Eugene Volokh:

From the Complaint filed today in Armenta v. G/O Media Inc. (Del. Super. Ct.):

Nine-year-old H.A. loves the Kansas City Chiefs—and he loves his family’s Chumash-Indian heritage. On November 26, 2023, H.A. displayed that love by attending the Chiefs-Raiders NFL football game wearing a Chiefs jersey and necklace, his face painted half-red and half-black, and a costume headdress— just as Chiefs fans and other avid sports fans have done for decades.

During the CBS television broadcast, H.A. was shown for three seconds, where the audience can clearly see his red-and-black face paint. Immediately thereafter, CBS panned to a Raiders fan in black-and-white face paint. Together, they represented fervent fans with their faces painted for game-day battle, each wearing their team’s respective colors and costume garb ….

Those few seconds provided just the opportunity for Deadspin Senior Writer Carron Phillips to, on behalf of himself and his employer Deadspin, maliciously and wantonly attack a nine-year-old boy and his parents for Phillips’ own race-drenched political agenda. By selectively capturing from the CBS broadcast an image of H.A. showing only the one side of his face with black paint on it—an effort that took laser-focused precision to accomplish given how quickly the boy appeared on screen—Phillips and Deadspin deliberately omitted the half of H.A.’s face with red paint on it.

Christian Robles:

Alexandria Millet found a way to sharply cut her rent this year and move closer to her job at Central High School in Kansas City, Mo.—live in a duplex built to house teachers.

A 10th-grade English and journalism instructor, Millet, 24 years old, now pays $400 a month to live with two other teachers in a home provided through a partnership between Kansas City Public Schools and Teachers Like Me, a nonprofit building housing to help recruit Black teachers.

KCPS is one of several school districts across the country—in urban and rural areas from California to West Virginia and Florida—that are trying to use affordable housing to hire and retain teachers amid a nationwide shortage of both. The efforts join state and federal programs that have for years provided teachers grants and down payment assistance to purchase homes.

“Not having to pay high rent and having a program that supports you specifically in terms of housing” made it easier to stay in Kansas City, Millet said, as she wanted to do after working there a year as an AmeriCorps volunteer.

The low-cost housing “made it come together,” said Millet, who is from Milwaukee. She earns about $48,000 a year in a metropolitan area with a typical monthly apartment rent of $1,437 in July, according to Zillow estimates.

Teachers Like Me opened its first duplex in February and has plans to house up to 25 teachers, said Trinity Davis, the organization’s founder and a former Kansas City school administrator.

2018 – Kansas City Star Editorial:

Taylor was blunt in linking educational attainment with dollars spent.

“The analysis finds a strong, positive relationship between educational outcomes and educational costs,” Taylor concluded. She also said a 1 percentage point increase in graduation rates is associated with a 1.2 percent increase in costs in lower grades and a 1.9 percent increase in costs at the high school level.

That amounts to a breathtaking repudiation of the long-standing conservative argument that there’s no link between outcomes and spending.

“It’s a validation of what I have been working on with a lot of colleagues and advocates and parents for many years.” said state Rep. Melissa Rooker, a moderate Republican from Fairway who has worked for years to boost school funding.

1998: Money and school Performance, Paul Ciotti:

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its support-
ers have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they
did try. To improve the education of black students and
encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas
City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-
object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers
to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more
money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any
other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money
bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such
amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwa-
ter viewing room, television and animation studios, a robot-
ics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United
Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field
trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was
12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the
country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the
black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not
greater, integration.

More, here.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported school districts, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Samantha Winslow, Alexandra Bradbury

Washington teachers waged rolling one-day strikes calling attention to decades of underfunding. Photo: WEA.

Lawmakers in Washington state are scrambling to get ready for a special session after the state’s highest court announced it will start charging a penalty of $100,000 per day while legislators continue illegally underfunding the public schools.

The court’s move comes on the heels of one-day strikes that rolled across the state this spring. Half the members of the Washington Education Association (WEA), in some 65 school districts covering 40,000 teachers, walked out—including on the state’s conservative side, east of the mountains.

The state’s attorney general claims teacher strikes are illegal, but that didn’t stop the teachers.

Picket signs read, “On Strike against Legislature,” highlighting that this strike was against the state government, not the school districts. In fact, some districts announced their support.

Money And School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment.

Simon Kuper

I especially see apartheid in the US. True, the country has made racist speech taboo. Use a racial epithet in public and your career combusts. That’s lovely. However, American school taxes are usually raised locally, and many neighbourhoods are segregated, and so most poor black children attend underfunded schools where they learn just enough to do lowly jobs for whites. The US later tries to airlift a few victims out of the ghetto through “affirmative action”, but by then the damage is done. Like apartheid South Africa, the US ensures through schooling that most black people won’t succeed. It just doesn’t call this “Bantu education”.

My instinctive measure of a society is how closely it resembles South African apartheid. On that score the Netherlands – despite ample racist speech – arguably beats the US, because the Dutch give so-called “black schools” more funding than white suburban schools. Similarly, ethnically mixed-up London has less apartheid than segregated Paris.

South African apartheid determined people’s life paths from before birth. If you were a white embryo, you’d be fine. A black embryo wouldn’t. I remember, aged about 16, sitting on the porch of some ridiculous white adult fraud, listening to him preach about the stupidity of his black servants, and realising: this guy needs to believe he made his own success. Few people at the top can think, “Luckily, I chose the right parents.” Instead they tell themselves a story about work and talent – even though their maid probably outworks them, and nobody ever cared whether she had talent.

Inequality is the new apartheid. Your life path is largely determined before birth. The ruling classes pass on their status by sending their children to exclusive schools, much like in apartheid Johannesburg.

Happily, ethnicity is no longer always decisive. Still, today’s apartheid delivers outcomes as unequal as the old apartheid did. One measure of a society’s inequality is its Gini coefficient. South Africa’s Gini in 1995, just after apartheid, was a shocking 0.59 (where 0 is perfect equality, and 1 is perfect inequality). But Manhattan today has almost exactly the same Gini: 0.6, according to the US Census Bureau. Amazingly, South Africa itself has become less equal since apartheid: by 2009 the country’s Gini had risen to 0.63, says the World Bank.

From the comments:

There are several key errors regarding school funding- many of the poorest performing schools spend the most per pupil. Schools and taxes are funded at the local AND state level, as well as directed by school boards elected locally and state DOE’s … these have been run almost exclusively by one philosophical perspective for more than 50 years, with the corruption and lack of accountability that comes with it … and results have gotten worse, not better. Maybe time for a change of concept!?!

Madison spends about double the national average per student yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results. Money may be a factor, but as the Kansas City experiment reveled, it is hardly decisive.

Sharon Lurye:

A few years ago she shifted her approach, turning to more direct explanation after finding a website on a set of evidence-based practices known as the science of math.

“I could see how the game related to multiplication, but the kids weren’t making those connections,” said Stark, a math teacher in the suburbs of Kansas City. “You have to explicitly teach the content.”

As American schools work to turn around math scores that plunged during the pandemic, some researchers are pushing for more attention to a set of research-based practices for teaching math. The movement has passionate backers, but is still in its infancy, especially compared with the phonics-based “science of reading” that has inspired changes in how classrooms across the country approach literacy.

Math forum audio/video.

Singapore Math

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Remedial math

Madison’s math review task force.

Bernie Wilson:

Jada Williams was a social media star and a talented point guard when she moved with her mother from a Kansas City suburb to San Diego, looking to play basketball for a high school powerhouse and parlay her online prowess into endorsement deals.

She found it all in California, which has become the trendsetter among the 19 states that allow high school athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness without affecting their eligibility to play in college.

The 17-year-old Williams is now pulling in six figuresa year from six major endorsement deals. The senior at La Jolla Country Day School has signed to play at the University of Arizona.

“It’s definitely a big change for me, but it was good in every single direction,” Williams said during a break from her exhaustive practice routine, which she often documents with videos and photos posted online. It was the right decision for school and basketball, “and on top of that I was able to start capitalizing off NIL,” shorthand for name, image and likeness.

Patrick Richardson:

One Kansas City-area mom had to fight tooth and nail to get a mask exemption for her children, despite having paperwork showing disturbing changes in their vital signs after just one minute of putting on a mask. USD 229 Blue Valley officials rejected the results on a technicality, but a doctor says the results should have been a red flag that prompted the district to take action.

Julie Myrick, who has both a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old in Blue Valley elementary schools, originally went to the Blue Valley Board of Education asking for mask exemptions for her children, one of whom has asthma and the other struggles with focal epilepsy.

Her 10-year-old was complaining of headaches daily, and her 7-year-old was having daily meltdowns due to fatigue and irritability.

“My initial grievance hearing under SB40 was a request for accommodations to be made for my children who were having difficulty learning due to prolonged mask use and the symptoms they were experiencing with mask usem,” she said in an email. “The hearing officer recommended my request be granted but the BOE did not respond to my individual request but simply voted 7-0 to maintain the current mask policy.”

Myrick said both her children were having adverse reactions to the masks — to include severe headaches daily — but the district was unpersuaded. She was able to secure “unofficial” mask breaks for her children, but that required them — per the district — to go to the nurse’s office, taking them out of class.

Laura Bauer & Judy Thomas:

Taken into foster care, through the eyes of a child

Before she was an inmate, Michelle Voorhees was a kid in foster care. Painting a vivid picture, Voorhees asks you to imagine the harrowing, disconcerting experience of being removed from your own home. By Shelly Yang | Neil Nakahodo

For the past year, The Kansas City Star has examined what happens to kids who age out of foster care and found that, by nearly every measure, states are failing in their role as parents to America’s most vulnerable children.

Roughly 23,000 kids across the country are churned out of the system every year, and their lives highlight a distinct path traveled by many:

Taken from an unstable home. Terrified by their first contact with the state. Emotionally and cognitively damaged in care as they are moved from home to home. Robbed of an education equal to their peers. Turned out to the streets unprepared to stand on their own. And changed for life.

“We are sending more foster kids to prison than college,” said Brent Kent, who spent the past 3½ years helping Indiana foster children transition into adulthood. “And what do we lose as a result? Generations of young people.

“I think as a society we view foster children the same way that we might view offenders coming out of prison or addicts in recovery. We forget that they are just children, that they were put in foster care and removed from their families through no fault of their own.”

As part of its investigation, The Star surveyed nearly 6,000 inmates in 12 states — representing every region of the country — to determine how many had been in foster care and what effect it had on their lives.

Of the inmates who took the survey, 1 in 4 said they were the product of foster care. Some spent the majority of their childhood in strangers’ homes, racking up more placements than birthdays.

Strong towns:

In this sense, Kansas City, Missouri is no different than most communities in the United States and Canada. In the last 70 years, the physical size of Kansas City has quadrupled while the population has remained relatively stable. (Put another way, every resident of Kansas City is on the hook for maintaining four times as much of the city as his or her predecessors.) In Kansas City, there are 6,500 linear miles of lanes just in the city street system—so not including county, state and federal roadways. This is the equivalent of driving from New York to San Francisco and back, with a bonus trip to Portland, Maine. According to the Kansas City public works department, to maintain and replace existing roads it needs ten times more money each year than it can ask for. 

While these stats are specific to Kansas City, Missouri, the story is familiar to anyone who has come to recognize the effects of the suburban development pattern: we’ve built cities we can’t afford.

Yet there are two assets that set Kansas City apart from many other communities. One is that the city has “great bones.” As Dennis Strait, managing principle of Gould Evans Kansas City, describes in the video above, Kansas City grew quickly from a village to a city following many of the best lessons humans have gleaned from 5,000 years of city-building. The positive effects of this ancient wisdom can still be felt today, and Kansas City’s most productive neighborhoods are often its oldest. The negative effects of bad policies—such as racist redlining—can still be felt too, Strait says.

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“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”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

Casey Geraldo:

The I-TEAM verified with a district spokesperson who clarified in an email that “the superintendent has the ability to appoint these positions regardless of an application process or not.” He continued, writing “I’d be curious to learn if that is common practice for other large districts.”

We called other similar-sized districts. Both Kansas City and St. Louis have processes that include an application and interviews. Milwaukee’s process does not.

Superintendent Keith Posley’s office declined several interview requests over two months. The I-Team’s Casey Geraldo caught up to him in a stairwell after a school board meeting. In response to a question about how he knows he’s chosen the best people to run the district, he said: “I know I have the best people working for the district.”

His office declined another opportunity to interview after the stairwell meeting.

Related: “an emphasis on adult employment.”

Joel Myers:

New York City has not had a daily high temperature above 100 degrees since 2012, and it has had only five such days since 2002. However, in a previous 18-year span from 1984 through 2001, New York City had nine days at 100 degrees or higher. When the power went out in New York City earlier this month, the temperature didn’t even get to 100 degrees – it was 95, which is not extreme. For comparison, there were 12 days at 95 degrees or higher in 1999 alone.
Kansas City, Missouri, for example, experienced an average of 18.7 days a year at 100 degrees or higher during the 1930s, compared to just 5.5 a year over the last 10 years. And over the last 30 years, Kansas City has averaged only 4.8 days a year at 100 degrees or higher, which is only one-quarter of the frequency of days at 100 degrees or higher in the 1930s.
Here is a fact rarely, if ever, mentioned: 26 of the 50 states set their all-time high temperature records during the 1930s that still stand (some have since been tied). And an additional 11 state all-time high temperature records were set before 1930 and only two states have all-time record high temperatures that were set in the 21st century (South Dakota and South Carolina).
So 37 of the 50 states have an all-time high temperature record not exceeded for more than 75 years. Given these numbers and the decreased frequency of days of 100 degrees or higher, it cannot be said that either the frequency or magnitude of heat waves is more common today.

Peter Coy, Katia Dmitrieva and Matthew Boesler:

There’s a lot of debate swirling around Modern Monetary Theory—some strident. Its critics call it a hot mess. “MMT has constructed such a bizarre, illogical, convoluted way of thinking about macro that it’s almost impervious to attack,” Bentley University economist Scott Sumner claimed recently on his blog. MMT’s proponents say it’s the critics who are impervious to reason—“part of a degenerative paradigm that has lost credibility,” says Australian MMTer William Mitchell.

This state of confusion isn’t good because Modern Monetary Theory, once confined to blogs and a handful of colleges including the University of Missouri at Kansas City, suddenly matters. In the U.S., the left wing of the Democratic Party is citing MMT to make the case for massive federal government spending on a Green New Deal to wean the U.S. off fossil fuels and fund Medicare for All. It’s virtually certain that MMT will be dragged into the debates of the 2020 presidential race. So the time is right for a semi-deep dive into Modern Monetary Theory—what it is, where it comes from, its pros and its cons.

College Fix:

Under scrutiny from lawmakers of both parties and academic groups, universities have been closing their Chinese government-run centers at a brisk pace.

The University of Kansas has not publicly moved to shutter its Confucius Institute, however, and a KU student wanted to know if administrators had discussed the possibility. He filed a public records request a month ago.

The taxpayer-funded university gave him an answer Thursday: $506.50.

Conner Mitchell set up a crowdfunding page to raise the money demanded by KU to hand over emails from top administrators that include the phrase “Confucius Institute.” He describes himself as a freelance journalist who has previously written for The Kansas City Star, Palm Beach Post and KU’s hometown newspaper, the Lawrence Journal-World.

“I simply don’t have the funds to pay for a request like this, even though I think the results could be of great public interest,” Mitchell wrote, explaining that his interest was piqued by the University of Michigan’s planned closure of its Confucius Institute.

KU’s institute “has caused controversy in the past,” he continued: “So I’m asking for your help, not only to pay for this request, but to show public agencies they can’t make requesters go away simply by charging a high amount for records about public business.”

Public-records expert Frank LoMonte, director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida, denounced the university for requiring payment for records that should be free in the first place.

Nellie Bowles:

The parents in Overland Park, Kan., were fed up. They wanted their children off screens, but they needed strength in numbers. First, because no one wants their kid to be the lone weird one without a phone. And second, because taking the phone away from a middle schooler is actually very, very tough.

“We start the meetings by saying, ‘This is hard, we’re in a new frontier, but who is going to help us?’” said Krista Boan, who is leading a Kansas City-based program called START, which stands for Stand Together And Rethink Technology. “We can’t call our moms about this one.”

For the last six months, at night in school libraries across Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., about 150 parents have been meeting to talk about one thing: how to get their kids off screens.

It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide. Schools ask students to do homework online, while only about two-thirds of people in the U.S. have broadband internet service. But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.

powerline:

Katherine Kersten is a Senior Fellow at Center of the American Experiment, the think tank that I run. In the Fall 2017 issue of our magazine, Thinking Minnesota, she wrote a long, thoroughly documented expose of leftist political indoctrination and bullying of nonconforming students, teachers and staff in the Edina, Minnesota public school system. She did a follow-up story in the Winter 2018 issue of the magazine. Because of their quality and depth of reporting, these articles (along with an op-ed by Kathy in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on the same subject) triggered a vigorous local debate.

The issue of left-wing indoctrination in the schools is, of course, of national interest, and Kathy’s articles began to attract attention from national news outlets, as well. The Weekly Standard commissioned a piece by Kathy which greatly expanded the national reach of the story. Kathy’s Weekly Standard article was featured on the Drudge Report. Links to the article were tweeted by prominent conservatives like Brit Hume. Fox’s Dana Perino included it in her weekly reading list. Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist whose recent book was the #1 best seller on Amazon for several weeks, discussed it. The piece became one of the Weekly Standard’s most-read articles of 2018.

Many popular web sites linked to, and discussed, Kathy’s various Edina articles, including, of course, Power Line. In addition, national web sites including Real Clear Politics, InstaPundit (three times), Fox News, the Kansas City Star, the Independent Women’s Forum, Intellectual Takeout, Education News, Breitbart, The American Conservative, PJ Media, Erick Erickson in the Macon, Georgia Telegraph, Legal Insurrection, Frontpage Magazine, Hot Air, Alpha News, and many more.

In addition, Kathy appeared on television on Fox & Friends, and on Dennis Prager’s radio show, and was also a guest on a number of local radio programs across the country. Her stories about indoctrination and bullying in the Edina schools truly had gone national.

Thus, I was not surprised to get an email from Solvejg Wastvedt, a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio, on March 5. Ms. Wastvedt said that she wanted to interview me. She wrote:

C. Kirabo Jackson, Cora Wigger and Heyu Xiong:

Audits of public school budgets routinely find evidence of waste. Also, recent evidence finds that when school budgets are strained, public schools can employ cost-saving measures with no ill-effect on students. We theorize that if budget cuts induce schools to eliminate wasteful spending, the effects of spending cuts may be small (and even zero). To explore this empirically, we examine how student performance responded to school spending cuts induced by the Great Recession. We link nationally representative test score and survey data to school spending data and isolate variation in recessionary spending cuts that were unrelated to changes in economic conditions. Consistent with the theory, districts that faced large revenue cuts disproportionately reduced spending on non-core operations. However, they still reduced core operational spending to some extent. A 10 percent school spending cut reduced test scores by about 7.8 percent of a standard deviation. Moreover, a 10 percent spending reduction during all four high-school years was associated with 2.6 percentage points lower graduation rates. While our estimates are smaller than some in the literature, spending cuts do matter.

Related: COMMENTARY ON K-12 TAX, SPENDING AND OUTCOMES: KANSAS CITY AND MADISON:

Alex Zimmerman:

“They buried us while we were breathing,” said Deidre Walker, a math teacher at J.H.S. 145, a Bronx middle school that will now close at the end of the school year. “The resources weren’t given.”

All five schools are part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Renewal initiative, a program designed to flood them with additional academic resources and social services to help sow improvements rather than closing them outright — the approach favored by the Bloomberg administration.

Given previous mergers and closures, the education panel’s vote will mean that, starting next school year, 78 schools will remain in the program, down from an original 94.

Kansas City’s spending explosion.

Francine Prose:

Search the Internet for news stories about public libraries in America and chances are that, sooner or later, the phrase “on the front lines” will come up. The war that is being referred to, and that libraries have been quietly waging since the September 11 attacks, is in defense of free speech and privacy—two concepts so fundamental to our democracy, our society, and our Constitution that one can’t help noting how rarely their importance has been mentioned during the current election cycle. In fact quite the opposite has been true: Donald Trump has encouraged the muzzling of reporters and the suppression of political protest, while arguing that government agencies aren’t doing enough spying on private citizens, especially Muslims. Hillary Clinton has failed to be specific about what she would do to limit surveillance, while her running mate, Tim Kaine, has promised to expand “intelligence gathering.” Meanwhile, public libraries continue to be threatened by government surveillance—and even police interference.

In the most recent such incident, a librarian in Kansas City, Missouri was arrested simply for standing up for a library patron’s free speech rights at a public event featuring a former US diplomat. Both the librarian and the patron face criminal charges. The incident took place last May, but went largely unnoticed until several advocacy groups called attention to the situation at the end of September. In cooperation with the Truman Presidential Library and the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City, the Kansas City Public Library had invited Dennis Ross—a former advisor on the Middle East to Presidents George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama, and to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and currently a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy—to speak about Truman and Israel at its Plaza Branch. The library hosts between twelve and twenty speakers each month, and though some of the topics and speakers have been controversial, the events have always been peaceful.

Noah Smith:

The case against spending more on schools comes in two basic forms. One is to look at various U.S. states, and see whether the ones that spend more on education enjoy better outcomes. This has been done many times, with decidedly mixed results. Some studies show little state-by-state correlation between spending levels and educational performance, while others show a fairly substantial one.

The second case against increased spending comes from looking at correlations across time. If more money is better, we’d expect to see increases in school funding followed by improvements in performance. In fact, though public school spending has increased a lot in the past couple of decades, achievement hasn’t really increased much.

So with mixed evidence from state-by-state analysis and discouraging evidence from the history of spending increases, many people are ready to conclude that throwing more money at education is a losing battle. Some spending opponents place their hopes in charter schools and other reform efforts, while others claim that education just doesn’t work — that academic ability is either innate or learned from an early age.

Kansas City dramatically increased spending years ago, and……

Tom James:

The central focus of his legal action would be to get the state Supreme Court to rule on the legality of continuing to use local levies to supplement teacher and staff pay. The court has already ruled that paying for essential parts of education is a state duty, not a local one. But local districts continue to collect levies that pay for basic parts of public school

Dorn added that he had been trying to put together some kind of legal action on the issue since before the start of the legislative session. Gathering support for the move and deciding on the right legal approach has taken time.

The Kansas City spending experience is worth reviewing.

Caitlin Emma:

The difference between the schools was in their readiness to make use of the sudden infusion of money. In Miami, school district officials had prepared for the grants. They had the support of teachers, unions and parents. In Chicago, where teachers fought the program and officials changed almost yearly, schools churned through millions of dollars but didn’t budge the needle.

Now, the Department of Education is preparing for another multi-million grant competition. But interviews by POLITICO with nearly two dozen analysts, teachers, administrators and policymakers, who have studied the performance of SIG schools, raise questions about whether any of the changes ordered by the Department of Education or Congress will actually yield better results for the money spent.

History is useful: Kansas City exploded K-12 spending as well…

Locally, Madison spends more than most yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Tap to view a larger version of these images.

Martin F. Lueken, Ph.D., Rick Esenberg & CJ Szafir, via a kind reader (PDF):

Robustness checks: Lastly, to check if the estimates from our main analysis behave differently when we modify our models, we conduct a series of robustness checks in our analysis. We estimate models with alternate specifications, disaggregate the spending variable by function, and examine an alternate data set that includes one year of school-level expenditures. Details about these approaches and their results are described and reported in Appendix B. As with our main analysis, we did not find conclusive evidence to indicate that marginal changes in spending had a significant impact on student outcomes.

Conclusion: We do not find reliable evidence in the data that a systematic relationship exists between additional spending and student outcomes. These results are similar to a larger body of research on the effectiveness of spending. Economist Eric Hanushek (2003), for example, systematically reviewed research on the effectiveness of key educational resources in U.S. schools. In examining the impact of per-pupil educational expenditures, he tallied the statistical significance and impact of 163 estimates on the impact of spending on student outcomes and found that 27% of these estimates were positive and statistically significant, while 66% were not statistically significant, meaning no impacts were detected.

Advocates for keeping the status quo argue for increasing education spending to solve problems with our education system. But, it is not the case that resources alone will bring about improvement – even substantial infusions of resources, as was the case with Kansas City’s experience. One plausible explanation may be that districts have reached what economists call diminishing returns. This occurs when an organization reaches a point where additional dollars spent do not produce proportional benefits, holding everything else constant. For example, a dollar spent on education in developing counties, such as India, is more likely to have a greater impact than in Wisconsin – or elsewhere in the United States – which spends more than most of the developed world.

This raises a question for policymakers: Has Wisconsin hit a wall where an additional dollar in education spending will not bring improvements in student outcomes? The results of our research indicate that this may be the case.

….

Funding disparities between schools
As Figure 8 shows, significant disparities in public funding exist among traditional public schools and both private schools in the choice program and independent public charter schools. The amount that independent charters and choice schools receive is set by state law. Currently, the amount of a voucher for the choice programs is $7,210 for K- 8 and $7,856 for grades 9-12.

Independent charters in Milwaukee receive the same amount (state law reflects that). Public school districts, on average, receive $12,512 per pupil. Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) receives $14,333 per pupil (Figure 8).

This disparity is not new. Since 2000, expenditures increased for public schools statewide by 3% while it decreased for independent charter and private schools in the parental choice program by 7% to 8% (adjusted for inflation, i.e. “real”).43 Notably, revenues for MPS increased by 15% in real terms.

Locally, Madison spends double the national average per student, or more than $15K annually, yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Scott Jaschik:

The University of Missouri at Kansas City gave the Princeton Review false information designed to inflate the rankings of its business school, which was under pressure from its major donor to keep the ratings up, according to an outside audit released Friday.

The audit — by PricewaterhouseCoopers — described the process by which business school officials came up with creative reasons to provide data that many at the school believed to be false, and that the audit found to be false. In one case, for example, the university created a wish list of clubs that it might support to promote entrepreneurial students. The university then reported that its wish list was reality and that it had all of those clubs, which in fact did not exist.

Courtney Martin:

“Do you think this is the right color ribbon?” asked a petite brunette, her hair pulled back in a haphazard ponytail, her college sweatshirt engulfing her tiny frame. “And do you think these are the right length of sections I’m cutting? I don’t want it to be all funky when we pin them on.”
“Mmm … I’m not sure,” said the guy next to her, sucking on a lollipop, his football-player physique totally evident in his tight band T-shirt.
“Looks good to me,” his roommate said without even glancing over at the ribbon or the girl.
Meet the college anti-war movement.
I just got back from a two-week campus speaking tour during which I had the privilege of hanging out in a women’s center at a Catholic college, eating bad Mexican food with Mennonite feminists, and chatting with aspiring writers and activists at a college in which half the students are the first in their families to experience higher education. I heard the stories of transgender youth in Kansas City, jocks with food addictions in Jacksonville, and student organizers who are too overwhelmed to address all the world’s problems in Connecticut.

Mara Rose Williams:

On the same day that state officials left Kansas City Public Schools unaccredited for now, Mayor Sly James and Superintendent Steve Green asked state lawmakers to support their efforts to improve education in the city.
At a public hearing before 18 members of the 22-member Missouri House Interim Committee on Education, the conversation ranged from a push for early childhood education to support for the mayor’s city-wide reading initiative. The potential transfer of students from unaccredited Kansas City schools to surrounding suburban districts also was discussed.
The committee, which is traveling the state hearing from educators and residents, said its plan is to put together a report on what people across Missouri say is needed to improve education and present it to other legislators.

Much more on the Kansas City schools, here.

I applaud the Wisconsin State Journal’s efforts to dig deeper into the Madison Superintendent search process. A kind reader pointed out to me how “shocking” it is that Barbara Thompson was NOT one of the two finalists.
The Madison School Board named these two finalists:

Jennifer Cheatham – apparently selected.
Walter Milton, Jr. – withdrew under a cloud of controversy.
from a larger group that included:

• Joe Gothard, Madison’s assistant superintendent for secondary education.
• Barbara Thompson, a former Madison principal and New Glarus superintendent who is currently superintendent in Montgomery, Ala.
• Tony Apostle, a retired superintendent from the Puyallup School District near Tacoma, Wash.
• Curtis Cain, administrator of the Shawnee Mission School District near Kansas City, Mo.
• Sandra Smyser, superintendent of Eagle County Schools in Eagle, Colo.

Matthew DeFour:

The newspaper sought the names of all candidates interviewed by the School Board and background material provided. The district disclosed those names along with background materials for the two finalists it named publicly, Milton and Cheatham.
The other finalists were:
• Joe Gothard, Madison’s assistant superintendent for secondary education.
• Barbara Thompson, a former Madison principal and New Glarus superintendent who is currently superintendent in Montgomery, Ala.
• Tony Apostle, a retired superintendent from the Puyallup School District near Tacoma, Wash.
• Curtis Cain, administrator of the Shawnee Mission School District near Kansas City, Mo.
• Sandra Smyser, superintendent of Eagle County Schools in Eagle, Colo.
Cheatham and Milton were the only finalists the board named on Feb. 3. They were scheduled to appear together at a community forum on Feb. 7, but Milton abruptly dropped out two days before the event amid questions about his background.

Ovetta Wiggins:

A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual.
The measure has some worried that by the system claiming ownership to the work of others, creativity could be stifled and there would be little incentive to come up with innovative ways to educate students. Some have questioned the legality of the proposal as it relates to students.
“There is something inherently wrong with that,” David Cahn, an education activist who regularly attends county school board meetings, said before the board’s vote to consider the policy. “There are better ways to do this than to take away a person’s rights.”
If the policy is approved, the county would become the only jurisdiction in the Washington region where the school board assumes ownership of work done by the school system’s staff and students.
David Rein, a lawyer and adjunct law professor who teaches intellectual property at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, said he had never heard of a local school board enacting a policy allowing it to hold the copyright for a student’s work.

Orwellian.
Related: Aaron Swartz:

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by federal authorities in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR.[8][9] Swartz opposed JSTOR’s practice of compensating publishers, rather than authors, out of the fees it charges for access to articles. Swartz contended that JSTOR’s fees were limiting public access to academic work that was being supported by public funding.[10][11]

Dylan Pauly, Legal Services:

Dr. Nerad recently announced his retirement effective June 30, 2013. Consequently, over the next few months this Board will be required to begin its search for the next District leader. While some members of the Board were Board members during the search that brought Dr. Nerad to Madison, many were not. A number of members have asked me to provide some background information so that they may familiarize themselves with the process that was used in 2007. Consequently, I have gathered the following documents for your review:
1. Request for Proposals: Consultation Services for Superintendent Search, Proposal 3113, dated March 19, 2007;
2. Minutes from Board meetings on February 26,2007, and March 12,2007, reflecting Board input and feedback regarding draft versions ofthe RFP;
3. Contract with Hazard, Young and Attea;
4. A copy of the Notice of Vacancy that was published in Education Week;
5. Minutes from a Board meeting on August 27, 2007, which contains the general timeline used to complete the search process; and,
6. Superintendent Search- Leadership Profile Development Session Schedule, which reflects how community engagement was handled during the previous search.
It is also my understanding that the Board may wish to create an ad hoc committee to handle various procedural tasks related to the search process. In line with Board Policy 1041, I believe it is appropriate to take official action in open session to create the new ad hoc. I recommend the following motion:

Dave Zweiful shares his thoughts on Dan Nerad’s retirement.
Related: Notes and links on Madison Superintendent hires since 1992.

Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater’s recent public announcement that he plans to retire in 2008 presents an opportunity to look back at previous searches as well as the K-12 climate during those events. Fortunately, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, we can quickly lookup information from the recent past.

The Madison School District’s two most recent Superintendent hires were Cheryl Wilhoyte [Clusty] and Art Rainwater [Clusty]. Art came to Madison from Kansas City, a district which, under court order, dramatically increased spending by “throwing money at their schools”, according to Paul Ciotti:

2008 Madison Superintendent candidate public appearances:

• Dan Nerad
• Steve Gallon
• James McIntyre

The Madison Superintendent position’s success is subject to a number of factors, including: the 182 page Madison Teachers, Inc. contract, which may become the District’s handbook (Seniority notes and links)…, state and federal laws, hiring practices, teacher content knowledge, the School Board, lobbying and community economic conditions (tax increase environment) among others.

Superintendent Nerad’s reign has certainly been far more open about critical issues such as reading, math and open enrollment than his predecessor (some board members have certainly been active with respect to improvement and accountability). The strings program has also not been under an annual assault, lately. That said, changing anything in a large organization, not to mention a school district spending nearly $15,000 per student is difficult, as Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman pointed out in 2009.

Would things improve if a new Superintendent enters the scene? Well, in this case, it is useful to take a look at the District’s recent history. In my view, diffused governance in the form of more independent charter schools and perhaps a series of smaller Districts, possibly organized around the high schools might make a difference. I also think the District must focus on just a few things, namely reading/writing, math and science. Change is coming to our agrarian era school model (or, perhaps the Frederick Taylor manufacturing model is more appropriate). Ideally, Madison, given its unparalleled tax and intellectual base should lead the way.

Perhaps we might even see the local Teachers union authorize charters as they are doing in Minneapolis.

Matthew DeFour:

If Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad’s job performance were judged like a student taking the state achievement test, he would score barely proficient, according to the Madison School Board’s most recent evaluation.
The evaluation, completed last month and released to the State Journal under the state’s Open Records Law, reveals the School Board’s divided view of Nerad’s performance.
School Board President James Howard said he expects the board to vote later this month on whether to extend Nerad’s contract beyond June 2013. The decision has been delayed as Nerad’s achievement gap plan is reviewed by the public, Howard said.
Soon after that plan was proposed last month, Howard said he would support extending Nerad’s contract. Now, Howard says he is uncertain how he’ll vote.
“It’s probably a toss-up,” he said. “There’s a lot of issues on the table in Madison. It’s time to resolve them. All this kicking-the-can-down-the-road stuff has to stop.”
Nerad said he has always welcomed feedback on how he can improve as a leader.

Related: Notes and links on Madison Superintendent hires since 1992.

Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater’s recent public announcement that he plans to retire in 2008 presents an opportunity to look back at previous searches as well as the K-12 climate during those events. Fortunately, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, we can quickly lookup information from the recent past.
The Madison School District’s two most recent Superintendent hires were Cheryl Wilhoyte [Clusty] and Art Rainwater [Clusty]. Art came to Madison from Kansas City, a district which, under court order, dramatically increased spending by “throwing money at their schools”, according to Paul Ciotti:

2008 Madison Superintendent candidate public appearances:

• Dan Nerad
• Steve Gallon
• James McIntyre

The Madison Superintendent position’s success is subject to a number of factors, including: the 182 page Madison Teachers, Inc. contract, which may become the District’s handbook (Seniority notes and links)…, state and federal laws, hiring practices, teacher content knowledge, the School Board, lobbying and community economic conditions (tax increase environment) among others.
Superintendent Nerad’s reign has certainly been far more open about critical issues such as reading, math and open enrollment than his predecessor (some board members have certainly been active with respect to improvement and accountability). The strings program has also not been under an annual assault, lately. That said, changing anything in a large organization, not to mention a school district spending nearly $15,000 per student is difficult, as Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman pointed out in 2009.
Would things improve if a new Superintendent enters the scene? Well, in this case, it is useful to take a look at the District’s recent history. In my view, diffused governance in the form of more independent charter schools and perhaps a series of smaller Districts, possibly organized around the high schools might make a difference. I also think the District must focus on just a few things, namely reading/writing, math and science. Change is coming to our agrarian era school model (or, perhaps the Frederick Taylor manufacturing model is more appropriate). Ideally, Madison, given its unparalleled tax and intellectual base should lead the way.
Perhaps we might even see the local Teachers union authorize charters as they are doing in Minneapolis.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Madison school chief Dan Nerad’s plan to close the district’s achievement gap is certainly bold about spending money.
It seeks an estimated $105 million over five years for a slew of ideas — many of them already in place or attempted, just not to the degree Nerad envisions.
The school superintendent argues a comprehensive approach is needed to boost the academic performance of struggling minority and low-income students. No one approach will magically lift the district’s terrible graduation rates of just 48 percent for black students and 57 percent for Latinos.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
Related:

• What Impact do High School Mathematics Curricula have on College (PDF)?
• Wisconsin Property Tax Growth: 1984-2012 (!)
• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
• Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
• Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad releases plan to address achievement gap @ Isthmus

Listen to most of the speech via this 25mb .mp3 file.

Well worth reading: Money And School Performance:
Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment:

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.

And, In Kansas City, tackling education’s status quo “We’re not an Employment Agency, We’re a School District”