Wisconsin is failing minority and low-income students. Plain and simple. Of the 10 issue areas featured in the Post-Crescent’s end-of-year “Editorial Agenda Update,” at least six are critically reliant on our schools performing – performing much better than they do now – and performing better and better around the state, not just here in our cozy, cuddly Fox Cities backyard.
Think about it. Success in these six important “Issue” areas – labeled by the Post-Crescent as Economic Development, Fiscal Responsibility, Education (of course), Government Accountability, Working Poor, and Citizenship have at their core a well-performing education system.
Then think about this. According to The Fordham Report 2006: How Well Are States Educating Our Neediest Children?, Wisconsin is doing a dreadful job in closing the achievement gap between the haves and the have-nots. The difference in achievement scores between Wisconsin white and African-American students is in the dead-last position – tied with Minnesota.
6 thoughts on “Education for all is just a bad dream”
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The Fordham Report 2006, cited in this article, rates Wisconsin at D+, but has this to say about MMSD:
“There are a few pockets of change outside Milwaukee. In Madison, for example, the local school district has made more progress than any other urban area in the country in shrinking its racial achievement gap, according to a study by two University of Wisconsin education experts. What is particularly laudable is this was done while the performance levels of all groups rose over the past decade. A key component has been an army of about 1,000 trained volunteer tutors working with 2,000 struggling Madison students on reading and math in grades K-8.”
The MMSD, in conjunction with these volunteer efforts, IS making a difference. However, as many of us on the northside have found via extensive efforts to involve FAMILIES in academic achievement, we can do a better job. The challenge lies in involving families in their childrens’ education- and it’s no small feat as the number of under-educated parents in the MMSD is skyrocketing. On the northside, this is being combatted by neighborhood centers like Packers Townhomes, Vera Court, Northport and Kennedy Heights, where learning is reinforced via after school programming that’s academic in nature.
I, for one, am unclear about what people mean by families being involved with their children’s education. What kind of involvement is needed, what kind of involvement is helpful? Discussions and studies around this topic have always struck me as being rather vague and unhelpful. In recent published research involving toddlers the importance of appropriate parental involvement is shown to be critical: positive emotional support, encouragement, minimizing negative involvement, reasonable parental vocabulary and communication.
Another set of issues is the extent to which and areas in which progress is being made “in spite” of some MMSD policies and curriculum, or “because of” some policies and curriculum.
These are areas in which school board oversight is important, and public participation is critical.
It’s pretty elementary, Larry. Students who are well supported by their families, academically as well as emotionally/socially, do better in school. We don’t need some anal retentive research to confirm this, but extrapolate your “recent published research involving toddlers” results. What I was pointing out was that the various northside neighborhood community centers are doing this with kids whose own families cannot accomplish such support.
I raise the family support issue, not to be anal, but to point out the literature keeps reiterating this, but often, like in many Madison schools, the view is “we’re the experts so don’t bother us and leave the education to us”, but at the same time “families need to support their kids in school”. So what does this really mean to all parties?
An AFT paper published in 1999 was entitled “Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science”, by Louis Moats. This paper was cited in many research papers arguing for only experts to be involved.
“In a recent document entitled “Teaching Reading is Rocket Science,” Louisa Moats (1999) revealed and articulated the complexities of carefully designed and implemented reading instruction. Teaching reading is far more complex than most professionals and laypersons realize. The demands of the phonologic, alphabetic, semantic, and syntactic systems of written language require a careful schedule and sequence of prioritized objectives, explicit strategies, and scaffolds that support students’ initial learning and transfer of knowledge and skills to other contexts. The requirements of curriculum construction and instructional design that effectively move children through the “learning to read” stage to the “reading to learn” stage are simply too important to leave to the judgment of individuals.”
This quote is from the paper A Consumer’s Guide to Evaluating a Core Reading Program, by Deborah C. Simmons, and Edward J. Kame’enui, from the U of Oregon. These folks are the designers of the Reading First program. Simmons, I believe, was the evaluator who gave MMSD a hard time with the Reading First grant, and Kame’enui was the primary researcher implicated in the Reading First grant fraud committed by the Dept of Education, recently detailed in a Federal Audit.
There is a research paper written by a Madison elementary teacher (for her masters?) which echoed such sentiments in the area of math, here, declaring that her teaching of fractions most irritated Ph.D engineers and mathematicians because they could no longer help their kids with their homework, incredibly declaring that such parents really didn’t understand fractions!
Sorry, David, but I don’t believe things are all that elementary, at least for many persons’ points of view.
Hey man, I’m simply relating what’s worked on Madison’s northside…your mileage may vary. Kids who get academic support via their family (or a substitute, like a community learning center) do better than those who don’t. Pretty elementary to me.