Last Thursday, the Isthmus newspaper published an extensive article by Jason Shepard entitled “The Fate of the Schools.” While the article covered many areas of interest regarding the school district and the upcoming school board elections, we have significant concerns about the way in which the article was written. These concerns include:
CONTEXT:
• The data in the article were used inappropriately. This story compares Madison’s schools with the small, suburban, middle-class districts surrounding it. A more comparable study would have looked at other districts with similar proportions of low-income students, such as Green Bay, LaCrosse, Racine and Milwaukee. The data also was not dis-aggregated. If it had been, it would have revealed that Madison’s white, non-poor children do as well as and even surpass both Dane County and larger districts in Wisconsin. Of that group, 96% of the “non-low-income” students scored proficient or advanced.
• Additionally, MMSD has 35% of the county’s 3rd graders – and 70% of the county’s low-income 3rd graders. On the math scores quoted in the article, it wasn’t pointed out that while Madison “only matches” the state average, Madison’s overall poverty rate is 30 percent higher. Madison continues to score above state and national averages on the ACT exam each year, despite the fact that more low-income and non-white students are taking the exam each year. MMSD had 69% of all the National Merit Semifinalists in the county this year (with only about 40% of the students).
SOURCES:
• The top sources of information listed in the article when talking about diminishing public support for MMSD and data on the schools come from two sources: talk radio and the SIS blog, neither of which are primary sources. Also, no grassroots parent groups or civic groups were interviewed other than SIS. And, no educational experts from curriculum and instruction at UW-Madison were interviewed, yet it is listed as the number one Graduate School of Curriculum and Instruction in the United States (U.S. News and World Report, 2006).
• We acknowledge that many families have opted-out of the district, for a variety of reasons. However, the overall trends for enrollment in and outside of Madison also reflect the growth and availability of new housing. It is very difficult to pull out whether the bulk of the enrollment choices were based on perceived educational quality of MMSD or for a larger house with more young families in the neighborhood. Just as anecdotal evidence from SIS and other sources indicate disengagement from MMSD, we could assert, with just as much authority that, based on our own experiences with people we know, families continue to move into MMSD for its breadth of instruction, diversity, and high quality teachers and staff.
ACCURACY:
• On the issue of equity, MMSD should not be blamed for segregated housing in Madison. And in fact, many of the board members have supported increased resources to schools with high poverty rates, not just Ruth Robarts and Lawrie Kobza. The formation of a new equity task force came from Carol Carstensen. Lawrie Kobza voted against its formation.
We raise these concerns in the interest of fairness, to give our fellow SIS readers a broader understanding of the issues covered in the article.
Submitted by: Francoise Davenport, Kirsten Engel, Jerry Eykholt, Kristina Grebener, Andrew Halada, Denise Halada, Molly Immendorf, Barbara Katz, Ed Kuharski, Jane Lambert, Randy Lambert, Beth Moss, Duncan Moss, Marge Passman, Lisa Pugh, Thomas Purnell, Fred Swanson, Beth Swedeen, Terry Tuschen, Barbara Wagner, Margaret Walters, and Andrea Wipperfurth.
5 thoughts on “REFLECTIONS ON ISTHMUS ARTICLE, “THE FATE OF THE SCHOOLS” BY 22 PARENTS AND COMMUNITY MEMBERS”
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Thank you for your thoughtful and astute analysis of Shepard’s article.
An observation I would add is that Jason Shepard, in my opinion, has followed MMSD and its Board of Ed actions and politics more closely than most journalists in our city. Having worked on the Memorial/West Task Force, I can identify with some of the frustration conveyed in Shepard’s Isthmus cover piece.
While it could be at the expense of having numbers convey a message, I don’t know that the entire spirit of Shepard’s article is skewed by those numbers.
Our Board of Ed has been failing us. It is solely on the backs of those fine educators your group sites that any of our district’s children – from any demographic group – have succeeded. In my opinion, our school board cannot take credit for those strides – particularly considering the quandries we face with budget and space issues.
I believe the main thrust of Shepard’s article needs to be shared and understood more widely by district stakeholders. We have a dysfunctional, fairly inoperable Board of Ed, caught up more in politics than issues affecting our children.
The BOE’s abysmal non-work on addressing the enrollment data they’ve had for, at least, the past several years, made our Task Force work that much more complicated. Had they put aside their egos and posturing, maybe we could be on a more accurate track toward solutions to some of our more pressing issues.
Again, thank you for your thoughtful observations. I invite you to offer Shepard a bit more benefit-of-the-doubt in his critique of the Board of Ed. I see some truth in his report.
Authors of a statement like the one below apparently mean one of two things:
1) Low-income kids can’t learn, or
2) We don’t know how to teach low-income kids.
Neither is true. However, the MMSD administration and board of education refuse to use curriculum proven to be effective for low-income kids, instead sticking with curriculum that the district’s own statistics show to be ineffective half the time.
“Additionally, MMSD has 35% of the county’s 3rd graders – and 70% of the county’s low-income 3rd graders. On the math scores quoted in the article, it wasn’t pointed out that while Madison “only matches” the state average, Madison’s overall poverty rate is 30 percent higher. . .”
I hope that one of the signers clarifies whether they mean #1 or #2.
I’m not going to disagree with everything you and your fellow parents wrote, Barb. I, too, think that the MMSD does a great job (in spite of the way our BoE behaves at times). However, I must correct one factual piece. Lawrie Kobza was, and has been, a catalyst behind the movement to get the BoE to create an Equity Task Force. She actually felt that the current policy should be utilized, but everyone else felt it was “outdated”. The current policy has some serious “teeth” to it, but the rest of the BoE and Mr. Rainwater wanted to DELETE it from the policy manual.
Lawrie and myself, along with some other notable northside residents, were the founders of the Northside PTO Coalition. Equity in schools has been our flagship issue since 2002. We have spent hundreds of hours lobbying BoE members on the details of what an equitable MMSD might encompass. Lawrie was always the most knowledgeable member on this issue and, frankly, never waivered in her opinions about equity. I’ve disagreed with her on some details regarding the current equity policy, but as my thinking has evolved over the past 4 yrs., I find that she’s right and I’m wrong in many cases….so it’s very unfair to say she didn’t support this task force. Carol created this task force because north and eastsiders asked for it- and while we spent years trying to talk equity to Bill Keys and Bill Clingan, a funny thing happened: the rest of Madison began to see the influx of poverty that we’ve experienced for the past decade…so now the Equity Policy Task Force is getting to do work that will benefit the MMSD as a whole.
Please note that this is, of course, my personal opinion, and I’m NOT speaking as either a task force member or as co-president of the East Attendance Area PTO Coalition.
On balance, Jason Shepard and Isthmus did a great job of identifying the fundamental structural problems with the board. It is abundantly clear that the best way to solve it is to elect both Cole and Mathiak. Just a glance at Silveira’s endorsements from the board should tell you that she would simply be a clone of Bill Keys. But back to your post and your related letter to the CapTimes editor:http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/letters/index.php?ntid=77931&ntpid=0
Your happy talk about heterogeneity is belied by the data. This has been eloquently and professionally addressed frequently on SIS by Jeff Enriques and Laurie Frost, and others.
The assertion that prompts this post is the one where you said: “The top sources of information listed in the article when talking about diminishing public support for MMSD and data on the schools come from two sources: talk radio and the SIS blog, neither of which are primary sources.”
Perhaps you’ve missed the links on SIS to all the videos of various and sundry events and meetings, not just BOE meetings, but also forums sponsored and coordinated by SIS members on a variety of topics, gangs, nutrition, budget. If that’s not primary source, please explain to me what is. (A special thanks to Raphael Gomez for his hard work in coordinating and organizing all those events.)
We’ve also had a number of folks from the SIS community with expertise in an area actually take apart the raw data and/or assumptions straight from district and state numbers.
In other words, oftentimes, this site has original work on it, not only opinion.
Indeed, this is one of SIS’ greatest contributions, presenting unfiltered information. So, for instance, when someone from your camp wants to speak generally about a “fractious board” as though it’s all of them behaving badly, we can pull up a video and show you just who the bullies are and when. (Just for the record, it isn’t Kobza or Robarts. And one more thing, disagreeing with the party line isn’t fractiousness either. That’s called doing your job.)
Oh, and one last thing, don’t you think it would be a bit more honest to disclose that some of you also work for the district?
The posting states “The data also was not dis-aggregated. If it had been, it would have revealed that Madison’s white, non-poor children do as well as and even surpass both Dane County and larger districts in Wisconsin. Of that group, 96% of the “non-low-income” students scored proficient or advanced.”
I agree that Madison compares better when the data is disaggregated. I’m curious, however, how the data was obtained to compare the white, non-low income subgroup in Madison vs. other districts in Dane County. That is not a commonly reported subgroup.
Thanks!