which we do worst has pointed out that in science the U. S. has 25% of all the highest scoring students in the entire world, at least the world as defined by the 60 countries that participate in the tests. Finland might have the highest scores, but that only gives them 2,000 warm bodies compared to the U. S. figure of 67,000. It’s the high scorers who are most likely to become leaders and innovators. Only four nations have a higher proportion of researchers per 1000 fulltime employees, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand and Japan. Only Finland is much above the U. S.  Consider Japan, the economic juggernaut of the 1980’s. It kids score well on tests and people made a causal link between scores and Japan’s economy. But Japan’s economy has been in the doldrums for almost a whole generation. Its kids still ace tests.
  9. Education itself produces jobs. President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan have both linked any economic recovery to school improvement. This is nonsense. There are parts of India where thousands of educated people compete for a single relatively low-level white-collar job. Some of you might recall that in the 1970’s many sociologists and commentators worried that America was becoming TOO educated, that they would be bored by the work available

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | September 25, 2009 · 8:30 am

Education Tweak #13 — Bill Gates Pulls the Strings

Click on image for pdf.

Click on image for pdf.

Previous EdTweaks can be found at www.edtweak.org.

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | September 18, 2009 · 3:37 pm

Don’t “Get Lost in the Numbers”

41-1I was cleaning  out old links and came across this wonderful editorial from the Eau Claire Leader Telegram.  It really really does a great job of explaining what is wrong with the “data driven” numbers obsessed educational policy decision-making and providing some perspective.  Here is the whole thing:

Editorial: As school year starts, don’t get numbed by numbers

When observing our educational system through the lens of the media, it’s easy to get lost in the numbers.

We’re not talking about the numbers kids will find in multiplication tables and quadratic equations when they return to classrooms in the Chippewa Valley this week; we mean the kind of numbers that make headlines.

There are the good numbers, such as standardized test scores, which typically show local schools meeting and exceeding state and national averages.

There are bad numbers as well – unfortunately, too many of them: the millions that are perpetually being cut from school budgets because of state aid shortfalls, not to mention the compensation numbers of a certain Eau Claire school district administrator most in the community wish would just go away.

On top of this, there are confusing, ambiguous numbers – those used to calculate allowable increases in teachers’ salary and benefits packages, for instance, or those mysterious ones known as “mill rates” – the kind that drive endless political debates and generate hard feelings among educators, taxpayers and elected officials.

All of these numbers are important, which is why you’ll find them in the pages of this newspaper. However, focusing on the numbers alone can distract our attention from other parts of the educational equation. To put it another way, if we focus only on the ‘rithmatic, we forget about the readin’ and ‘ritin’.

Measuring, tabulating and trying to improve test scores is important to education, but that’s far from the mind of a kindergartner who can’t wait to use his brand new box of crayons on the first day of school.

School budgets and the decisions that shape them are vital too, but so is the pride of an elementary student who has finished her first chapter book, the joy of a middle-schooler tackling a novel, or the excitement of a high school student unfolding Shakespearean sonnets.

Likewise, while it’s necessary to ensure our educators are paid in a way that’s fair to them and the taxpayers, it’s also necessary to acknowledge and support teachers as they inspire young people to learn, work hard and express themselves.

And though community residents deserve honest school administrators and elected school board members, we shouldn’t let the numbers games some people have played undercut our support for the goal of our educational system: producing good citizens capable of improving their own and others’ lives.

The 2009 school year is a brand-new spiral-bound notebook. May the numbers and letters that fill it in the coming months tell a positive story.

– Tom Giffey, editorial page editor

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | September 15, 2009 · 9:06 pm

Recipe for Disaster(s), Or the Wisconsin Democrats’ Fall Agenda

I just read the release and memo on the Democratic agenda for the Fall legislative session.  The agenda is  a recipe for disasters.

The disaster that matters to most of us in the state is already in progress as school districts cut programs and services while raising property taxes at rates that have not been seen for years (read this report from Kenosha, look at Rhinelander); as municipalities trim essential services, cut investments that would lead to recovery and growth while also raising property taxes  and fees (here is the latest from Eau Claire); and counties axe public safety and  safety net programs, close nursing homes and like everybody else, raise property taxes and fees (here is a recent report on Dane County).  This Fall budget season is bad; the 2010-11 will be worse if there isn’t bolder action from the state.

The disaster that probably matters most to the Democratic leadership will come in the 2010 elections.  Their vulnerable members will lose if all they bring back to the voters is window dressing campaign finance reforms and tougher drunk driving laws (this isn’t quite fair, some of  the agenda is good — Green Jobs in particular –,  but it is not anywhere near sufficient to meet the crises we are facing).  Even the Democrats in “safe seats” (like in Madison) may well find themselves surprised by challengers from the left who demand better and bolder action.

I don’t care what their polling says, they need to take their heads out of the sand and look around at what is happening with the schools, with the counties, with the cities and most of all with the families they claim to be “Standing Up” for.  They need to look beyond November 2010 and act in the long term interests of our still great state.  Mostly they need to recognize that the revenue and budgeting assumptions they have been working from cannot be sustained.

Some realize this.  Representative Cory Mason is proposing a jobs program funded by higher taxes on those earning over $1 million annually.  A “Save Our Services” campaign has started, seeking to fund essential services via an expanded sales tax base (info on the October 1 Madison rally here).  Last night the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education voted unanimously in support of a resolution calling for a sales tax increase dedicated to school funding.  This idea is the focus of a “Pennies for Kids” campaign that the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools is in the process of initiating (this is just beginning, stay tuned).

Many of us would like to see even broader changes in our state’s taxation, budgeting and investment policies, but something has to be done to meet the crisis and these are good steps.  the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future and Wisconsin Council on Children and Families Catalog of Tax Reform Options for Wisconsin is still the best place to begin thinking about revamping the entire system in order to achieve adequacy, equity and sustainability.

If the Democrats stick with their “do little or nothing” agenda, the crises will grow all around the state and come back to hit them hard in November 2010.  When that happens they will have no one to blame but themselves.  With power comes responsibility, with failure of effort and accomplishment comes accountability.

One closing observation:  There is nothing in the Democratic agenda about Governor Jim Doyle’s “Scramble for the Crumbs”/ Race to the Top package.  I hope this indicates that many in the party are too smart to sell what is left of  their souls for a lottery ticket in a rigged game where the payoff is one-time funding far below the needs of our schools ($80 million is what I hear).

Thomas J. Mertz

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by | September 14, 2009 · 2:57 pm

Education Tweak #12 – Arne Duncan: “You Lie” (+ Bob Dylan Bonus)

Click on image for pdf.

Click on image for pdf.

Previous EDTweaks can be found at www.edtweak.org.

And thanks to my brother for making the connection between the Joe Wilson “You lie” outburst and this classic Bob Dylan performance.

Thomas J. Mertz

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