Christina Smallwood:

In Reading in the Brain (2009)—which Hanford recommends on the Sold a Story website, writing, “I’ve never filled a book with so many sticky notes”—the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene identifies three stages of learning to read: the pictorial, where children memorize a few words as if they were pictures (these are likely to be the child’s own name or a familiar brand logo); the phonological, where they “decode graphemes into phonemes”; and the orthographic, where “word recognition becomes fast and automatic.”

2011: a majority of the taxpayer funded Madison School Board aborts the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School in a 5-2 vote.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Olivia Herken:

This week the school district contended with more violent incidents. On Tuesday, a 14-year-old was stabbed in the chest in a park after an incident at a middle school parking lot earlier in the day, and on Wednesday, police were called to East High for a fight between students.

Some survey respondents called for the removal of students who were disruptive in classes. Others want to bring back school resource officers, who were removed from schools in 2020. Additional cameras, security and metal detectors in buildings also were recommended.

One large theme from the survey results was a stronger emphasis on mental health for both students and staff. Specifically, respondents said there needs to be more support staff, training, dialogue and resources for those who are struggling.

In terms of nutrition, those who responded said there needed to be higher quality meals and lower prices, as well as provisions on hand for students who face food hardships when they aren’t at school.

2011: a majority of the taxpayer funded Madison School Board aborts the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School in a 5-2 vote.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Olivia Herken:

Enrollment in Wisconsin’s traditional public schools has continued to decline since the start of the pandemic.

There isn’t a single answer as to where students are going and why. A nationwide declining birth rate and changing trends in where families live are big contributors.

But there’s clearly a growing appetite in Wisconsin for more alternative schooling, including charter schools and home-schooling.

Ten new independent charter schools have opened across the state since 2019, with 35 options now available. Other options that break the traditional mold have also sprouted, from a new forest school in La Fargeto an expanding campus at Madison’s private Hickory Hill Academy.

2011: a majority of the taxpayer funded Madison School Board aborts the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School in a 5-2 vote.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Sarah Karp:

Urban Prep is the city’s only all-male charter school operator, once celebrated nationally for getting all its seniors, who are almost all Black, into college year after year. It currently has two CPS campuses, one in Englewood and one in Bronzeville, with about 380 students. CPS budgeted $8 million for Urban Prep this year.

A third Urban Prep campus is run by the state. Earlier this month, the state board of education issued Urban Prep a “notice of revocation.” The state said Urban Prep must provide a corrective action plan and the state board will vote at its Nov. 17 whether to allow the campus to continue operating.

District officials lay out an extensive case against Urban Prep in a board report released Monday. Among the many failures cited: Only one-third of teachers are certified; a failure to provide special education services for disabled students; financial turmoil and mismanagement. Officials also lambasted the charter operator for refusing to sever ties with its founder and executive director after allegations of sexual misconductinvolving a student were substantiated against him.

“In the judgment of [Chicago Board of Education] representatives, [Urban Prep Academies] has prioritized personal considerations of executives and administrators over student health and safety, responsible fiscal management, compliance with laws, and compliance with their Charter obligations,” an attachment explaining the resolution read.

Tim King, the founder and executive director, denied sexually abusing a student. Through his attorney, he called them “wild accusations.” King filed court documents asking a judge to reverse disciplinary actions against him by CPS.

School district officials said they’ve been trying to work with Urban Prep’s board and executives to resolve the issues, but felt they weren’t negotiating in good faith, according to the attachment.

Urban Prep officials called CPS’ takeover attempt an “attack” and said the school district is “more interested in dragging down our leadership and school than in the successful education of young Black men.” They note that Urban Prep’s campuses were recognized as “commendable” by the state this year, the second highest rating.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Urban Prep leaders are planning a press called on Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to “intervene and halt CPS’ move to revoke licenses of the only Black-run and Black Male focused charter school in Illinois.”

Chicago urban prep students visited Madison in 2011, as part of the effort to launch an independent charter school: Madison Preparatory Academy. The taxpayer supported Madison School board aborted that initiatiave.

LinkedIn post.

A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board rejected (2011) Kaleem’s proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school. Consider the implications for the many children…

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Elizabeth Beyer:

A contract, inked in February with the UW System, greenlit Caire’s 33-year dream of growing One City Schools from early childhood education and elementary to include students through grade 12, roughly a decade after the Madison School Board rejected a similar proposal for a charter school overseen by the Madison School District that would have been called Madison Preparatory Academy.

The Charter School Growth fund, a nonprofit, philanthropic venture capital fund, will contribute $850,000 over the next two years to One City. That along with a recently awarded $900,000 grant to the school from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction through a federally funded program, will total $1.75 million in funds for the opening of the academy over the course of the next two years.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Pat Schneider (2018), dives into a look at the aborted Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school proposal (2011).

The book includes several recommendations to improve information exchange around controversial public policies. Talk about the most important.

The most important thing is that we all do our own individual work of understanding our own biases. We all have a role to play in trying to disrupt racism.

For public communicators, I give some specific examples of how you could use Facebook in conjunction with a key influencer to work in collaboration to get in to some of those communities

You’ve also introduced some new work with students.

I developed a class at UW-Madison. It’s a service learning class where we use some of these principles and see how they play out. I tell them: We‘re going to experiment with some different ways of doing things and some of them are going to fail and some of them are going to change the way you think about reporting.

Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school notes and links. (Aborted 5-2 by a majority of the Madison School board). As an aside, I doubt that legacy or independent writers had much influence on this issue vis a vis the entrenched, status quo interests.

Today, via a University of Wisconsin Madison charter school authority (just 2 schools after years…!), Kaleem Caire’s One City institution is rolling – soon expanding in nearby Monona.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before. 2004 notes.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

John Roach:

I worked with Caire when he headed the Urban League of Greater Madison and on his effort to launch Madison Prep, the earnest but quixotic attempt to address Madison’s embarrassing racial achievement gap. The failure to launch that school was a bitter blow. And the gap has remained unchanged.

Madison Prep failed because the teachers’ union and other supporters of the educational status quo were motivated and powerful. But they are not invincible. Caire discovered that the best way to battle those who stand in opposition to righteous change is not to meet them head on, but to adroitly scoot around them.

It also helps to enlist allies.

Allies like the legendary Pleasant Rowland, who just donated $14 million to help address Madison’s stark racial reality by expanding Caire’s One City Schools to a bigger, better building in Monona. Like Caire, I am a Madisonian, born and raised, and cannot think of anyone who’s had a greater impact on our city in modern times than Rowland and her husband, Jerry Frautschi. There is simply no precedent for such philanthropy in Madison’s history. None. Rowland and Frautschi deserve a statue at the head of State Street, once we elect leaders who can figure out how to fix Madison’s shabby aorta.

Caire has other allies, like the UW System’s Office of Educational Opportunity. This entity moved to alter the painful reality that its flagship university is in a town with one of the worst racial gaps in America. So, they chartered One City Schools. Yes, the C word. Charter.

Notes and links on Kaleem Caire.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarcer

Mengchen Dong:

Status holders across societies often take moral initiatives to navigate group practices toward collective goods; however, little is known about how different societies (e.g., the United States vs. China) evaluate high- (vs. low-) status holders’ transgressions of preached morals. Two preregistered studies (total N = 1,374) examined how status information (occupational rank in Study 1 and social prestige in Study 2) influences moral judgments of norm violations, as a function of word-deed contradiction and cultural independence/interdependence. Both studies revealed that high- (vs. low-) status targets’ word-deed contradictions (vs. noncontradictions) were condemned more harshly in the United States but not China. Mediation analyses suggested that Americans attributed more, but Chinese attributed less, selfish motives to higher status targets’ word-deed contradictions. Cultural in(ter)dependence influences not only whom to confer status as norm enforcers but also whom to (not) blame as norm violators.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts and tolerating long term, disastrous reading results, a majority of the Madison School board aborted the planned independent Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, in 2011.

Yet, Kaleem Caire persevered, supported by many seeking a diverse K-12 governance environment, now moving much of One City schools to a large Monona facility.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

Logan Wroge:

With a $14 million donation from American Girl founder and philanthropist Pleasant Rowland, One City Schools announced plans on Tuesday to purchase an office building in Monona that will become a new home for the fast-growing independent charter school.

One City will use the donation to buy a 157,000-square-foot office building on the campus of WPS Health Solutions for $12 million and transform it into a school.

Kaleem Caire, founder and CEO of One City, also said the school received conditional approval earlier this year from its charter authorizer — the University of Wisconsin System’s Office of Educational Opportunity — to start teaching middle- and high-schoolers in the fall of 2022.

“This is huge, having Pleasant Rowland’s support like this,” Caire said in an interview. “It’s a sign that the opportunity’s here for us to do something great, there are a lot more people that want to do great things for our children and the schools that we’re creating.”

Hard Road

Caire said securing the building and charter expansion to operate a full-fledged 4K-12 school feels like “vindication” nearly a decade after a bitter battle to open a charter school failed.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborts an independent charter school: On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

Annysa Johnson:

Howard Fuller announced this month that he is retiring from Marquette University, where he is a distinguished professor of education and founder and director of its Institute for the Transformation of Learning.

At 79, Fuller has served in many roles in his lifetime: civil rights activist, educator and civil servant. He is a former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and best known in recent decades as a national advocate for school choice, which provides taxpayer-funded vouchers, typically to low-income families.

He is founder of Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy, a local charter high school, which beganinitially as a private religious school in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.He is a controversial figure for many public school advocates who believe school choice bleeds needed dollars from those schools.

In addition to retiring from Marquette, Fuller has resigned all of his board appointments, except for that of the school.

Fuller sat down with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel education reporter Annysa Johnson for a lengthy and wide-ranging discussion. These are excerpts:

Question: When you first announced your retirement, I could sense a weariness in your voice. It was clear you were struggling with where we are in this country right now. What can you say about education in the context of this moment?

Fuller: One of the things that became absolutely clear when the pandemic hit was what we already knew, and that was the inequities in education in this country. What the pandemic did was show which schools were already into the 21st century and which were holding on tightly to the 20th century, still functioning with an industrial-age paradigm. When the pandemic broke, the people who were tied lock, stock and barrel to the industrial-age paradigm, were lost. They had no idea what to do. Because everything was centered onyou gottacome to a building, the teacher is the center of learning, etc.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Libby Sobic:

The roundtable was hosted by Vice President Mike Pence, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway as well as Wisconsin parents, school leaders and school choice advocates. Building off of Lee’s comments, Pence said, “every parent became an educator, in part, and had to make choices in the way they use their own time and the way they became engaged… I’m really struck by your comment that maybe this challenging time through which we’ve passed has reinvigorated that principle in parents.”  

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Mark Brown:

A school principal will always need a good working relationship with the local district commander, but police are asked to intervene in too many situations, Dozier believes.

“We put too much on them,” she says. “It doesn’t necessarily warrant a police response.”

The problem with getting police involved is that it sucks students into a situation from which they might never recover.

“Once a kid touches the criminal justice system, it just steamrolls,” Dozier says.

It’s not enough for CPS to give a school the option of getting rid of its police officers if no resources are offered to take their place.

In Chicago’s resource-poor schools, it’s hardly a surprise that school communities would choose to hang on to what little they have, no matter how imperfect.

Dozier agrees with those who say the $33 million that CPS spends on its police contract should be reinvested in alternative resources.

“You have to give the schools what they need,” she says. “You can’t just take [police] out and say, ‘Good luck.’ ”

Maybe that can’t be accomplished by the beginning of this school year. But it ought to be the stated goal of the Chicago Public Schools.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

2005: Gangs & School Violence audio / video.

Wisconsin DPI:

Responding to COVID-19 is a tremendous undertaking for schools. Schools are tasked with re-envisioning educational delivery models in a span of weeks and adjust practices accordingly. As we look toward the fall, the safety and health of our students, educators, and families remains of the highest importance.

The Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is providing this guidance to aid in school districts’ decision making as they look to build educational services and supports in a COVID-19 environment.Under state law, school districts determine the operations of their buildings and the learning environment. Risk mitigation and health factors will drive decisions regarding school operations.

While I expect schools to reopen this fall, they will undoubtedly look different. There will need to be social distancing, new cleaning and disinfecting procedures, and changes to how educators deliver instruction. There will be students who are not able to return to school due to health concerns and students and staff who may be quarantined due to exposure. This means every school district will need to plan for both school operations on campus and remote learning.

The DPI will be using federal CARES Act dollars to support school districts around remote learning options. Changes will need to be made as districts look at how they provide meals to students, transport students to and from school, move through their buildings, and gather to celebrate achievements.

The DPI partnered collaboratively with our state’s educational leaders: the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, Association of Wisconsin School Administrators, Wisconsin Council of Administrators of Special Services, Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, Wisconsin Association of School Boards, Wisconsin Education Association Council, and the Cooperative Educational Service Agency Statewide Network and in conjunction with the Department of Health Services.

Education Forward was developed to help local education and community leaders plan appropriately for students to return to school this fall. There are 421 school districts, 26 independent charter schools, and 792 private schools serving a school-age population of over 1,000,000 students in Wisconsin.

Due to the extensive variance in schools, this guidance is offered as a workbook to be considered in conjunction with the Department of Health Services risk assessment checklist. Please use these tools to discuss school district reopening plans with local health agencies and ensure information is complete in regards to the magnitude of risk associated with options being considered. The DPI will continuously update this guidance as new information arises and provide additional resources as they become available to support school operations and the learning environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the inequities existing in Wisconsin.As we look to address these inequities and the planning around the pandemic,the DPI is focused on providing school districts the necessary supports andregulatory relief to pursue innovative strategies to ensure equitable access to learning.

Thomas Sowell’s book “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” is scheduled to be available June 30.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Melinda Anderson:

Racial inequality in Baltimore’s public schools is in part the byproduct of long-standing neglect. In a system in which eight out of 10 students are black, broken heaters forced students to learn in frigid temperatures this past winter. Black children in Baltimore’s education system face systemic disadvantages: They’re suspended at much higher rates than their white peers; they rarely pass their math or reading tests; their campuses are chronically underfunded.

Yet this stark reality is juxtaposed with a largely unnoticed educational phenomenon underway in the city.

In a brightly painted row house in East Baltimore, Cameren Queen, who’s 13, walked confidently to a colorful trifold poster, cleared her throat, and began to speak. Her oral presentation—“All About Hepatitis C”—was the culmination of two weeks of work. With animated precision, she rattled off common symptoms of hepatitis C, specified risk factors, described prevention strategies, and listed treatment plans. Seated to her right, the instructor—her mother, April VaiVai—listened intently, scrutinizing facts and peppering Cameren with questions. The two of them are part of a thriving community of black homeschooling families, here in Baltimore and elsewhere throughout the country, taking the adage “Parents are a child’s first teacher” to another level.

The homeschooling population in the United States is predominantly white and concentrated in suburban or rural areas. In 2016, black children accounted for 8 percent of the 1.7 million homeschooled students nationally, according to U.S. Department of Education statistics. What federal education data don’t show, though, is what’s driving those 136,000 or so black students and their families into homeschooling. Nor do the data reveal the tenacity and tradition that bond this homeschooling movement—a movement that challenges many of the prevailing stereotypes about homeschooling, which tends to be characterized as the province of conservative Christians, public-school opponents, and government skeptics.

For VaiVai and many other black homeschoolers, seizing control of their children’s schooling is an act of affirmation—a means of liberating themselves from the systemic racism embedded in so many of today’s schools and continuing the campaign for educational independence launched by their ancestors more than a century ago. In doing so, many are channeling an often overlooked history of black learning in America that’s rooted in liberation from enslavement. When seen in this light, the modern black-homeschooling movement is evocative of African Americans’ generations-long struggle to change their children’s destiny through education—and to do so themselves.

Sowell’s book “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” is scheduled to be available June 30.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Thomas Sowell:

For decades, there has been widespread anxiety over how, when or whether the educational test score gap between white and non-white youngsters could be closed. But that gap has already been closed by the Success Academy charter school network in New York City.

Their predominantly black and Hispanic students already pass tests in mathematics and English at a higher rate than any school district in the entire state. That includes predominantly white and Asian school districts where parental income is some multiple of what it…

One piece of rhetoric that seems plausible on the surface is that charter schools “skim the cream” of students, leaving the public schools worse off. But this ignores the fact that admission to New York City charter schools is by lottery—that is, by luck—and not by students’ academic records or test results.

No doubt more motivated students are more likely to apply to charter schools. But only a fraction of those who enter the admissions lotteries win. This means that the majority of those motivated students remain in traditional public schools. The fraction that go into charter schools do not prevent traditional public schools from properly educating the much larger number who remain. If traditional public schools fail to do so, that is their own responsibility, and cannot be blamed on charter schools.

Teachers unions and traditional public school administrators have every reason to fear charter schools. In 2019 there were more than 50,000 New York City students on waiting lists to transfer into charter schools.

If that many students were allowed to transfer, in a city where expenditures per pupil are more than $20,000 a year, the result would be that more than a billion dollars a year would transfer with them to charter schools.

Sowell’s book “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” is scheduled to be available June 30.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Libby Sobic:

So what’s a charter school and what kind of options do parents have access to?

Charter schools are public schools with significantly less red tape than their traditional public school peers. Wisconsin has several types with the most common type of charter school is a school authorized by the school district.

• “Instrumentality” charter schools are part of the traditional school district, providing an alternative option for students or a unique perspective to the district. For example, according to DPI date, Tesla Engineering Charter School is a high performing instrumentality charter school authorized by the Appleton Area School District.

• In Milwaukee, there are also several charter schools that are authorized by the district but have some separation between them and the district. These are called “non-instrumentality” charters. For example, these charter schools have their own governing boards and hire their own teachers. Milwaukee Excellence, a “non-instrumentality charter” authorized by MPS, is the highest performing school in the City of Milwaukee.

• Milwaukee also has a high percentage of “independent” charter schools, schools that are authorized by a governmental entity that is not a school district. For example, these schools are authorized by the UW-Milwaukee or by the City of Milwaukee’s Common Council. Schools like Rocketship, with two campuses in the north and south neighborhoods of Milwaukee, are schools serving vulnerable populations of students and helping students achieve academic success. Independent charter schools are beginning to expand outside of Milwaukee. The University of Wisconsin-System Office of Educational Opportunity started authorizing charter schools in the Madison area. UW-Parkside also authorized a charter within its community.

But does the charter school model work?

According to the data from most recent state report card, charter schools are some of the highest performing schools in the state. WILL research found that in Milwaukee, both independent and non-instrumentality charter schools exceeded MPS in student proficiency in math and English.

But these charter schools should be celebrated for more than just their academic performance. These schools embrace their students and families, creating a community of support for overall student success. For example, Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academycelebrated their 2019 high school senior’s college signing day with 100% college acceptance and over $2.5 million dollars earned in scholarship funds.

2005 [Madison]: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before.

2012: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

2018: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2020: Madison’s “illiteracy-to-incarceration pipeline”: Booked, but can’t read

Holly Meyer:

Meanwhile, earlier this month, Cooper said he asked Nashville school leaders to figure out how they could carve up to $100 million out of the district’s budget for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. 

The school board’s denial of charter school applications is also in keeping with its overall trend in recent years. The debate over charter schools in Nashville has been one of the city’s most contentious. 

…

Critics say charter schools, which receive public money but are operated independently, pull students, money and resources away from zoned schools. Proponents have said they allow choices for parents and alleviate needs at some schools. 

Nashville now is projected to spend $139 million on the city’s 28 charter schools, which enroll nearly 13,000 students.

Board members, who met Tuesday via an online video chatting platform due to the pandemic, considered applications for the following schools: 

A majority of the Madison School District rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

The University of Wisconsin “charter czar” can approve “independent charter schools” in Madison.  One City Learning operates under this model.

Madison School District.

Notes and links on the Badger Rock Middle School Madison Style charter school (largely subject to the same teacher work rules and costs as the rest of the taxpayer supported Madison School District).

A majority of the Madison School District rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

The University of Wisconsin “charter czar” can approve “independent charter schools” in Madison. One City Learning operates under this model.

Karin Chenoweth:

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”. 

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close. 

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers. 

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Conor Williams:

Charter schools used to be a bipartisan education reform, but Democrats have turned against it of late. Many of their complaints are bad-faith projections—criticism for problems that aren’t unique to charters but endemic throughout the public education system.

Take the objection that charters are an insufficiently transparent use of public dollars. In rolling out his education policy last May, Bernie Sanders charged that “charter schools are led by unaccountable, private bodies.” His campaign website promises he’ll make charters “comply with the same oversight requirements as public schools” and impose a moratorium on public funding for expanding charters. In an August interview with Education Week, Pete Buttigieg said “we want to see considerably more oversight” of charter schools.

Charters are governed differently from traditional district schools—usually, but not always, they sit outside of school-district control. Though for-profit charter schools exist in some states, the overwhelming majority are run by nonprofit organizations overseen by boards of directors, operating under contracts granted by a local or state authority.

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers. 

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Kelly Stuart & Gina Fugnitto:

Dr. Louisa Moats: The body of work referred to as the “science of reading” is not an ideology, a philosophy, a political agenda, a one-size-fits-all approach, a program of instruction, nor a specific component of instruction. It is the emerging consensus from many related disciplines, based on literally thousands of studies, supported by hundreds of millions of research dollars, conducted across the world in many languages. These studies have revealed a great deal about how we learn to read, what goes wrong when students don’t learn, and what kind of instruction is most likely to work the best for the most students.

Collaborative Classroom: What is your perspective on the current national discussion about the science of reading? For example, Emily Hanford of American Public Media has done significant reporting that has really elevated the conversation.

Dr. Louisa Moats: These days I have moments when I feel more optimistic. Emily Hanford’s reports have been the catalyst sparking our current national discussion.1 A growing number of states are confronting what is wrong with the way many children are being taught to read. I’m inspired by the dialogue and courage of the people who know enough about the science of reading to offer a vigorous critique of those practices, programs, and approaches that just don’t work for most children. I am also optimistic about the recent report out from the National Council on Teacher Quality. There’s an increasing trend of new teachers being trained in the components of reading, and I think that many veteran educators are open to deepening their learning.

However, there’s still a long way to go. In general our teaching practice lags far behind what the research tells us. We consolidated the research on what it takes to teach children to read way back in the early 1990s, and yet today a majority of teachers still haven’t been given the knowledge or instruction to effectively teach children to read.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”. 

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close. 

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers. 

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Steven Elbow:

The problem, some say, is that disparities impact a population that has little political or economic clout. And white people, who control the levers of commerce and government, address only pieces of an interconnected web of issues that include child development, education, economics and criminal justice.

Brandi Grayson co-founded Young, Gifted and Black and now runs Urban Triage, an organization that provides educational support, teaches parenting skills and promotes wellness to help black families become self-sufficient.

She said elimination of racial disparities would require a seismic shift in attitude throughout society, which would take years, maybe generations. In the meantime, she said, government has to enact policies that enforce equitable treatment of people in housing, health care, education, employment and criminal justice.

David Blaska:

What’s Madison’s answer?

Teaching responsibility instead of victimhood? Demanding performance, not excuses? 

ARE YOU KIDDING? !!! This is Madison, where the answers are: More money, more baffling programs, more guilt, rinse and repeat. The Capital Times reports:

County officials and local nonprofits are hoping to reverse the trend with a new program that provides intensive mentoring for youthful offenders, which showed promise during a pilot program last year.

At $250,000 from the United Way and $100,000 from the county, the program would serve up to 49 kids — that’s $7,000 a kid for those who didn’t take math. As for the Policy Werkes, we’re siding with a neighbor who ventured, on social media:

If it isn’t stray bullets it is out-of-control 4,000-pound missiles. Next time you vote, consider how many chances a particular judge tends to give juveniles before applying the maximum extent of the law or creatively applies a deterrent.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”. 

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close. 

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers. 

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Billy Binion:

This isn’t the first time that AOC has inadvertently made the case for school choice. At an October rally for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), she shared that her family left the Bronx for a house in Westchester county, so that she could attend a higher-quality school. “My family made a really hard decision,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “That’s when I got my first taste of a country who allows their kids’ destiny to be determined by the zip code they are born in.” 

The congresswoman has correctly diagnosed the problem. Whether or not a student is able to attend a decent public school too often turns on the neighborhood he or she happens to grow up in. It’s a reality that briefly dominated the national conversation during the recent college admissions scandal, which saw wealthy celebrities paying to have their children receive rigged acceptances to elite universities. Comparisons were immediately drawn to the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar, who received a five-year prison sentence for using her father’s address to ensure that her children could attend the superior elementary and middle schools nearby.

As AOC recognized in her speech at the Sanders rally, such a dilemma is only possible when the system hinges on a zip code. But isn’t that a problem that school choice can help fix?

If her experience is any guide, the congresswoman should say yes. But school choice has become strangely polarizing in recent years, as many Democratic leaders forcefully repudiate charters.

A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school (2011).

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Jon Levine:

Good for me, but not for thee.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez managed to get her goddaughter into a Bronx charter school, according to a Facebook Live video she recorded in 2017 — before she was a public figure.

“This area’s like a lot of where my family is from,” AOC says as she strolls along Hunts Point Avenue in the Bronx. “My goddaughter, I got her into a charter school like maybe a block or two down.”

It’s unclear exactly how Ocasio-Cortez managed to finagle the favor for her goddaughter, or which school she attended. There are at least five — including South Bronx Classical Charter School I and Bronx Charter School for the Arts — within walking distance of the Hunts Point subway station where the video cuts out.

Reps for AOC did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Embracing charters would be a big no-no for Ocasio-Cortez’s Democratic socialist base, which calls for the total abolition of charters, arguing that their existence hurts traditional public schools.

“Charter schools act as tools for privatizing education and weakening the power of unionized teachers,” the party says in its New York City platform, which called for ending “the creation of new charter schools, [banning] the expansion of existing charter schools, and transform[ing] existing charter schools into public schools.”

Though Ocasio-Cortez has frequently talked about how her own family fled the Bronx to avoid the borough’s failing public schools, she has also publicly stood in total lockstep with anti-charter advocates.

2011: A majority of the Madison school board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter School.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Alan Borsuk:

Notre Dame School of Milwaukee opened on Milwaukee’s south side in 1996 with a student body of 26 middle school girls.   

It grew steadily — 90 students in 2001, 130 in 2006, 201 in 2012. It added co-ed elementary grades and a middle school for boys, as well as a second building.   

It now has 535 students, a five-star (“significantly exceeds expectations”) state report card, and a lot of construction equipment in what was previously a paved area adjacent to its building at West Greenfield Avenue and South Layton Boulevard as it builds a $7 million addition.  

Three blocks from that Notre Dame building is Nativity Jesuit School. It opened with 14 middle school boys in 1993 and grew within several years to about 60. In recent years, its enrollment has quadrupled to 252, including boys and girls in elementary grades. It also has a five-star report card and it recently completed $3 million in improvements. 

And in four buildings on the south side, there are Carmen charter schools with about 1,400 students in kindergarten through 12th grade (plus another 663 at a northwest side Carmen school). The first Carmen school, which opened in 2007, got a five-star report card this year for the second year in a row. 

Milwaukee parents and students have extensive school options.

Madison’s taxpayer funded K-12 school district has long resisted school choice, rejecting the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School (2011) and lobbying against a proposed University of Wisconsin system charter school (2019).

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Laura Waters:

On New Year’s Eve The Nation published an analysis by Jennifer Berkshire called “The Democrats’ School Choice Problem.” Her piece is instructive because it illustrates a strategy commonly employed by those who regard themselves as warriors against craven privatizing shysters intent on expanding charter schools and/or voucher programs. This is how it works: Ignore context. Ignore math. Ignore inconvenient facts. And hustle together a specious I argument that plays to those who —perhaps responding to the Trumpian lurch to the right by Republican Party leaders in D.C. —believe that the only way to retain decency and moral order is by careening just as far to the left, which seems to me a surefire way to guarantee Trump a second term. (Not sure what these directions mean anyway. Since when is limiting public school choice, which primarily benefits low-income children of color, a value of left-wingers? Since when is it a violation of Democratic Party loyalty to want better schools for your kids?)

To unknowing readers (which apparently includes The Nation’s fact-checking department) Berkshire’s argument, as context and fact-free as it is, holds power. So let’s demystify the mystique and look at some of the ways that Berkshire makes her argument that the Democratic pro-choice coalition is “unraveling” and that no choice is the right choice.

First, to give credit where credit is due, Berkshire  begins with the recent AFT/NEA “school choice forum” last month in Pittsburgh where seven candidates begged for union money and endorsement. She notes that the invitation-only audience was greeted by a Black mother affiliated with the Working Families Party (closely tied in agenda and funding with AFT/NEA) while 250 Black mothers (she says 100 but who’s counting) stood in a cold rain because they were locked out of the “public forum” for wanting quality schools for their children even if they can’t afford to live in Gloucester. (See here.) Why were they outside in the rain? Because the candidates, with the sole exception of Mike Bennett, refused to walk down the block and meet with them in a hotel room paid for by a GoFundMe campaign. Inside, audience members wore “F*%k Charter Schools” tee-shirts.

Madison’s taxpayer supported K – 12 school district has resisted school and parental choice.

A majority of the school board rejected the proposed Madison preparatory Academy ib charter school in 2011.

Madison taxpayers have long spent far more than most K-12 school districts, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction “DPI”, lead for many years by new Governor Tony Evers, has waived thousands of elementary reading teacher content knowledge requirements. This, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Chan Stroman tracks the frequent Foundations of Reading (FoRT) mulligans:

Yet the statutory FoRT requirement is now deemed satisfied by “attempts” to pass pic.twitter.com/xSS0lxgo8g

— Chan Stroman (@eduphilia) March 28, 2019

Contrary to what was represented to @usedgov in the approved state ESSA plan pic.twitter.com/fuNKxlc0Q7

— Chan Stroman (@eduphilia) March 28, 2019

DPI Rhetoric: “We set a high bar for achievement”.

Wisconsin DPI efforts to weaken the Foundations of Reading Test for elementary teachers

Foundations of Reading Elementary Reading Teacher Exam Results.

December, 2018: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2013: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

2011: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges.

K-12 attempts to address learning include the implementation – and abandonment – of “one size fits all” courses, such as English 10 and “small learning communities“.

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine” – NOT!.

2005: Lowering the bar – When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

Yet, spending continues to grow, substantially. Governor Evers has proposed a double digit increase in K-12 tax and spending for the next two years. Once in a great while, a courageous soul dives in and evaluates spending effectiveness: a proposed (not heard from again) Madison maintenance referendum audit.

“Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” – Former Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School. Curiously, former school board member Ed Hughes, who voted against Madison Prep, is supporting Kaleem Caire for school board, 8 years hence. Yet, how many students have we failed as time marches on?

Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results:

Of the 65 students plus or minus it kind of changes this year 24 of them are regular ed students.

Another way to say they don’t have an IEP so there is no excuse for that reading intervention in (that group).

12 of those 24 have been enrolled in Madison School since Pre-K kindergarten or kindergarden. 12 students have been in Madison Schools.

They have High attendance. They have been in the same (you know) feeder school they have not had high mobility. There is no excuse for 12 of my students to be reading at the first second or third grade level and that’s where they’re at and I’m angry and I’m not the only one that’s angry.

The teachers are angry because we are being held accountable for things that we didn’t do at the high school level. Of those 24 students, 21 of them have been enrolled in Madison for four or more years.

Mulligans.

CBS News:

Our series, School Matters, features extended stories and investigations on education. In this installment, we’re looking at a lawsuit winding its way through the federal appeals process that questions whether access to literacy is a constitutional right. A federal judge in Michigan recently ruled it wasn’t when he dismissed a 2016 case. That case claimed students in some of Detroit’s lowest-performing schools were denied “access” to literacy due to poor management, discrimination and underfunding.

For years, Detroit public schools were under control of emergency managers, who were trying to lift the district out of debt. But, this case has drawn national attention because of its wide-ranging implications, possibly leading to federal changes to the education system.

March 10, 2018: The Wisconsin State Journal published “Madison high school graduation rate for black students soars”.

September 1, 2018: “how are we to understand such high minority student graduation rates in combination with such low minority student achievement?”

2005:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level”. We adopted this goal in response to recommendations from a citizen study group that believed that minority students who are not competent as readers by the end of the third grade fall behind in all academic areas after third grade.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2011: On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)

2013: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

The Simpson Street Free Press (!) digs: Are Rising MMSD Grad Rates Something to Celebrate?, and digs deeper: Madison’s ACT College Readiness Gap.

In closing, Madison spends far more than most K-12 taxpayer funded organizations.

Federal taxpayers have recently contributed to our property tax base.

Emily Hanford:

Balanced literacy was a way to defuse the wars over reading,” said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of the book “Language at the Speed of Sight.” “It succeeded in keeping the science at bay, and it allowed things to continue as before.”

He says the reading wars are over, and science lost.

Seidenberg knows of a child who was struggling so much with reading that her mother paid for a private tutor. “The tutor taught her some of the basic skills that the child wasn’t getting in her whole language classroom,” he said. “At the end of the school year the teacher was proud that the child had made so much progress, and the parent said, ‘Well, why didn’t you teach phonics and other basic skills related to print in class?’ And the teacher said ‘Oh, I did. Your child was absent that day.'”

For scientists like Seidenberg, the problem with teaching just a little bit of phonics is that according to all the research, phonics is crucial when it comes to learning how to read. Surrounding kids with good books is a great idea, but it’s not the same as teaching children to read.

Experts say that in a whole-language classroom, some kids will learn to read despite the lack of effective instruction. But without explicit and systematic phonics instruction, many children won’t ever learn to read very well.

In 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, reviewed the syllabi of teacher preparation programs across the country and found that only 39 percent of them appeared to be teaching the components of effective reading instruction.

Seidenberg says the scientific research has had relatively little impact on what happens in classrooms because the science isn’t very highly valued in schools of education. “Prospective teachers aren’t exposed to it or they’re led to believe that it’s only one of several perspectives,” he said. “In a class on reading, prospective teachers will be exposed to a menu in which they have 10 or 12 different approaches to reading, and they’re encouraged to pick the one that will fit their personal teaching style best.”

Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence, Seidenberg said. “We have to change the culture of education from one based on beliefs to one based on facts.”

Kelly Butler has been trying to do just that for nearly two decades in Mississippi.

The Wisconsin DPI, lead by Mr. Evers, has largely killed our one (!) teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading.

Related: MTEL

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2011: A Capitol conversation.

On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)

2013: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

2018: The Simpson Street Free Press (!) digs: Are Rising MMSD Grad Rates Something to Celebrate?, and digs deeper: Madison’s ACT College Readiness Gap.

The state of journalism, 2018.

Molly Beck:

But Walker and his campaign accused Evers of flip-flopping on the issue of school funding because Evers once said in an interview with WisconsinEye that improving academic outcomes for students struggling the most could still be achieved even if the state didn’t provide a significant funding increase.

Evers in the interview did say schools needed more funding overall, however.

Four years ago, Walker leveled similar criticism when he was running against another education official: Madison School Board member Mary Burke.

He blasted Burke for the Madison School District’s massive gap in academic performance between black and white students.

The Wisconsin DPI, lead by Mr. Evers, has largely killed our one (!) teacher content knowledge requirement: Foundations of Reading.

Related: MTEL

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2011: A Capitol conversation.

On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)

2013: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

2014: Wisconsin DPI Superintendent’s Task force on the Achievement Gap.

2018: The Simpson Street Free Press (!) digs: Are Rising MMSD Grad Rates Something to Celebrate?, and digs deeper: Madison’s ACT College Readiness Gap.

Wisconsin Legislative Council Committee on Dyslexia.

The state of journalism, 2018.

Jessie Opoien, has more.

Francis Turner:

The argument for public education is that it is good for society as a whole to have its children educated so that they can successfully take their place in it, contribute to it and so on. This has historically been understood to mean that we expect our children to learn the 3Rs, get some sort of idea of history/culture and then study something that helps them get a decent job and thence a house, spouse and 2.2 children. The logic behind public provision of it is that this levels the playing field and that it helps most the poorest children whose families otherwise could not afford it. Given that in the modern world there isn’t a single job that doesn’t require some literacy/numeracy the logic that says that education is a public good is quite plausible because uneducated people won’t be able to get a job and thus can’t pay taxes etc. (not to mention that in a democracy where everyone has the franchise, everyone should be able to make an informed choice).

You can now compare that theory with the actual result.

The majority of students do in fact learn to read at some minimal level. Some learn to read more, some learn to do sums in their head, but neither is guaranteed. That seems to be about it for useful results and even that minimal level is pretty poor, particularly for minorities:

Madison, 2005:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2006:

They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2011:

On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)

2013:

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

2018:

The Simpson Street Free Press (!) digs: Are Rising MMSD Grad Rates Something to Celebrate?, and digs deeper: Madison’s ACT College Readiness Gap.

Christian D’Andrea:

Several reform-minded schools have carved similar paths for I Promise to follow. The Knowledge is Power Program, better known as KIPP, has created the nation’s largest network of charter schools by catering to marginalized students with longer class hours, increasing access to teachers, and a tough but accommodating schedule for students. Rocketship Public Schools, another non-profit charter program with schools in California, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Washington D.C., operates with a similarly non-traditional classroom. Rocketship emphasizes a STEM-based curriculum while bringing a student’s home life into the classroom and continuing learning outside regular class hours. Both take aim at reducing the achievement gap between low-income students and their peers.

It’s still early, but reports from I Promise suggest the school will address Akron’s achievement gap by running similar reforms as other successful national programs. It does not go as far as KIPP or Rocketship in those charges, but it’s clear I Promise is designed to operate at a level beyond the typical public school by creating a more comprehensive experience for students, not just one that begins at 7 a.m. and ends at 2 p.m.

I Promise is a regular public school, not a charter or a voucher-receiving private school
This kind of wide reform is rare to see at a traditional neighborhood school. KIPP and Rocketship schools have been successful in larger cities across the nation, but typically operate outside the purview of their local school boards as charter schools. Several private schools, like Milwaukee’s St. Marcus Lutheran Schools or Philadelphia’s Gesu School, have instituted reforms like these while enrolling students using publicly-funded vouchers or tax-credit scholarships.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

We have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

One City Schools, via a kind Kaleem Caire email:

On Monday May 7, the Pahara and Aspen Institutes announced a new class of leaders that were selected to participate in the distinguished Pahara-Aspen Education Fellowship. One City’s Founder and CEO, Kaleem Caire, will join 23 other leaders in this highly prized two-year fellowship program.

The Pahara-Aspen Education Fellowship is a two-year, cohort-based program that identifies exceptional leaders in the educational excellence and equity movement, facilitates their dynamic growth, and strengthens their collective efforts to dramatically improve public schools, especially those serving low-income children and communities.

The Fellowship is a partnership between the Pahara and Aspen Institutes. The Aspen Institute has created a leadership development model through its renowned Henry Crown Fellowship program, which focuses on inspiring Fellows to make a lasting difference in their spheres of influence through the application of effective and enlightened leadership. Pahara-Aspen Fellows become part of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, which currently includes more than 2,500 Fellows from over 50 countries who are collectively making tremendous positive change in the world. Click here to review the full press release and learn more about the Pahara-Aspen Fellowship.

Donna Hurd and Joseph Krupp to Lead One City’s Board of Directors

At its annual retreat on May 5, 2018, One City’s Board of Directors elected Madison business and civic leaders Donna Hurd and Joe Krupp to lead the Board. Donna will serve a two-year term as One City’s Board Chair and Joseph Krupp will serve a two-year term as Vice Chair. Torrey Jaeckle of Jaeckle Distributors, was also elected to continue as Board Treasurer.

Donna has served as the Director of Administration for Perkins Coie LLP since September 2013, where she manages the Madison Office, supervises all non-attorney staff, maintains positive contact with internal and external clients and is responsible for the fiscal management of the office. Prior to Perkins Coie, Donna was the Executive Director for Boardman & Clark law firm of Madison. She currently serves as President of the Rotary Club of Madison, President of Board of the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools and is a member of the Literacy Network’s Board of Directors. Her term as Rotary President expires this summer. When she’s not volunteering her services to the community, Donna enjoys spending time with her grandchildren.

Joe is currently the owner of Prime Urban Properties, a local real estate development and management company involved in both commercial and multi-family projects. He founded Krupp General Contractors in 1976 and served as the CEO for 35 years until retirement in 2006. In addition, Joe is a founding partner in the local restaurant group Food Fight Inc. and continues to serve on its Board of Directors. He is also a proud University of Wisconsin-Madison alum who has been active in industry organizations and has served on numerous community boards of directors. He and his wife Diana Grove were early supporters of One City’s first capital campaign and he served as the campaign’s co-chair.

Torrey is vice president and co-owner of Jaeckle Distributors, a business started by his grandfather in 1958. Jaeckle Distributors is based in Madison and employees 115 people (50 in Dane County), with branches in Minneapolis, Chicago and St. Louis. They distribute floor coverings and countertop surfacing materials throughout the Midwest to floor covering retailers, contractors, and countertop fabricators.

Torrey is a native Madisonian. He attended Edgewood High School and later the University of Wisconsin Madison where he received his BBA in Finance and Marketing in 1995. After college, he joined his family’s business. He and his brother now run the business full time and are the third generation of Jaeckles to lead the company. For six years, Torrey served on the board of the North American Association of Floor Covering Distributors, holding the position of president in 2016. On a personal level, Mr. Jaeckle first and foremost enjoys spending time with his wife Stephanie and their two daughters. He also enjoys the outdoors, reading, writing, his hometown and state sports teams, and playing poker.

Click here for more information on One City’s Board of Directors.

Notes and links:

One City Schools

Kaleem Caire

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Via a kind email:

Dear Friends.

Last night, we learned that our application to establish One City Senior Preschool as a public charter school serving children in 4 year-old and 5 year-old kindergarten was approved by the University of Wisconsin System. We are very excited! This action will enable us to offer a high quality, tuition-free education to young children living in Dane County that prepares them for school success prior to beginning first grade.

We currently offer an exciting and proven curriculum that emphasizes early reading and math literacy development, creativity, and STEM learning through play. Our program features a full-time chef, healthy meals program, field trips, Family Perks, great partnerships, and a diverse and highly qualified staff. Beginning in the summer of 2018, we will implement our new co-curricular Sports and Fitness Program for children enrolled in our school. As a year-round preschool, our program will include fun summer, fall, winter and spring sports and fitness learning and activities.

We have other exciting news to share with you this month, too. Please look out for this, along with information about our staff hiring and enrollment for 2018-19 school year.

Stay tuned!

Kaleem Caire
Founder & CEO

Beginning September 1, 2018, One City will operate two different preschools in our current facility: One City Junior Preschool for children ages 1 to 3 and One City Senior Preschool for children ages 4 and 5. We will offer two 4K classrooms and two kindergarten (5K) classrooms.

Our Senior Preschool will be tuition-free while our Junior Preschool will continue to offer scholarships to families who need assistance with paying our lower than average weekly tuition rates. Wisconsin currently does not offer per-pupil funding for public school children younger than age 4, so families must continue to pay tuition for children ages 3 and younger.

Why two schools? We were required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to create a separate school to receive state-funded tuition aid for our 4K/5K charter school.

Because we will operate two different schools, we are changing our name from “One City Early Learning Centers, Incorporated” to “One City Schools, Incorporated”. We will begin using the new name on March 1, 2018.

In the mean time, we look forward to working with the Madison Metropolitan School District, University of Wisconsin System and its campuses, Edgewood College and other partners to expand educational access and opportunities for children in our city and region.

Much more about One City Early Learning Centers, here.

Kaleem Caire

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, and more recently the Montessori charter school.

Christine Campbell, Georgia Heyward, and Betheny Gross, via a kind email:

As school choice evolves in cities across the country, the heated debate among advocates and critics is too often disconnected from the reality for families. CRPE’s new report goes beyond the rhetoric to provide evidence about how public school choice is playing out in 18 cities, including Atlanta, Cleveland, Oakland, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.

Drawing on school performance data; interviews with district, charter, and community leaders; and a survey of parents, researchers looked across both district and charter schools to examine student and school outcomes and recent reform strategies. The cross-city analysis, Stepping Up: How Are American Cities Delivering on the Promise of Public School Choice? addresses three questions: Is the city’s education system continuously improving? Do all students have access to a high-quality education? Is the education strategy responsive to community needs?

Locally, Madison lacks K-12 governance diversity, recently rejecting the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

Office of Educational Opportunity (PDF):

Identifying Information

Name of Organization:

Year Founded:

Revised 5/31/2017, 11:30 a.m.

Recovery School Request for Proposal

First and Last Name of Primary Applicant:

Mailing Address:
Preferred E-Mail Address
Preferred Phone Number:

Attach the names, professional affiliation, and role in the proposed school for all school leaders and board members.

Summarize the purpose and brief history of the organization. (For instance, is this a new non profit created for this proposed school, or is it an existing nonprofit seeking to expand or replicate its portfolio?)

Evidence of Incorporation in Wisconsin and IRS status

Organizational Background

Do you currently operate a school, if yes where for how long and how is it operated (public district, private, other)?

Is your proposal a fresh start campus, replication campus, or a conversion campus?

If it is a conversion campus, why are you seeking to reorganize your operations into a public charter school?

Have you applied for charter status before? If yes with what authorizer, what was the outcome, and what reasons were given for the outcome?
May we contact the authorizer to discuss your prior application?

Much more on Gary Bennett’s Wisconsin – non traditional government school district – charter school authorizing body.

Related: A majority of the Madison School rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School. Also rejected: the Studio School.

This University of Wisconsin system office has the authority to authorize Charter schools in Madison and Milwaukee.

Despite spending more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Note that charter and voucher schools must operate on less than half of Madison’s per student spending. They receive only redistributed state tax dollars, nothing from local property taxes or other typical government sources.

Molly Beck:

The office’s first charter school will be one aimed at helping teenagers recover from drug abuse, which was created by legislation passed this year. It will likely open next year.

Two UW System schools and other entities can now create charter schools throughout the state. The Senate budget would let Bennett’s office, any System college and any Technical College District Board authorize charter schools statewide.

The proposal also gives the UW Board of Regents oversight over donations given to Bennett’s office and how they are spent.

Stephanie Marquis, spokeswoman for the UW System, said UW officials “continually look for ways to expand educational opportunities across Wisconsin, and the proposal would empower the (office) to be a part of our statewide (services to) Wisconsin students, families and communities

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison preparatory academy IB charter school.

Entique Dans:

Society’s approach to the relationship between men and robots, taking the definition of robot as broadly as possible, tends to be somewhat apocalyptic: robots will steal our jobs and create a dysfunctional society where manual labor and tasks of little added value or the three Ds have been replaced: in short, a largely negative vision of the future.

And then of course there are those people who still ask whether we are really in the midst of a process of replacing people with robots? Of course we are. In fact, robots have been taking work away from people for many years.

Madison has continued to support non diverse K-12 governance despite long term, disastrous reading results and spending more than most, now around $18,000 per student.

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison preparatory academy IB charter school and the studio school.

Graham Vyse:

Black History Month began Wednesday, and this year’s theme is “The Crisis in Black Education.” According to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the group that founded BHM—this crisis “has grown significantly in urban neighborhoods where public schools lack resources, endure overcrowding, exhibit a racial achievement gap, and confront policies that fail to deliver substantive opportunities.”

President Barack Obama championed these publicly funded but independently run schools, whose promise is that freedom from traditional bureaucratic regulation will allow educators to innovate, thus improving student outcomes. Unlike vouchers—essentially publicly funded passes for select students to attend private school, which Democrats typically oppose—charters are a public form of “school choice” that enjoys bipartisan support. In particular, supporters see them as a lifeline to poor and minority families; most are located in urban and other low-income areas across the country.

But the charter movement was dealt a devastating blow last year when both the NAACP and the Black Lives Matter–aligned Movement for Black Lives called for a moratorium on these schools. With its resolution, the NAACP listed four conditions under which the nation’s oldest civil rights group would support further charter proliferation:

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School several years ago.

Emily Deruy:

When states raise the number of math classes they require students to take in high school, black students complete more math coursework—and boost their earnings as a result. That’s the topline takeaway from new research by Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

To understand the results, it’s helpful to have a little background. During the 1980s, a now-famous report called “A Nation at Risk” by Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education opened this way:

Related: a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Doug Erickson:

The Madison School Board is poised to vote Monday on whether to create its first public Montessori charter school, a decision that appears to hinge on the level of risk board members are willing to accept.

The district’s charter review committee says it cannot recommend approval of the proposal from Isthmus Montessori Academy because the plan falls short in key areas. But the board could decide the shortcomings are fixable and not major enough to derail the effort.

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham has raised another possibility. If board members want to go forward with the proposal, she is recommending that implementation be delayed until the 2018-19 school year. That would provide more time to address remaining issues.

Melissa Droessler, a co-founder of the Montessori school, said delaying implementation by a year would be disappointing but not a deal-breaker, as long as the district kept negotiating in good faith.

Isthmus Montessori Academy (IMA), 1402 Pankratz St., is a private, nonprofit school founded in 2012 that wants to become part of the district. It is attempting to do that through the district’s charter application process, which was revised last year to be more rigorous.

Under the new process, if an applicant receives a “fails to meet expectations” rating in even one of 15 areas, the district’s charter review committee will not recommend it. The IMA proposal fails to meet the district’s expectations in four areas, including in its approach to budgeting, staffing and measuring academic growth.

However, School Board President James Howard questioned the rubric used by the district to evaluate applications, saying it “seems to be subjective” and that perhaps the threshold is too high.

Related: a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

Thomas Sowell

The one bright spot in black ghettos around the country are the schools that parents are free to choose for their own children. Some are Catholic schools, some are secular private schools and some are charter schools financed by public school systems but operating without the suffocating rules that apply to other public schools.

Not all of these kinds of schools are successes. But where there are academic successes in black ghettos, they come disproportionately from schools outside the iron grip of the education establishment and the teachers’ unions.

Some of these academic successes have been spectacular — especially among students in ghetto schools operated by the KIPP (Knowledge IS Power Program) chain of schools and the Success Academy schools.

Despite all the dire social problems in many black ghettos across the country — problems which are used to excuse widespread academic failures in ghetto schools — somehow ghetto schools run by KIPP and Success Academy turn out students whose academic performances match or exceed the performances in suburban schools whose kids come from high-income families.

A majority of the Madison school board voted to abort the proposed Madison preparatory Academy IB charter school.

Citizen Stewart:

Most Black families support charter schools, not because they are duped or privatizers, but because many see their neighborhood schools, and know their children need better options. I know, because I saw it first hand in West Oakland, struggling to get my brother the education he deserved, in a system that didn’t treat him with concern or respect.

I never intended to be the charter guy, it just happened. It all started when I went to my brother “johnny’s” school in West Oakland.

When schools disrespect you

“The teacher made fun of my mama” my little brother said, restraining his sobs.

I would help Johnny with his homework if I was around, but I was in law school and out a lot. If his mom couldn’t help him, I told him to just tell the teacher he couldn’t do the homework and needed help.

A majority if the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, among others.

Erica Green:

Seven years ago 120 girls bedecked in purple polo shirts and plaid skirts walked into an experiment — a Baltimore public school modeled on those originally designed for affluent white girls whose families could afford to send them to “finishing school.”

On Friday, half of those girls, all but one of them African-American and most from working-class families, will don white robes to make history as the first graduating class of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, the city’s first all-female, public middle-high school.

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school. This, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

John King:

But there are still so many young people out there like me, children whose paths to school have been marked by burdens no young person should have to bear. We owe it to those children to make school for them what it was for me.

That’s why I feel such urgency about the work of education. That’s what led me to help found a school and then a school network. And it’s what drove me in my tenure as the Deputy Commissioner and then Commissioner of Education in New York State.
Roxbury Prep, the first school I co-founded, and one that is filled with young people from backgrounds like mine, became one of the highest-performing urban middle schools in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Uncommon Schools network that my colleagues and I created now includes nearly fifty high-performing urban schools, and impacts the lives of thousands of low-income students every day. And as a result of my tenure in Albany, I am proud to say that New York is now a

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school serval years ago. This, despite the government funded schools’ long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Alan Borsuk:

Until Thursday evening, I never dreamed I would write a “profiles in courage” piece about Wendell Harris. I apologize, Wendell. You earned it, and here it is.

Of course, an example of political courage can also be seen as an example of betrayal and broken promises. Harris will get those reactions, too. I assume he burned just about every political bridge he had when he voted for the proposal to put a Carmen high school program in the Pulaski High School building on Milwaukee’s south side.

Electrifying is a word I believe I have never used to describe a Milwaukee School Board meeting until now.

But the stakes Thursday night were high, the outcome uncertain, and the tension in the room palpable enough to lead Milwaukee Public Schools officials to bring in extra security. The proposal became an intense battle between supporters of conventional public schools and supporters of independent charter schools.

Deciding the issue meant making a statement about what kind of change is going to fly or not fly in MPS.

Carmen has two high-expectations charter schools in Milwaukee, operating under authorization of the School Board but employing its own teachers and its own education plans. Pulaski is a venerable, large high school with declining enrollment and low achievement. Its new principal, Lolita Patrick, supports the Carmen-Pulaski plan as a path to change.

If they won, advocates of the “partnership” plan would undertake the ambitious, but very difficult pursuit of a vision of these two schools creating excellence together in the same building.

More, here.

Meanwhile, Madison continues its one size fits all government schools model, most recently rejecting the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school, despite long term disastrous reading results.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

We had a great time at our campaign kick-off event for One City Early Learning Centers at the CUNA Mutual Conference Center on March 6! More than 350 friends and champions for children joined us on a Friday night to learn about our plans to raise $1.4 million to establish a new type of preschool in the Madison area.

One City will take a two-generation community impact approach to providing young children with the learning and developmental experiences they need to become compassionate and high potential learners, leaders and students in school and life, and to be reading-ready by the time they reach kindergarten.

Attendees learned about our three strategic priorities:

1. Empowered and Happy Children
2. Strong and Happy Families, and
3. Healthy and Resource-Filled Neighborhoods

We shared our educational approach and plans for establishing One City’s Parent University and Family Resource Network. We highlighted the partnerships we are developing to support strong families and cultivate talented and successful children. We also shared how One City will be an active partner in efforts to continue the revitalization of South Madison. We want to ensure that children in our neighborhood and preschool are raised in safe, sustainable and enriching environments, and that parents have access to high quality, affordable and accessible early education opportunities for their children while they work and continue their education.

Additionally, Forward Community Investments announced their purchase of the South Madison Day Care facility for One City. This marks the first time FCI has purchased property and made such an investment in their 19-year history. The details of this unique partnership inspired everyone in attendance and we raised $40,126 towards our goal that night!

Thank you for your support, encouragement and partnership. We appreciate you! We also thank and appreciate CUNA Mutual Group Foundation, Forward Community Investments and Urban Assets Consulting for hosting and supporting the event, and supporting the launch of One City.

Building the Bridge to a Bright Future for Kids.

Onward.

Kaleem Caire
Founder, President & CEO
kcaire@onecityearlylearning.org
Phone: 608.268.8004

LEARN MORE

To take a virtual tour of our preschool (pre-renovation), which is located at 2012 Fisher Street on Madison’s South Side, click here.

To view photographs of our kick-off event, click here. As Dr. Frank Byrne, the recently retired president of St. Mary’s Hospital noted, “One City was here in this room this evening. It was beautiful.”

To review and download the PowerPoint presentation we gave at the kick-off event, and that many in attendance expressed an interest in obtaining, click here. To arrange a presentation, please contact Quinn Heneghan at quinn@urbanassetsconsulting.com or 608.819.6566.

To view a list of our early supporters, our Bridge Builders, click here.

Give what you can. We’ve had investors contribute $10, $10,000 and $50,000. We want as many people, businesses and institutions to contribute as possible so we can (a) achieve our fundraising goal, (b) get our school opened by September 1, 2015 and (c) live out the meaning and intent of our name – One City coming together to invest in the potential and future of its children.

To make your tax-deductible investment in One City and join our list of Bridge Builders – click here. You can also download and complete our pledge form by clicking here and mailing it along with your contribution (payable to One City Early Learning) to:

One City Early Learning Centers
c/o Scholz Nonprofit Law
16 North Carroll Street, Suite 530
Madison, WI 53703
Phone: 608.268.0076

Related:

Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Kaleem Caire attempted to create the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School. Unfortunately, it was rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.

Tutankhamun Assad, via a kind reader:

I am a blue collar African-American man and the proud father of two black boys. I enjoyed reading the Rev. Alex Gee’s eloquent piece about racial disparities, and the many spot-on articles that have followed. While fully appreciating the concern exhibited by the white community for these very real issues, I have to ask: What is the role of the African-American community in these racial disparities? Are we enabling the drivers of disparity by lowering our own expectations? Where is the honest conversation about our accountability in helping reduce those disparities?

I attended many of the disparity meetings and noticed one glaring omission: the secret truths we as African-Americans understand about what is oppressing our culture and our refusal to discuss what we do to sabotage our own cultural advancement. We fully expect transparency and accountability from white Madison, so why can’t we be honest with ourselves? For instance, while we expect many things from the school system — and it is glaringly obvious it is failing us — it should be equally obvious that we are failing ourselves. We are sending children out of the house who are not prepared to survive, much less thrive.

The African-American community needs to talk about three topics that have not been addressed: 1. The public demeanor of our youth. Too often black adults see disgraceful behavior exhibited by our children and we simply stand by and allow it to continue. In malls, schools, at sports functions, or in any public place, our children often are not conducting themselves as if we have taught them how to behave. We must admit this and acknowledge that we are responsible for said behavior. How many of us have challenged kids about their behavior? Then again, when a responsible adult talks to us about our children’s actions, we respond with this: “You talk to me, not my kid!” Well, where were you when your kid was acting out? We want the whole community to baby-sit our kids, but then we get mad when someone attempts to functionally act as a parent. Far too frequently we sabotage positive African-American role models in our communities, all the while genuflecting to the white power elite.

Related: The proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.

Dave Zweifel:

Lafer’s report details how Rocketship teaches only basics like reading and math with “live” teachers, while the rest of the curriculum is taught online. There are no art, music or gym classes.

The teachers are recent education school grads who have volunteered for a couple of years with Teach for America, a private national program that was modeled after the Peace Corps, but aimed at American schools in poor and troubled neighborhoods.

Like many recently formed charter school companies, Rocketship uses the savings from its educational model to expand its schools throughout the country. Meanwhile, one of its directors runs a for-profit company that provides thousands of educational materials to the schools.

Indeed, it’s these kind of behind-the-scenes financial relationships that have raised eyebrows throughout the educational community.

To be sure, charter schools can be public schools if the school districts set them up to be accountable to the board and administrators. Madison has established three such charters — Wright Middle School, Badger Rock and Nuestro Mundo — that appear to have had good results experimenting with different educational methods and providing a different academic focus.

Related: The rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

Center for Research on Education Outcomes (PDF):

Across the country, charter schools occupy a growing position in the public education landscape. Heated debate has accompanied their existence since their start in Minnesota two decades ago. Similar debate has occurred in California, particularly in Los Angeles, with charter advocates extolling such benefits of the sector as expanding parental choice and introducing market-based competition to education. Little of that debate, however, is grounded in hard evidence about their impact on student outcomes. This report contributes to the discussion by providing evidence for charter students’ performance in Los Angeles for four years of schooling, beginning with the 2008-2009 school year and concluding in 2011-2012.

With the cooperation of the California Department of Education (CDE), CREDO obtained the historical sets of student-level administrative records. The support of CDE staff was critical to CREDO’s understanding of the character and quality of the data we received. However, it bears mention that the entirety of interactions with CDE dealt with technical issues related to the data. CREDO has developed the findings and conclusions independently.

This report provides an in-depth examination of the results for charter schools physically located within the Los Angeles Unified School District boundary. It is the first separate analysis by CREDO of the performance of Los Angeles’ charter schools. However, charter schools in Los Angeles were included in the CREDO report on all California charter schools, which can be found on our website.1 This report has two main benefits. First, it provides a rigorous and independent view of the performance of the city’s charter schools. Second, the study design is consistent with CREDO’s reports on charter school performance in other locations, making the results amenable to being benchmarked against those nationally and in other states and cities.

The analysis presented here takes two forms. We first present the findings about the effects of charter schools on student academic performance. These results are expressed in terms of the academic progress that a typical charter school student in Los Angeles would realize from a year of enrollment in a charter school. The second set of findings is presented at the school level. Because schools are the instruments on which the legislation and public policy operate, it is important to understand the range of performance for the schools. These findings look at the performance of students by school and present school average results.

Compared to the educational gains that charter students might have had in a traditional public school (TPS), the analysis shows that in a year’s time, on average, students in Los Angeles charter schools make larger learning gains in reading and mathematics. Results for Hispanic charter students, especially Hispanic students in poverty, are particularly notable. At the school level, we compare the average performance over two growth periods to the average results for the school’s control group. The results in Los Angeles are among the strongest observed in any of the previous CREDO studies. Larger shares of schools outperform their local market in reading and math than was reported in the national study that was released in 2013.2

Meanwhile, a majority of Madison School Board members rejected the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school a few years ago. The traditional – Frederick Taylor -, non diverse governance model remains well entrenched here.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

This will be my final report to the community as the president & CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison. Today, former Madison Police Chief Noble Wray will take over as the interim leader of this great organization and I will spend the remainder of this month supporting his transition, ironing out my new path, drinking these wonderful green smoothies and enjoying more frequent trips to the gym and bike rides around town.

We have accomplished a great deal since I joined the organization on March 29, 2010. We increased the size, diversity and strength of our staff to meet increased community needs, invested more in their professional growth and development of our team members than ever before, and improved their compensation to be more consistent with the market rate for their positions. We also provided full-time employment to five team members who completed our job training programs.

Highlights of our other accomplishments:
Increased our industry-specific, skill-based training academies from one to five, adding Customer Service & Sales, IT, Food Service and Construction Trades Academies. We continue to operate the highly regarded Health Administration Training Program (HATP) and are exploring adding academies in facilities maintenance, coding and lab tech as well.
Added the Featured Employer Program, adding 40 new employer partners in just the last 18 months who are dedicated to hiring talent through the Urban League. Since January 2010, graduates of Urban League training programs have earned more than $17.2 million in salaries and wages, and yielded more than $3.5 million in paid taxes. We’ve also grown from serving 183 adults in 2009 to 1,731 in 2013 through our four-tiered workforce development strategy.

Launched the Urban League Scholars Academy, which is presently offering an extended day high school preparatory program to 127 sixth and seventh graders attending three Madison middle schools who have academic enrichment needs.

Tutored more than 2,500 children annually in 17 middle and high schools across four Madison area school districts, utilizing more than 900 skilled volunteers; prepared more than 300 students for success on the ACT college entrance exam; and launched a partnership with the Madison Metropolitan School District to identify young men and women who’ve dropped out of school and help them complete high school, prepare for the workforce, secure jobs and continue their post-secondary education.

Created the annual Workplace Diversity & Leadership Summit, Wisconsin’s largest training ground in workplace diversity for employers and career professionals, and the Urban League Jazz Cabaret, a new annual fundraiser. To learn more about the upcoming Summit on May 9th which we are co-hosting this year with the Madison Region Economic Partnership, click here.
Completed a comprehensive analysis of the needs and aspirations of residents of three important South Madison neighborhoods and hosted several community events that have brought together hundreds of residents to celebrate and work together, and build a strong South Madison community.

Established the Urban League of Greater Madison Young Professionals Chapter which will bring together an unprecedented number of diverse young professionals at its first ever Emerge Gala on March 29, 2014. To learn more and purchase tickets, click here.

Built one of the strongest and most diverse teams and Board of Directors among nonprofits in Greater Madison, and cultivated talented leaders who are doing great things within the Urban League and other organizations they have gone on to work for and lead.

Among our greatest achievements also was our effort to establish the Madison Preparatory Academy charter schools for young men and women. Though our vision was not realized, in pushing for the school we spearheaded an unprecedented and necessary conversation about the state of education for African American and low income children that has moved a community and a school district to become more engaged and accountable than ever.

It has been an honor and a pleasure to stand on the shoulders of the Urban League leaders and team members who’ve come before me, and serve this great organization and the Greater Madison region. Thank you for all the encouragement and support you’ve shown me and our team, and thank you for all that you do for our community as well. The Urban League is poised to accomplish great things for the community for years to come.

…and don’t forget to provide your sponsorship and buy your tickets to the YP’s Emerge Gala and Economic Development, Leadership & Diversity Summit. The League can’t succeed without your financial contribution, continued active engagement, and support.

To the Future. Onward.

Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison

Much more on Kaleem Caire and the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

From today’s Wisconsin State Journal.
Two Madison School Board races are shaping up as the city’s most high-profile election contests this spring, with the board’s vote last month against a controversial charter school proposal front and center.
All four candidates who filed paperwork by Tuesday’s 5 p.m. deadline say the election is about more than Madison Preparatory Academy, the proposed single-sex charter school that was voted down by the board last month.
But they agree the issue that drove the charter school debate — raising achievement levels of low-income, minority students — will be a key issue over the next three months.
Madison last had multiple contested School Board races in 2007. In the past four years, only two of nine races were contested.
The election will be a referendum on both the district’s handling of Madison Prep and the achievement gap, said former School Board member Ray Allen, a Madison Prep supporter.
“The community has a unique opportunity,” Allen said. “They’ve got choices and they can voice their opinions.”
The achievement gap has been a critical issue for the district for the past 20 years, said former School Board member Carol Carstensen, a Madison Prep opponent. The Madison Prep debate elevated the conversation about the issue, but there are “a host of issues that you have to deal with as a School Board member.”
“You want people coming in who don’t have a set agenda, but who have principles that are important to them,” Carstensen said. “They are elected to represent the entire district ultimately.”
Other major issues include the future of the teachers union contract after it expires in 2013, school building maintenance needs, limited state funding and how to reverse the increasing number of families opting to leave the district.
Read more: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/local_schools/madison-prep-at-front-and-center-of-school-board-races/article_534767e0-367c-11e1-a2e2-0019bb2963f4.html#ixzz1iUwbMeNv
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/local_schools/madison-prep-at-front-and-center-of-school-board-races/article_534767e0-367c-11e1-a2e2-0019bb2963f4.html

Rory Linnane

St. Augustine Preparatory Academy unveiled a new $49 million elementary school on Milwaukee’s south side Tuesday, showcasing a major expansion as school leaders also discussed plans for a new north-side branch on the former Cardinal Stritch campus.

About 730 students in kindergarten through fourth grade are expected to start school this week in the new building, which can eventually hold up to 900 students as the school plans to admit more students. Across the street in the older building, about 1,100 students are expected to attend middle and high school.

With the capacity to eventually serve a combined total of about 2,400 students at both buildings on the south side, school leaders said it has become the largest single-campus school in Milwaukee.

More exciting news for #SchoolChoice in Wisconsin even as @bangstad and Minocqua Brewing seek to snuff out the opportunity for these low-income, primarily minority students to have educational options. https://t.co/u3Q0PRr5YC

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) August 23, 2023

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Dan McGowan:

When Mayor Jorge Elorza raised concerns last year about a charter school organization’s expansion plan in Providence, he had a very practical reason. He was in charge of a school system with 24,000 students, and he feared that the district would not be able to absorb the financial hit if too many students left the traditional school system for public charter schools.

Now Elorza, a Democrat who is openly considering a run for governor in 2022, is publicly supporting an even larger expansion of the Achievement First Mayoral Academy, and he has also agreed to chair the board of directors for Excel Academy, the Massachusetts-based charter school organization that wants to open a school that would eventually serve nearly 2,200 students from Providence, North Providence, and Central Falls.

The mayor’s about-face in such a short period of time would ordinarily be viewed as a stunning policy shift, but he maintains that his evolution is also a practical one. In short, the state has taken over the Providence school system, so Elorza no longer has the same worries about the district’s finances that he had a year ago.

“Not having to take into account the finances and how we’re going to balance the budget, it’s a much a different consideration for me,” Elorza told the Globe on Monday. “Now it comes down to: Are they delivering for students? And the answer is unequivocally yes.”

The Rhode Island Department of Education took control of Providence schools on Nov. 1, 2019, several months after researchers from Johns Hopkins University released a scathing report that showed widespread dysfunction with nearly every facet of the district. Elorza publicly supported the takeover, although it has been less of a partnership between the city and state than he initially envisioned.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Joanne Jacobs:

Thirty years ago, Milwaukee launched a private-school voucher program for low-income students. In 1998, when religious schools were allowed to participate, enrollment expanded.

Overall, test scores for voucher students resemble their public school counterparts. But there’s a critical difference: Voucher students are more likely to complete high school, enroll in college and earn a degree.

They’re also more likely to become law-abiding citizens, concludes a study, published in the Journal of Private Enterprise. 

Participation in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) “predicts lower rates of conviction for criminal activity and lower rates of paternity suits” by ages 25 to 28, conclude Patrick Wolf, a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas, and Corey DeAngelis of the Reason Foundation. “Exposure to the MPCP is associated with a reduction of around 53 percent in drug convictions, 86 percent in property damage convictions, and 38 percent in paternity suits,” Wolf and DeAngelis found.

Effects tend to be “largest for males and students with lower levels of academic achievement at baseline.”

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board voted to abort the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Avi Wolfman-Arent:

The small parent rebellion forming in one of Pennsylvania’s wealthiest school districts began at a Starbucks in suburban Chester County.

Over coffee, three moms — Kate Mayer, Jamie Lynch, and Wendy Brooks — swapped stories about how their kids struggled to read as they moved through the Tredyffrin/Easttown school district, located about 30 minutes west of Philadelphia on the Main Line.

They decided to start a local awareness campaign, beginning with an event where they passed out flyers and donuts to teachers. It seemed as benign as a bake sale.

That was a little less than two years ago.

Today, their group, “Everyone Reads T/E,” pushes a more subversive idea: that their acclaimed district doesn’t know how to teach reading. They’ve rallied a growing group of parents around this notion, and joined a national effort.

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques on Madison’s disastrous reading results:

Children who are not proficient readers by fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of school. Additionally, two-thirds of them will end up in prison or on welfare.

Though these dismal trajectories are well known, Madison School District’s reading scores for minority students remain unconscionably low and flat. According to the most recent data from 2017-18, fewer than 9 percent of black and fewer than 20 percent of Hispanic fourth graders were reading proficiently. Year after year, we fail these students in the most basic of our responsibilities to them: teaching them how to read.

Much is known about the process of learning to read, but a huge gap is between that knowledge and what is practiced in our schools. The Madison School District needs a science-based literacy curriculum overseen by licensed reading professionals who understand the cognitive processes that underlie learning how to read.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

Routing around Madison’s non-diverse K-12 legacy governance model:

In March 2016, Cheatham said that it was her intent to make OEO “obsolete — that our schools will be serving students so well that there isn’t a need.”

Since then, the district has tried to keep tabs on any new charter proposals for Madison, going so far as to send former School Board member Ed Hughes to a September meeting of the Goodman Community Center board of directors to express the district’s opposition to another proposed charter school, Arbor Community School, which was looking to partner with the Goodman center.

Hughes gave the board a letter from Cheatham to UW System President Ray Cross that expressed the district’s dismay at allegedly being kept out of the loop on Arbor’s plans, pointed to alleged deficiencies in Arbor’s charter proposal, and asked that Arbor either be rejected or at least kept out of Madison.

Hughes also told the board that as a Goodman donor, he did not think other donors would look kindly on a Goodman partnership with Arbor.

Becky Steinhoff, Goodman executive director, later told the Wisconsin State Journal that Goodman was “experiencing a period of enormous change,” including the recent opening of a new building, and chose not to work with Arbor.

“I understand the climate and the polarizing topic of charters” in Madison, McCabe said, but he wasn’t concerned the district would attempt to thwart Milestone and he said it would “be a dream come true” if Milestone were one day folded into the district.

He said Community—Learning—Design has an application due to the state Feb. 22 for a federal planning grant.

Much more on our 2019 school board election:

Seat 3

Kaleem Caire, 7856 Wood Reed Drive, Madison

Cristiana Carusi, 5709 Bittersweet Place

Skylar Croy, 502 N. Frances St., Madison

Seat 4

David Blaska, 5213 Loruth Terrace, Madison

Laila Borokhim, 2214 Monroe St., Madison

Albert Bryan, 4302 Hillcrest Drive, Madison

Ali Muldrow, 1966 East Main St., Madison

Seat 5

TJ Mertz, 1210 Gilson St., Madison

Ananda Mirilli, 1027 S. Sunnyvale Lane Unit A, Madison

Amos Roe, 5705 Crabapple Lane, Madison

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Sarah Manski and Ed Hughes “withdrew” from their respective races in recent elections. The timing, in both cases was unfortunate for voters, and other candidates.

Erin Hinrichs:

“Minnesota has a state of emergency regarding literacy. I’m very disappointed with where we’re at right now with the persistent reading success gap between white students and students of color,” he said Wednesday. “We are not making adequate progress, and the future of tens of thousands of our students is seriously at risk if we don’t address this.”

Third-grade reading skills are a critical benchmark for students’ future success. By the end of third grade, they should have the literacy skills they need to transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
Yet according to the latest state assessments, only 56 percent of fourth-graders tested proficient in reading. That number has remained relatively flat for years. Broken down by race and special status, the proficiency rates are even more alarming: Minnesota now has the widest gap in reading scores between white and nonwhite students in the nation. Only 32 percent of black fourth-graders and 34 percent of Hispanic fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared to 66 percent of white fourth-graders.

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques on Madison’s disastrous reading results:

Children who are not proficient readers by fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of school. Additionally, two-thirds of them will end up in prison or on welfare.

Though these dismal trajectories are well known, Madison School District’s reading scores for minority students remain unconscionably low and flat. According to the most recent data from 2017-18, fewer than 9 percent of black and fewer than 20 percent of Hispanic fourth graders were reading proficiently. Year after year, we fail these students in the most basic of our responsibilities to them: teaching them how to read.

Much is known about the process of learning to read, but a huge gap is between that knowledge and what is practiced in our schools. The Madison School District needs a science-based literacy curriculum overseen by licensed reading professionals who understand the cognitive processes that underlie learning how to read.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

Routing around Madison’s non-diverse K-12 legacy governance model:

In March 2016, Cheatham said that it was her intent to make OEO “obsolete — that our schools will be serving students so well that there isn’t a need.”

Since then, the district has tried to keep tabs on any new charter proposals for Madison, going so far as to send former School Board member Ed Hughes to a September meeting of the Goodman Community Center board of directors to express the district’s opposition to another proposed charter school, Arbor Community School, which was looking to partner with the Goodman center.

Hughes gave the board a letter from Cheatham to UW System President Ray Cross that expressed the district’s dismay at allegedly being kept out of the loop on Arbor’s plans, pointed to alleged deficiencies in Arbor’s charter proposal, and asked that Arbor either be rejected or at least kept out of Madison.

Hughes also told the board that as a Goodman donor, he did not think other donors would look kindly on a Goodman partnership with Arbor.

Becky Steinhoff, Goodman executive director, later told the Wisconsin State Journal that Goodman was “experiencing a period of enormous change,” including the recent opening of a new building, and chose not to work with Arbor.

“I understand the climate and the polarizing topic of charters” in Madison, McCabe said, but he wasn’t concerned the district would attempt to thwart Milestone and he said it would “be a dream come true” if Milestone were one day folded into the district.

He said Community—Learning—Design has an application due to the state Feb. 22 for a federal planning grant.

Much more on our 2019 school board election:

Seat 3

Kaleem Caire, 7856 Wood Reed Drive, Madison

Cristiana Carusi, 5709 Bittersweet Place

Skylar Croy, 502 N. Frances St., Madison

Seat 4

David Blaska, 5213 Loruth Terrace, Madison

Laila Borokhim, 2214 Monroe St., Madison

Albert Bryan, 4302 Hillcrest Drive, Madison

Ali Muldrow, 1966 East Main St., Madison

Seat 5

TJ Mertz, 1210 Gilson St., Madison

Ananda Mirilli, 1027 S. Sunnyvale Lane Unit A, Madison

Amos Roe, 5705 Crabapple Lane, Madison

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Sarah Manski and Ed Hughes “withdrew” from their respective races in recent elections. The timing, in both cases was unfortunate for voters, and other candidates.

Christopher Osher:

But districts are free to use their READ Act per-pupil funds on whatever curriculum they want, even on interventions researchers have found ineffective.

“Typically, as with any education policy, we’re only given so much authority on what we can tell districts to do and what we monitor for,” Colsman said in an interview with The Colorado Sun.

The state spends $3 million annually through the READ Act to provide diagnostic software school districts can use to assess student reading levels, but not all districts use it. Data shows the state’s software is used on fewer than half of the students in the state. The reading proficiency of most of the young students in Colorado is determined through other diagnostic tools never subjected to quality reviews by the state.

Meanwhile, state tracking of READ Act student performance shows that only 6 percent of children identified with a significant reading deficiency in kindergarten were reading at their grade level by third grade.

“All of us are looking for a way to get better results for kids because we can’t wait a generation for this,” Colsman said.

Half of state districts see worsening rates for significant deficiencies

Nearly half of the state’s 178 school districts saw the rate of students with significant reading deficiencies worsen since the READ Act program was put in place, according to a review of state data.

Commerce City’s Adams County 14 school district, home to 7,500 students, received more than $3 million in per-pupil READ Act funding to tackle significant reading deficiencies from 2012 through 2018, but reading problems there have worsened over same period.

In 2014, slightly more than 18 percent of the district’s kindergarten through third-grade students had a significant reading deficiency, according to state records. By 2018, that rate had more than doubled to nearly 40 percent.

New administrators at the district, forced by the Colorado Board of Education in November to hire an outside management consultant, said they’ve discovered the reading curriculum they were using was ineffective and not suited to the district’s heavily bilingual student population. They’ve since switched curriculum and are putting in place a summer school program devoted solely to reading instruction.

“Over the past 19 years we’ve had a high turnover in teachers and administrators,” said Jeanette Patterson, who was hired as the district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction last summer. “We’ve had to do a lot of training and retraining and retraining. That leads to inconsistency in the literacy block at the elementary school level.”

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques on Madison’s disastrous reading results:

Children who are not proficient readers by fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of school. Additionally, two-thirds of them will end up in prison or on welfare.

Though these dismal trajectories are well known, Madison School District’s reading scores for minority students remain unconscionably low and flat. According to the most recent data from 2017-18, fewer than 9 percent of black and fewer than 20 percent of Hispanic fourth graders were reading proficiently. Year after year, we fail these students in the most basic of our responsibilities to them: teaching them how to read.

Much is known about the process of learning to read, but a huge gap is between that knowledge and what is practiced in our schools. The Madison School District needs a science-based literacy curriculum overseen by licensed reading professionals who understand the cognitive processes that underlie learning how to read.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

Routing around Madison’s non-diverse K-12 legacy governance model:

In March 2016, Cheatham said that it was her intent to make OEO “obsolete — that our schools will be serving students so well that there isn’t a need.”

Since then, the district has tried to keep tabs on any new charter proposals for Madison, going so far as to send former School Board member Ed Hughes to a September meeting of the Goodman Community Center board of directors to express the district’s opposition to another proposed charter school, Arbor Community School, which was looking to partner with the Goodman center.

Hughes gave the board a letter from Cheatham to UW System President Ray Cross that expressed the district’s dismay at allegedly being kept out of the loop on Arbor’s plans, pointed to alleged deficiencies in Arbor’s charter proposal, and asked that Arbor either be rejected or at least kept out of Madison.

Hughes also told the board that as a Goodman donor, he did not think other donors would look kindly on a Goodman partnership with Arbor.

Becky Steinhoff, Goodman executive director, later told the Wisconsin State Journal that Goodman was “experiencing a period of enormous change,” including the recent opening of a new building, and chose not to work with Arbor.

“I understand the climate and the polarizing topic of charters” in Madison, McCabe said, but he wasn’t concerned the district would attempt to thwart Milestone and he said it would “be a dream come true” if Milestone were one day folded into the district.

He said Community—Learning—Design has an application due to the state Feb. 22 for a federal planning grant.

Much more on our 2019 school board election:

Seat 3

Kaleem Caire, 7856 Wood Reed Drive, Madison

Cristiana Carusi, 5709 Bittersweet Place

Skylar Croy, 502 N. Frances St., Madison

Seat 4

David Blaska, 5213 Loruth Terrace, Madison

Laila Borokhim, 2214 Monroe St., Madison

Albert Bryan, 4302 Hillcrest Drive, Madison

Ali Muldrow, 1966 East Main St., Madison

Seat 5

TJ Mertz, 1210 Gilson St., Madison

Ananda Mirilli, 1027 S. Sunnyvale Lane Unit A, Madison

Amos Roe, 5705 Crabapple Lane, Madison

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Sarah Manski and Ed Hughes “withdrew” from their respective races in recent elections. The timing, in both cases was unfortunate for voters, and other candidates.

Will Flanders:

The News: January 20-26 marks National School Choice Week, a week-long celebration of the progress made across the country in providing parents with education options. WILL is celebrating National School Choice Week by releasing a short summary of facts about school choice in Wisconsin.

All week we’ll be profiling private schools participating in the school choice programs. Check out our first profile on the innovative new Free Enterprise Academy at Milwaukee Lutheran High School.

Dive Deeper: Wisconsin has a rich history of providing parents and families with education options that best serve their children.

Madison has long practiced non-diverse K-12 governance. A majority of the Madison School board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.

Alan Borsuk:

20 percent. That is roughly the percentage of Milwaukee students, both in public and private schools, who were rated proficient or advanced in reading in tests in spring 2018 — and it’s about the same figure as every year for many years. Folks, we have a huge reading crisis. There may be more attention being paid to this, but there is little sign so far of more action.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Notes and links on the 2019 Madison School Board election:

Kaleem Caire

Cris Carusi

Dean Loumos

TJ Mertz

Ed Hughes

Ananda Mirilli

Ali Muldrow

David Blaska

Kate Toews

A majority (including Mr. Hughes) of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Negassi Tesfamichael:

The three-term School Board member said he is most proud of helping further MMSD’s work on diversity and inclusion. Howard said he wished the School Board could have approved several more major initiatives that he said would have helped students of color.

Howard, the only black man on the School Board, is currently its longest serving member. He was first elected to Seat 4 in 2010 after defeating Tom Farley by nearly a two-to-one margin. Howard captured 76 percent of the vote when he was re-elected in 2013. He ran unopposed in 2016.

Howard, an economist for the USDA Forest Service, was widely expected to not run for re-election this spring. He said during his 2016 campaign that his next term would be his last.

Still, even as recently as earlier this month when several challengers announced School Board runs, Howard told the Cap Times he was still deciding if he would run again.

Notes and links:

Ali Muldrow

David Blaska

James Howard

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Tim Harford:

Internal politics soon asserted itself. A case study co-authored by Henderson describes the PC division as “smothered by support from the parent company”. Eventually, the IBM PC business was sold off to a Chinese company, Lenovo. What had flummoxed IBM was not the pace of technological change — it had long coped with that — but the fact that its old organisational structures had ceased to be an advantage.

Rather than talk of radical or disruptive innovations, Henderson and Clark used the term “architectural innovation”.

“An architectural innovation is an innovation that changes the relationship between the pieces of the problem,” Henderson tells me. “It can be hard to perceive, because many of the pieces remain the same. But they fit together differently.”

An architectural innovation challenges an old organisation because it demands that the organisation remake itself. And who wants to do that?

The armies of the late 19th century were organised — as armies had long been — around cavalry and infantry. Cavalry units offered mobility. Infantry offered strength in numbers and the ability to dig in defensively.

Three technologies emerged to define the first world war: artillery, barbed wire and the machine gun. They profoundly shaped the battlefield, but also slipped easily into the existing decision-making structures. Barbed wire and machine guns were used to reinforce infantry positions. Artillery could support either cavalry or infantry from a distance.

Tanks, however, were different. In some ways they were like cavalry, since their strength lay partly in their ability to move quickly. In other ways, they fitted with the infantry, fighting alongside foot soldiers. Or perhaps tanks were a new kind of military capability entirely; this was the view taken by J F C Fuller.

These discussions might seem philosophical — but in the light of Henderson’s ideas, they are intensely practical. “You have to find an organisation that will accept the new bit of technology,” says Andrew Mackay. Mackay runs an advisory firm, Complexas, but was also the commander of British and coalition forces in Helmand, Afghanistan, in 2008. “The organisational question is deeply unsexy, but it’s fundamental.”

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.

Mario Koran:

It could also be a function of school size. Data suggest that larger schools tend to suspend students at higher rates, and some California middle schools serve between 2,000 and 3,000 students.

“You put 3,000 13- to 14-year-olds together, there are bound to be problems. Big schools are tough to manage,” Loveless said.
He found that small- and mid-sized schools suspended black students at below-average rates, while a larger share of big schools — those with 1,300 students or more — have above-average suspension rates.

Only 16.7 percent of schools that have 200 or fewer students have high suspension rates for blacks, defined by rates that are 5 percent or higher. That jumps to 38 percent for schools that serve 1,300 students or more.

2011: A majority of the Madison School Board voted against the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.

2013: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

2018: “I’m going to call it Madison Prep“.

T. Keung Hui:

Nearly 1 in 5 North Carolina students is not attending a traditional public school, and that percentage is likely to continue rising as more families choose alternative education options.

For the third year in a row, enrollment has fallen in North Carolina’s traditional public schools even as the number of students continues to rise in charter schools, private schools and homeschools. The percentage of the state’s 1.8 million students attending traditional public schools has dropped to 80.8 percent and is continuing to fall rapidly.

“Families are more attuned to and used to having choices at their fingertips, and that is entering education as well,” said Brian Jodice, interim president of Parents For Educational Freedom in North Carolina. “We’re no longer in this mindset that because I live at this address or this ZIP code I have to attend this particular school that works for many students but doesn’t have to be the only choice.”

But what’s seen as an expansion of school choice by some is viewed by others as part of an effort to undermine the state’s traditional public schools.

“North Carolina has already embraced the privatization, the ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) agenda of dismantling public schools in favor of their donors who’d rather try to monetize what should be a public good,” said Kris Nordstrom, education finance and policy consultant for the N.C. Justice Center’s Education and Law Project.

The education landscape has changed considerably since Republicans took control of the General Assembly after the 2010 election. Changes have included:

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school.

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

T Keung Hui and Ann Doss Helms:

Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte are home to many charter schools, but a new national report says those three areas are filled with places where lower-income families don’t have access to these non-traditional public schools.

A new report from the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute says there are hundreds of “charter school deserts” in the U.S., which it defines as three or more contiguous census tracts that have poverty rates greater than 20 percent but that have no charter schools.

The report, released Thursday, found 14 charter school deserts in North Carolina, including nine in the Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte metro areas. The other five are in rural areas.

“We think there are plenty of cities that are saturated with charters, but when you can zoom in at the census track level, you can see census tracks that are pretty poor and they have no other option than their traditional school,” said Amber Northern, senior vice president for research at the Fordham Institute.

Madison lacks K-12 governance diversity. A majority of the School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school in 2011.

Max Eden & Matthew Ladner:

One year ago, President Trump nominated Betsy DeVos for secretary of education. Shortly thereafter, the technocratic faction of the education reform establishment joined with the teachers’ unions to declare war against her and against Michigan’s charter schools. The evidence, they said, is clear: Michigan’s charter schools are uniquely awful. But the evidence has been piling up that Michigan charter schools are actually unusually good.

The first shot fired came from the opinion pages of the New York Times, where Tulane University professor Doug Harris declared that DeVos’ nomination represented, “a triumph of ideology over evidence.” He held her responsible for charter schools in Detroit, which he called “the biggest school reform disaster in the country.”

The evidence has been piling up that Michigan charter schools are actually unusually good.

Oddly, Harris linked his claim to a Stanford study showing that Detroit’s charter schools significantly outperform its traditional public schools. He, and the rest of Michigan charter critics, also ignored studies from the Mackinac Center and Excellent Schools Detroit that also showed a substantial charter edge.

Locally, Madison lacks K-12 governance diversity, having rejected the proposed Madison preparatory IB charter school and more recently the Montessori charter.

Shavar Jeffries:

With President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos driving the public dialogue toward their far-right, for-profit privatization agenda, an alien from another planet could be forgiven for landing here and assuming that “school choice” is the priority of only the Republican Party — or that Democrats are in retreat when it comes to expanding options for improved public education for all students.

That would be a nearsighted and incorrect view. As distinct from for-profit private schools with a flimsy track record of success, it was national progressive leaders from labor and civil rights who laid the foundation for public charter schools. These equity-focused leaders include Al Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers; the past two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; the late liberal icon Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone; and former Vermont governor and head of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean. Minnesota Democratic state Sen. Ember Reichgott Junge authored the nation’s first charter school law, and big-city mayors like Cory Booker, Antonio Villaraigosa, Adrian Fenty, Mitch Landrieu, and the late Tom Menino succeeded in creating some of the most vibrant and high-performing charter sectors in the country.

Madison has long tolerated a lack of K-12 diversity, despite spending more than most (about $20,000 per student) and long term, disastrous reading results.

Salim Furth:

Old Town Road traces a choppy, swerving path that marks the southern edge of Trumbull, Connecticut. It is shaded by maples and oaks that frame the sensible New England homes of an affluent suburb. Across the double yellow lines of Old Town Road are similar homes in the city of Bridgeport, one of the poorest places in Connecticut.

Last July, Trumbull’s Planning and Zoning Commission approved a zoning change to allow a 202-unit apartment complex to replace a vacant office building a few blocks away from Old Town Road. Key to getting approval was that the apartment building was designed with only one- and two-bedroom units; the developer estimates that only 16 school-age children will live among the 202 new units.1 For Trumbull’s residents, eager to maintain their school district’s third-in-the-state ranking,2 a larger influx of potentially poor students might have been a deal-breaker.

According to Zillow’s estimate, the three-bedroom house at 1230 Old Town Road could sell for $287,000. Across the street in Bridgeport, a very similar home at 1257 Old Town Road is worth only $214,000. The Zillow interface helpfully informs the prospective buyer that any children living at 1230 Old Town Road have the right to attend Frenchtown Elementary School, rated 9 out of 10 by GreatSchools. Children on the south side of the street attend the Cross School, which rates a 2,3 and is part of the worst municipal school district in the state, according to the state’s own ranking.4

Madison’s non diverse K-12 governance model rejected the proposed indepedent Madison Preparatory IB Charter School. This, despite spending more than most (now nearly $20,000 per studentf) and tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

One City Early Learning, via a kind Kaleem Caire email:

A high quality preschool education, from birth to age 5, should be available and accessible to every child in the United States of America. Please join us on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 from 11:30am to 1:00pm for lunch and an important presentation and dialogue.

We would like to get your input and feedback about two significant steps One City is taking to make high quality preschool available and accessible all children. First, we are planning a major community fundraising event for 2018 that we hope to draw 7,000 to 8,000 people to attend. One City will be the host and organizer, but we plan to dedicate funds generated from the event to support tuition scholarships and teacher training at other high quality preschools so that more children have access, and more children are better prepared for school success.

Second, we will also talk with you about our plans to establish a public charter school that would provide economically disadvantaged families greater access to high quality preschool, and potentially create a pathway to educational success for children beyond kindergarten.

These two initiatives will be central to our efforts to initiate an effective and impactful preschool movement in Dane County. It’s one that we hope will positively impact children all across Wisconsin in the future, as well. We truly hope that you will join us.

Madison has long tolerated a non diverse K-12 governance structure, despite long term disastrous reading results.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school.

Matt Barnum:

When charter school teachers push to unionize, charter leaders often fight back.

That’s happened in Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. Unionizing, they argue, would limit the schools’ ability to innovate, ultimately hurting kids.

But a new study of California schools finds that, far from harming student achievement, unionization of charter schools actually boosts test scores.

“In contrast to the predominant public opinion about school unionizations, we find that unionization has a positive … impact on student math performance,” write researchers Jordan Matsudaira of Cornell and Richard Patterson of the U.S. Military Academy.

The analysis is hardly the last word on the question, but it highlights the limited evidence for the idea that not having unionized teachers helps charter schools succeed — even though that is a major aspect of the charter-school movement, as most charters are not unionized.

“Contrary to the anti-worker and anti-union ideologues, the teacher unions in charter schools don’t impede teaching and learning or hurt kids,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers in more than 240 charter schools. “And the findings — that schools with teachers who have an independent voice through its unions have a positive effects on student performance — are consistent with common sense and other studies.”

Madison has long spent far more than most government funded school districts (now nearly $20,000 per student), yet we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Yet, Madison’s non diverse governance model continues unabated, aborting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school and more recently a quasi Montessori charter proposal.

Madison School Board President James Howard’s remarks prior to the recent Montessori “charter” school contract vote (which failed 3-4).

Well worth watching.

Madison lacks K-12 governance diversity.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Preporatory Academy IB Charter School.

Madison spends more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student, while tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

NY1

rmed with new test scores showing a strong performance by her 15,000 students, the head of the Success Academy network of charter schools takes a victory lap – and seizes an opportunity to bash her long-time sparring partner Mayor de Blasio. NY1’s education reporter Lindsey Christ filed the following report:

The city’s leading charter school operator is back on the offensive, barely a week after she made two humbling apologies — one for ties to the Trump administration, the other for comments by her board chairman.

Eva Moskowitz gathered reporters Thursday to crow about the performance of her students in the most recent round of statewide testing — and berate Mayor de Blasio for celebrating a more modest uptick in public school scores.

“What is going on in a city that is spending $31 billion a year and accepting massive failure?” said Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of the Success Academy charter schools..

“I’m outraged by the educational racisim engendered by the system. I’m also frustrated by the Mayor’s response, and I know the journalists it the room are gonna think it’s personal. It’s not personal. The mayor’s a good man, it’s hard to run the city of New York, but his reaction to the scores is not appropriate,” she said.

Scores out Tuesday show that 95 percent of students of color at her Success Academy schools passed the math exam, compared to 24 percent in city public schools. And 83 percent of students of color at Success passed the English test; only 29 percent in public schools did.

Locally, Madison lacks K-12 Governance Diversity.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Preporatory Academy IB Charter School.

Madison spends more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student, while tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Betheny Gross, Colleen McCann, Shannon Murtagh and Christine Campbell::

As school choice grows in America’s cities, more district leaders are adopting a portfolio approach, giving schools greater autonomy and families more choices while still ensuring accountability. However, some community advocates are concerned that the new school options are not diverse enough to meet students’ needs. For instance, are the pressures of implementing accountability measures forcing districts to offer just two types of schools: traditional public schools and “no excuses” college-prep charter schools?

Given these concerns, and the importance of providing distinct options for an effective choice system, CRPE researchers analyzed school offerings in Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., to see just how diverse or homogenous the cities’ portfolios really are.

Using publicly available data, their research showed a diversity of school offerings in each district. However, it also revealed why many families aren’t aware of the array of curriculum, instructional approaches, and enrichment activities available. Researchers discovered, for example:

Locally, Madison lacks K-12 Governance Diversity.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Preporatory Academy IB Charter School.

Madison spends more than most, now nearly $20,000 per student, while tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Paul Fanlund:

For example? “If you’re looking for the simplest examples, we weren’t consistently teaching students the fundamentals of reading in the earliest grades. We weren’t teaching phonics consistently in the early grades, and then you wonder why students aren’t attaining the skills, the basic skills … the foundational skills of reading. We still have some more work to do in that area, but boy, we have come a long way.”

With her background in California schools before she held senior-level jobs in the gigantic Chicago school district, one wonders whether a successful 45-year-old administrator might find appeal in returning to lead a big urban district. When she was hired, Cheatham talked about being here for the long haul. She still does.

She says she is excited that her son, Theo, is starting elementary school at Crestwood this fall and adds: “I am more committed and invested than ever. Like I said, I think we had this foundation-building phase that we’re going to be bringing to a close and I’m really excited about what comes next. I think we’re poised to do so much and especially for students who need and deserve more, students of color in particular.

“When I signed up I told the board that I was walking in the door thinking that I was here for a good 10 years, or as long as you guys will keep me, and I serve the community, and so that commitment remains, so I’m not planning on going anywhere.”

Notes and links:

“Plenty of resources“, now nearly $20k/student.

Madison’s long-term, disastrous reading results.

Jennifer Cheatham. Previous Superintendents.

A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison preparatory IB charter school.

Phonics.

Nicholas Kristof::

So far, it seems it can — much better. An interim study just completed shows Bridge schools easily outperforming government-run schools in Liberia, and a randomized trial is expected to confirm that finding. It would be odd if schools with teachers and books didn’t outperform schools without them.
 
 If the experiment continues to succeed, Liberia’s education minister would like to hand over “as many schools as possible” to private providers. Countries in Asia and others in Africa are also interested in adopting this model.
 
 The idea of turning over public schools to a for-profit company sparks outrage in some quarters. There’s particular hostility to Bridge, because it runs hundreds of schools, both public and private, in poor countries (its private schools in other countries charge families about $7 a month).

Madison, unfortunately, continues with a non diverse K-12 system, now spending nearly $20k annually per student. This, despite long term disastrous reading results.

Doug Erickson:

A small, environmental-themed charter school in Madison with a substandard academic record is facing heightened School Board scrutiny as its charter comes up for renewal.

Badger Rock Middle School, 501 E. Badger Road, opened in 2011 amid great enthusiasm for its emphasis on urban agriculture, environmental sustainability and project-based learning. Last month, though, it landed in the “fails to meet expectations” category on the latest round of state-issued report cards.

The school’s overall accountability score, which takes into account such things as test scores, student academic progress and college and career readiness, was the lowest of the 45 district schools that received ratings.

Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham this week called Badger Rock an “under-performing” school but said it “has incredible potential to be an excellent school.” She said she is leaning toward recommending a charter renewal of three years. That’s less than the five-year contract sought by school leaders, but the recommendation still should be seen as a vote of “confidence and hope,” Cheatham said.

The School Board is expected to vote on the issue Monday. Wright Middle School, the district’s oldest charter school, also is to be up for discussion the same night, but for a very different reason. Its leaders say they want to drop the school’s charter status.

The designation no longer makes sense for them, they say, as Wright has operated for many years as a traditional district school. The change in designation would have little effect on day-to-day school operations, district officials said.
Badger Rock

A charter school is a publicly funded school that does not have to adhere to many of the state laws governing traditional public schools. The intent is to foster innovation and experimentation and to give students more choices.

Madison has three charter schools. In addition to Badger Rock and Wright, there’s the dual-language Nuestro Mundo Community School. Each is an “instrumentality” of the district, meaning the district authorizes the school, employs the staff and retains ultimate authority.

Madison’s K-12 world lacks governance diversity. Many cities, including Minneapolis, offer families diverse school options.

Wright developed from the largely aborted “Madison Middle School 2000” project.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School several years ago.

Alan Borsuk:

We need to talk about Milwaukee College Prep. In fact, however much people have talked about this set of four charter schools over the years, we need to talk about Milwaukee College Prep more and more — and learn more and more from what the success of these schools.

There was an amazing fact within the mountain of school reports cards released by the state Department of Public Instruction on Thursday, namely this:

Five schools in Milwaukee were given the five-star top rating, also known as “significantly succeeds expectations.”

One of them was Cooper School, a Milwaukee Public Schools kindergarten through eighth-grade school at 5143 S. 21st St. Cooper is a very good school with a praiseworthy track record of striving to get better in innovative ways, including drawing on outside help that has been beneficial. In 2015-’16, Cooper had 421 students, 60% of them “economically disadvantaged” and 22% having disabilities. Half of the students were white, a third Hispanic.

Locally, Madison continues with it’s non diverse K-12 structure.

Chris Arnade

Trump voters may not vote the way I want them to, but, after having spent the last five years working in (and having grown up in) parts of the US few visit, I know they are not dumb. They are doing what all voters do: Trying to use their vote to better their particular situation (however they define that).

Labeling them dumb is simply a way of not trying to understand their situation, or what they value.

Related, Madison, despite spending nearly $18k per student annually, has long tolerated disastrous reading results and perpetual resistance of K-12 diversity.

Mike Antonucci:

Save Our Public Schools, the Massachusetts campaign fighting to retain the state’s cap on charter schools, describes itself as “a grassroots organization of families, parents, educators and students.”

But a glance at its campaign finance disclosure shows it to be almost devoid of families, parents, and students, and includes educators only to the extent that their dues money is being spent by the teachers union they belong to.

Of the more than $7.2 million in cash and in-kind contributions received by Save Our Public Schools so far, 99.86 percent came from the nation’s two largest unions: the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and their affiliates. But even that percentage is slightly misleading.

Boston parents have many charter choices while Madison continues it’s none-diverse K-12 structure.

Rachel Slade

In November, Massachusetts voters will decide whether the Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (DESE) can raise the cap on the number of charter schools allowed, or increase enrollment in existing charters in underperforming districts. If the referendum is approved, the city of Boston—which currently has 27 Commonwealth charter schools that operate independently of the district and educate about 14 percent of the student population—will likely see an increase in charters over the next several years. It’s an advance that charter advocates firmly champion but opponents see as another little push in the direction of a very steep cliff.

How did public education get so contentious, even as Boston’s public school system is near the top on every available scoring index of the nation’s major urban districts? Why does Brooke Charter Schools founder Jon Clark, a quiet, straight-talking guy from Wellesley, become slightly unhinged when I share some of the views of the anti-charter folks? What is it about this debate that brings out the tinfoil-hatted paranoia in all of us?

Ideologically speaking, charter schools—which are publicly funded but operate outside of typical district and teachers union rules—are the muddiest of all political issues, simultaneously supported by neoliberals and ultraconservatives, progressives and regressives, hedge funders and immigrants. For those who favor them, charters represent our best hope for improving education. In fact, the pro-charter movement is predicated on the certainty that public education is in crisis, and it lays the blame squarely on government incompetence and union hegemony. Well-run charters, they argue, not only educate children more cheaply, but also more effectively. The data back that up: The average SAT composite score in Boston’s charter high schools in 2015 was 100 points higher (about 10 percentile points) than the district schools’.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.

Jay Greene:

And on the specific claim the article makes that “half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools” this is what the Stanford study has to say: “In reading, 47 percent of charter schools perform significantly better than their traditional public school market, which is more positive than the 35% for Michigan charter schools as a whole. In math, 47 percent of Detroit charter schools perform significantly better than their local peers, the same proportion as for the charters as a whole statewide.” The study found that only 1% of Detroit’s charters performs significantly worse than the traditional public schools in reading and only 7% in math. (See Table 7 on p. 44) To claim that half the charters perform the same or worse than traditional public schools is a grotesque distortion of the study’s findings.

Look, I don’t accept the Stanford CREDO study as “the gold standard” in charter evaluations. But if the reporter cites that research to demonstrate that one charter management organization has sub-par performance, it is journalistic malpractice not to mention the positive overall results. And those positive overall results contradict the very foundation of the entire article.

Besides a few anecdotes and a mis-reporting of the CREDO study,
the article mostly consists of scary words like “chaos” and “glut.” Imagine if the article were about phone providers instead of schools. Would anyone find it persuasive to wring one’s hands over the glut of phone companies after Ma Bell was broken up, causing “chaos” in the telephone market? I understand there are differences between phones and schools, but reporting should be based on evidence of outcomes rather than just invoking scary words.

Madison’s long term disastrous reading results might suggest the benefit of avoiding non diverse governance.

Doug Erickson:

Leaders of a new online public charter high school in Wisconsin say its focus on career and technical education will help train students for high-paying jobs in fields that desperately need workers, such as construction.

The school, announced in Madison on Wednesday, is to begin offering classes this fall. It will be called Destinations Career Academy of Wisconsin and will be based in the McFarland School District, which already authorizes another online school, Wisconsin Virtual Academy.

According to the new school’s founders, students will be able to get a head start on careers by earning technical and specialty trade credentials and college credits along with their high school diplomas. The venture will be Wisconsin’s first career and technical education online school and potentially a national prototype, said Terry McGowan, president of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 139.

“Everyone’s watching us,” McGowan said.

The Wisconsin labor union, based in Pewaukee, is a partner in the effort along with Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton and the McFarland School District. The virtual school will use the digital curriculum and academic services of K12 Inc., a for-profit education company based in Herndon, Virginia. The company also provides the curriculum for Wisconsin Virtual Academy.

The new high school will offer career pathways in four clusters: architecture and construction; business, management and administration; health science; and information technology. Students in grades 9-12 will be able to earn dual credits through Fox Valley Technical College, said Nicholaus Sutherland, who will be the new venture’s head of school. He serves in the same capacity for Wisconsin Virtual Academy.

Madison’s $17k/year government schools lack such diverse options. The most recent attempt to change this was rejected by a majority of the School Board.

Stephanie Simon:

Education reformers stymied by teachers unions and liberal state legislatures increasingly are turning to the courts to get their way on everything from funding charter schools to making it easier to fire teachers.

It’s an end-run strategy championed by Republican and Democratic reformers alike: When they find it hard to change policies through the political process, they reframe the issues as civil rights crusades and take them to the courts.

Locally, Madison continues its one size fits all governance approach, rejecting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school despite long term, disastrous reading reults.

Kaleem Caire:

So far, our capital city, like so many other cities, has preferred to go another way. They have no problem limiting their investment to spending millions of dollars on safety and security strategies that focus on locking up black males and policing them. We spend more money on policing, jail and related services than we do on providing black men with scholarships for college and addressing their unique social circumstances on the front end of their lives. Our black boys are struggling from having no fathers at home and too few positive male role models in their lives who show them real love, build their confidence, teach them healthy values, demonstrate a strong work ethic and hold them accountable (in constructive and inspiring ways) to high standards of personal conduct and performance excellence. Fatherlessness is destroying the future of many black boys — and almost as fast as they come out of the womb.

Besides that, our young men are struggling to define themselves against stereotypes that pervade almost every facet of their lives. They are struggling with negative images America has of them, and the diminished view people have of their potential. Their role models now are Breezy, Yeh, Lil Wayne and a host of other rappers who limit their talents to undermining the talent development of others — except at the microphone. Unfortunately, some of our boys are being raised by 30- and 40-year-old men who see these young rappers as their role models, too.

Additionally, our young men are being raised in a community that doesn’t know what black male success really looks like. Not in mass. We don’t see it very often here, and when we do, we can’t always spot it. We’ve been conditioned to see black males as needy, incapable and unworthy. Unfortunately, that’s what some of our boys then give you — they show you the image that you saw them in. Give me a suit, a tie, a dress shirt, some dress shoes, a book bag, some great books and a place to unleash their creativity and potential, and some men and women who are great teachers, coaches and mentors, and who truly love our young black and brown men and believe in their potential, and I will give you highly confident, determined, purpose-driven and successful black males in return.

Madison continues its one size fits all governance approach, rejecting the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school despite long term, disastrous reading reults.

Norman Sannes

Nothing has changed in the past 30 years. The love affair between the Madison School Board and Madison Teachers Inc. Executive director John Matthews is still in full bloom.

The latest pending agreement to extend the existing union contract is proof. The ensuing litigation could cost Madison taxpayers a great deal. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has already promised to challenge this if the School Board caves to MTI.

MTI is not about our kids. It never has been (other than indoctrinating liberalism). The union’s opposition to the Madison preparatory charter school is further proof.

The School Board is supposed to be looking out for the kids and the taxpayers, but their first priority continues to be MTI and the demands from Matthews.

Related: Madison Governance Status Quo: Teacher “Collective Bargaining” Continues; West Athens Parent Union “Bargains Like any other Union” in Los Angeles.

Jesse Opoien:

Without trying to pin it on one magic solution — what are some of the potential solutions that are being discussed?
There’s plenty of research that says you get the most bang for your buck in investing in the early childhood grades. That probably still holds true. But at the same time, if you invested in high quality preschool and then let chips fall where they may, many of those positive effects will eventually deteriorate.
My sense is that the efforts to identify high-performing schools, high-quality schools regardless of what sector they’re in — public, charter or private — identifying the characteristics of high-performing schools regardless of sector, and trying to replicate them.
The other thing we’ve known for a long time is the single biggest within-school factor or influence on student achievement, in this order, are the quality of the teacher and the quality of the principal. Investing in ways of identifying effective teachers and helping them get better is almost always a good investment. It’s hard work, but it’s a good investment.
The other thing in terms of causes worth mentioning: there’s plenty of research that shows we have inequitable distributions of teacher quality. The higher the poverty rate, the more likely students are to be taught by a younger, less effective teacher. We can look at ways of trying to incentivize the most effective teachers to teach in the neediest schools. There are some positive signs here, but it’s nothing that’s going to be fixed over night.

Related: the rejected Madison Preparatory IB charter school.

City of Madison, via a kind reader’s email:

Mayor Paul Soglin joined U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, other mayors and school superintendents in Washington, DC, today to discuss partnership opportunities between cities and the U.S. Department of Education to foster effective approaches to education reform.
Participating city leaders are part of a new Mayors’ Education Reform Task Force co-chaired by National League of Cities (NLC) First Vice President Chris Coleman, Mayor of Saint Paul, MN, and NLC Second Vice President Ralph Becker, Mayor of Salt Lake City, UT. Mayors Coleman and Becker formed the task force in March 2013 to explore how cities can and should be involved in local education reform efforts.
During today’s meeting, task force members highlighted the growing commitment by municipal officials across the country to promoting educational achievement.
“Mayors and elected officials can bring together all the stakeholders in the education conversation in their cities,” said Mayor Soglin. “The perspectives from mayors of cities large to small are valuable to local and national policymakers. I’m glad we had an opportunity to talk with the Secretary and his staff about the role mayors can play in education transformation.”
Local leaders shared examples of city-school partnerships they have formed in their communities in areas such as school improvement, early learning, afterschool programming, and postsecondary success.
“The trajectory of learning begins at birth and extends over a lifetime,” said Mayor Becker, who was unable to attend the meeting. “Cities now experience an unprecedented level of collaboration and discussion in formulating specific plans for postsecondary access and success and productive out-of-school time learning.”
The meeting with Secretary Duncan provided mayors with an opportunity to discuss how lessons learned at the city level can inform federal education policy. Among the key issues of concern identified by the task force are:

• Finding a “third way” in education reform that balances a commitment to accountability with a spirit of collaboration among school administrators, teachers, and cities;
• Transforming schools into centers of community that support parent engagement and provide wraparound services to children and families;
• Building on successful “cradle-to-career” models to develop a strong educational pipeline;
• Securing adequate and equitable funding for local education initiatives; and
• Promoting college access and completion.

“In this global economy, cities and towns depend on an educated workforce and schools are depending on us. We need to work together to ensure that our children graduate high school ready for postsecondary education and career success,” said NLC President Marie Lopez Rogers, Mayor of Avondale, AZ. “As city leaders, we have an important message that must be heard and we must be at the table in guiding federal and local education reform policies.”
In addition to Mayors Soglin, Coleman and Becker participants in today’s meeting included: Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson of Gary, Indiana; Mayor Edna Branch Jackson of Savannah, Georgia; Mayor Dwight Jones of Richmond, Virginia; Mayor Pedro Segarra of Hartford, Connecticut; Riverside (Calif.) Unified School District Superintendent Rick Miller; Gary Community School Corporations Superintendent Cheryl Pruitt; and New York City Deputy Chief Academic Officer Josh Thomases.
The National League of Cities (NLC) is dedicated to helping city leaders build better communities. NLC is a resource and advocate for 19,000 cities, towns and villages, representing more than 218 million Americans.

Related:

• www.wisconsin2.org
• Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay.
• Madison’s disastrous reading results.
• Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap
• Status quo governance
• Minneapolis teacher’s union approved to authorize charter schools
• A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.
• Wisconsin State Journal columnist Chris Rickert appears to correlate the “achievement gap strategy and education outcomes with money spent. Madison has long spent more per student than most districts.
  The recent “expert review” concluded that the “Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap“.
  We have seen the results of an ongoing “same service” approach to school spending. There are no indications that this is changing.

Erin Richards:

t’s midmorning on a Saturday in June when Will Reichardt unlocks the front door of a south side office and grabs the day’s supplies: clipboard, school fliers in Spanish and English, some enrollment applications.
Just in case.
Then Reichardt drives his minivan to the local laundromats, where he circles dryers and washers and toddlers and parents, asking each family, in Spanish, to consider the opportunities at a new school opening in August called Rocketship.
A newcomer to Milwaukee, Rocketship Education is a nonprofit elementary charter-school network based in San Jose, Calif., that’s attracting national attention for its low-cost schools that blend traditional instruction with technological intervention.
Rocketship’s first national expansion site is Southside Community Prep, a new school at 3003 W. Cleveland Ave. which will operate under a special charter with the City of Milwaukee. If successful, Rocketship may open up to eight schools serving up to 4,000 children in Milwaukee.
The organization’s mission is to eliminate the achievement gap by rapidly replicating schools that perform better and cost less than local options. It intends to grow from 3,800 students in California to 25,000 students in six states by 2018.
In a decade, leaders estimate, they could be educating 200,000 students in 30 cities.
But in Milwaukee, Rocketship is an unknown, and the hurdles to recruiting students in a highly competitive school landscape have it scrambling to enroll at least 300 students by an Aug. 19 start date — now four weeks away.

Related: A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school last year.

Stephanie Banchero & Caroline Porter:

An educational curriculum that originally catered to the children of globe-trotting diplomats is making rapid inroads in K-12 public schools across the U.S., boosting test results and academic readiness even at inner-city schools.
An educational curriculum designed for the children of globetrotting diplomats is making rapid inroads in K-12 schools across the U.S., showing surprising improvements in test results and academic readiness even at inner-city schools. Caroline Porter has details.
Houston, Chicago, Tampa, Fla., and other cities are embracing the International Baccalaureate [SIS IB Link] program as a way to overhaul low-performing schools, attract middle-income families who might otherwise favor private schools, or offer more choice.
“It’s not a program for the elite,” said Samuel Sarabia, who runs the IB program for Houston Independent School District, where 10 schools have IB programs, including two where the majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Five more low-income schools are in the midst of an IB conversion process run by the nonprofit International Baccalaureate group.
The program began in Geneva in the 1960s as a two-year high-school diploma offering for the children of diplomats and itinerant business executives. It later expanded into elementary- and middle-school programs.
Today, there are 1,651 IB programs in the U.S.–including 1,493 public schools–up from 503 in 2003. About 90% of them are in public schools, and most are aimed at U.S. students, not the children of diplomats.
Officials tout the programs’ emphasis on critical thinking. Unlike the traditional model of teachers imparting knowledge in a lecture format, IB programs emphasize individual and group projects governed by a philosophy of “international mindedness.” Students are required to take a second language.

The Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school in 2012, largely sponsored by the local Urban League.