Category Archives: Board Meeting Archives

Board Meeting Archives, Curriculum, School Climate, Student Support, TAG, What Can I Do?

West HS English 10: Time to Show Us the Data

According to the November, 2005, report by SLC Evaluator Bruce King, the overriding motivation for the implementation of West’s English 10 core curriculum (indeed, the overriding motivation for the implementation of the entire 9th and 10th grade core curriculum) was to reduce the achievement gap. As described in the report, some groups of West students were performing more poorly in English than were other groups of West students. Poor performance was defined as:

  1. not electing to take the more rigorous English electives offered at West during 11th and 12th grade and
  2. failing one or more English classes.

The current West 10th graders — the first class to take English 10 — has almost finished two semesters of the new course. As well, they registered for their 11th grade courses several weeks ago. Seems to me it’s about time to take a look at the early data.
I would like to know what English courses the current 500 or so West sophomores signed up for for next year and if the distribution of their course selections — broken down by student groups — looks significantly different from that of previous 10th grade classes? When final grades come out later this month, I would also like to know what the impact of the first two semesters of English 10 has been on the achievement gap as defined by the “grade earned” criterion.
Thinking about the need to evaluate the impact of English 10 brings to mind the absence of data on English 9 that became so glaringly apparent last year. [English 9 — like English 10, a core curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes — has been in place at West for several years. And yet, according to Mr. King’s report, it is not clear if English 9 has done anything to reduce the achievement gap in English among West students. (More precisely, according to email with Mr. King and others after the SLC report was made public, it is not clear that the impact of English 9 on the achievement gap at West has even been empirically evaluated. Readers may recall that some of us tried valiantly to get the English 10 initiative put off, so that the effect of English 9 could be thoroughly evaluated. Unfortunately, we failed.)] I would like to know what has been done this year to evaluate the impact of English 9 on the gap in achievement between different groups of West HS students.
Bruce (King), Heather (Lott), Ed (Holmes) and Art (Rainwater), I do hope you will soon “show us the data,” as they say, for West’s English 9 and English 10. And BOE, I do hope you will insist on seeing these data asap.
While we’re at it, what do the before-and-after data look like for Memorial’s 9th grade core curriculum? (In contrast to West, Memorial implemented only a 9th grade core curriculum. TAG and Honors classes still begin in 10th grade, as does access to Memorial’s 17 AP classes.)
With the District in the process of applying for a federal grant that may well result in the spread of the West model to the other three comprehensive high schools, we should all be interested in these data.
So should officials in the Department of Education.

Board Meeting Archives, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

Madison Schools’ “Restorative Justice”

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“Madison Parent”:

The superintendent, school board president and other school board candidates are already talking as if this were a done deal. But what is “restorative justice,” and what will it mean to have student misconduct addressed with a “restorative justice” approach? A layperson’s online search leads to academic papers in the criminal and juvenile justice area from fields ranging from sociology, social work, philosophy and theology, but not much specific research or data on whether or how “restorative justice” has been found to work as an approach to addressing misconduct in schools. The decision to move away from a discipline-based approach to a “restorative justice” approach will have an immediate, on-the-ground, daily impact on the school climate and educational experience encountered by the students and teachers in our schools, and parents of children in the public schools here may very well have the following questions:

Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, PTO Priorities, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Notes and Links on the Madison K-12 Climate and 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:

In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. In an effort to bring the district into compliance with his liberal interpretation of federal law, the judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms.
It didn’t work. When the judge, in March 1997, finally agreed to let the state stop making desegregation payments to the district after 1999, there was little to show for all the money spent. Although the students enjoyed perhaps the best school facilities in the country, the percentage of black students in the largely black district had continued to increase, black students’ achievement hadn’t improved at all, and the black-white achievement gap was unchanged.(1)
The situation in Kansas City was both a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for supporters of increased funding for public schools. From the beginning, the designers of the district’s desegregation and education plan openly touted it as a controlled experiment that, once and for all, would test two radically different philosophies of education. For decades critics of public schools had been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” Educators and advocates of public schools, on the other hand, had always responded by saying, “No one’s ever tried.”

Cheryl Wilhoyte was hired, with the support of the two local dailies (Wisconsin State Journal, 9/30/1992: Search No Further & Cap Times Editorial, 9/21/1992: Wilhoyte Fits Madison) by a school board 4-3 vote. The District’s budget in 1992-1993 was $180,400,000 with local property taxes generating $151,200,00 of that amount. 14 years later, despite the 1993 imposition of state imposed annual school spending increase limits (“Revenue Caps“), the 2006 budget is $331,000,000. Dehli’s article mentions that the 1992-1993 School Board approved a 12.9% school property tax increase for that budget. An August, 1996 Capital Times editorial expressed puzzlement over terms of Cheryl Wilhoyte’s contract extension.
Art, the only applicant, was promoted from Acting Superintendent to Superintendent in January, 1999. Chris Murphy’s January, 1999 article includes this:

Since Wilhoyte’s departure, Rainwater has emerged as a popular interim successor. Late last year, School Board members received a set of surveys revealing broad support for a local superintendent as opposed to one hired from outside the district. More than 100 of the 661 respondents recommended hiring Rainwater.

Art was hired on a 7-0 vote but his contract was not as popular – approved on a 5-2 vote (Carol Carstensen, Calvin Williams, Deb Lawson, Joanne Elder and Juan Jose Lopez voted for it while Ray Allen and Ruth Robarts voted no). The contract was and is controversial, as Ruth Robarts wrote in September, 2004.
A February, 2004 Doug Erickson summary of Madison School Board member views of Art Rainwater’s tenure to date.
Quickly reading through a few of these articles, I found that the more things change, the more they stay the same:

Fascinating. Perhaps someone will conduct a much more detailed review of the record, which would be rather useful over the next year or two.

Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, What Can I Do?

2007 – 2008 Madison School District Budget Discussions Underway

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Watch Monday evening’s school board discussion [Video | Download] of the upcoming larger than usual reductions in revenue cap limited increases in the District’s 2007 – 2008 budget (they are larger than normal due to the recently disclosed 7 year structural budget deficit). The 2006 / 2007 budget is $333M+ (it was $245M in 98/99 while enrollment has remained flat, though the student composition continues to change).

Related Links:

Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Curriculum, Health Care, TAG

Board of Education meeting of 30-Oct-2006

The October 30, 2006 Board of Education met to discuss a series of resolutions, and approve the final 2006-07 MMSD Budget, and approve the AFSCME Local 60 contract.

QT Video
 The video of the meeting is 210MB, and 2 hours and 30 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.
Public Appearances
There was a public appearance by Barbara Lewis who expressed concern over the apparent change in policy of MMSD in granting high school credit for courses taken at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Both Superintendent Art Rainwater and Director of Alternative Programs Steve Hartley discussed the issues with the Board and clarified that the policy statement which Ms. Lewis had received, and which apparently was being misinterpreted by some high school staff referred only to Independent Study. The Board, noting confusion of parents, school staff and themselves, requested that these issues be placed on the Board agenda as soon as possible.
Agenda Item #4
Resolution supporting expenditures for school security be placed outside the revenue caps.
Agenda Item #5
Resolution supporting language by the Superintendent and other superintendents that the State adopt the Adequacy Model for school funding.
Agenda Item #6 – Discussion and Approval of 2006-2007 Budget
This portion of the meeting begins at approximately 20 minutes into the meeting and continues until the Board votes to approve the tax levy amount at 2 hours into the meeting. Final approval of the full budget is rescheduled for a later meeting. The discussions included issues of fund equity, the fund reserve, the unexpected decrease of State support, liquidation of earnings on Chavez building funds, changes in the budget necessary to offset decrease in State support, and the minimum decisions the Board needed to make to meet budget deadline.
Agenda Item #7
Approval of the AFSCME Local 60 contract, in which the District and Union agree to a health care package containing only HMOs, saving the District significant healthcare costs, in exchange for a generous wage increase.

Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, What Can I Do?

A bit of Sunshine on the Madison School District’s Budget Process: 2006/2007 Madison School District Budget & $6M “Structural Deficit” Discussions

video here There’s been a fascinating school board discussion over the past few weeks as the 2006/2007 $332M+ Madison schools budget is finalized.

(about 41 minutes into this 61 minute video clip) Lawrie Kobza:

“Why did our equity go down this past year since we, the board, passed a balanced budget in 2005/2006? Why did it go down by $2.8M (about a 1% variance in last year’s $319M+ budget)?

Answer: “Negative expenditure of $6M in salaries (tuition income was down, special ed high incidence aid was down) $5.9M “structural deficit in place”.”

Art Rainwater:

“The way we have attempted to deal with maintaining the quality of education as long as we could was to budget very, very aggressively, realizing that we had an out of fund balance ($5.9M in 2006/2007). We made the decision 7 years ago or so to budget aggressively and try to manage to that budget believing that we would use less fund equity over time than if we set aside a set amount. So that’s been our approach. That fund equity has now come down to the point that we believe we can’t do that any more and we will not bring you a balanced budget that is aggressive particularly where it gets into aggressive on the revenue side in how much efficiency we believe we can budget. So, what the effect of that is to increase the amount you have to pay.

Lawrie Kobza:

We budgeted under this CFO/COO account, we budgeted that we were going to find $6.1M somewhere without saying where, and we didn’t. We found all but 2.7M of that. In this year’s budget, we have the same type of thing. We have budgeted that we’re going to find $5.9M somewhere. So, while we can look at all of our budget items, oh, we’re doing great we’re right on budget for salaries, transportation, for whatever. We can’t just meet our budget, we have to do $5.9M better than our budget. We’re going to take this up in the Finance committee to see if there is a different way we can present some of this, to be able to track it.

Roger Price mentioned that this was not a new item, but was in place when he arrived in the mid 1990’s.

Ruth Robarts asked about a February 2006 consultant’s forecast of the District’s equity versus Roger Price’s Numbers (52 minutes). Ruth also asked about the financial implications of the District’s retirement buyout commitments through 2009. “I’ve been on the Board a long time and did not see in the documents I’ve seen that kind of structural deficit”.
Watch the video here or listen to the mp3 audio.

Bottom Line: Thanks to Lawrie Kobza’s digging, the public knows about the Madison School District’s $6M “structural deficit”. This also means that next year’s balanced budget will require significantly greater reductions in spending increases, or “cost to continue approach” than we’ve seen in the past. It would also be interesting to see how our District’s “equity” or cash reserves have declined over the years.
The good news regarding the budget’s “Fuzzy Math, or the balanced budget that isn’t” (there must be some)? The discussion happened publicly, on MMSDTV, and the community is now aware of looming larger budget changes than we’ve seen in the past. Unfortunately, I’ve seen no mention of this in the traditional media.
Run for school board!

Board Meeting Archives

Should Schools Be Included in Taxpayer Amendment

Mike Ellis:

Unfortunately, it appears the controls proposed for school districts under the constitutional amendment could undo all that. Just as troubling, it also appears the amendment could seriously disequalize taxes and spending across school districts in Wisconsin – something that itself would appear to violate an existing constitutional mandate that requires school districts to be “as nearly uniform as practical.”
When the proposed amendment was introduced last month, I asked the Legislative Fiscal Bureau to analyze its effect on school levies compared to the statutory revenue controls in current law. Because the proposed constitutional limits would not be in effect until the 2009-10 fiscal year, the bureau analysis estimated the effect of the amendment if it had been in effect for the current school year rather than the current statutory controls.
According to the Fiscal Bureau analysis, “In the absence of the statutory revenue limits, the total allowable levy under the joint resolutions would have been $3.71 billion, which would have been an increase of $117.8 million compared to the actual 2005-06 levy.”
That begs the question, why would we amend the constitution to increase property taxes more than $100 million? How can that be labeled taxpayer protection?

Board Meeting Archives, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, Student Support, TAG

Notes from Performance & Achievement Meeting on Ability Grouping

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At this past week’s meeting, Adam Gamoran from the UW Center for Educational Research spoke to the Board about ability grouping. Dr. Gamoran talked about how ability grouping often ends up grouping students by race and SES because these students enter school having had different early childhood experiences and different educational opportunities (recall Donna Ford discussing the number of books in the homes of low income and middle income families).
Dr. Gamoran noted that there are often differences in the classroom experiences of high and low ability groups of students in regards to teacher expectations, academic rigor, and teacher ability.
He also emphasized that there is no simple solution to the achievement gap. Heterogeneous or homogeneous grouping by themselves will not reduce the gap in achievement. However, there are some clear cut solutions that are obvious according to Dr. Gamoran.

  1. No more dead end classes like general math for the low ability students;
  2. high academic expectations for students of all ability levels; and
  3. teachers should not be assigned in a way that results in only the newest and least experienced teachers working with the low ability students, in other words, all students deserve quality instruction.

In discussing heterogeneous grouping, Dr. Gamoran noted that differentiation is hard work for teachers, and they need a lot of support and training in order to be successful.
Dr. Gamoran also shared an example of a school where heterogeneous grouping was successful. This was a school that was 51% free and reduced lunch, but because the school had a strong, dynamic leader and had gotten grants, they were able to recruit a top notch staff. Not only was the principal able to select which teachers worked in the school, but approximately half of the student body had to go through an interview process to get into the school, so this magnet school was selective about its teachers and its students. Class size was kept to 15 students and instruction went at a fast pace. Students who were struggling were expected to attend tutoring sessions on Saturdays. I think there was an expectation that parents would be involved in their student’s education, but I am not sure about that.
Obviously the situation in the Madison schools is different from this ideal, and that’s why I think it is important for the Board and the administration to hear from students and parents what it is like in the classroom. I should add that Bill Keys was very annoyed that the Board was even discussing this issue because he believes that the Board has no place in the classroom. According to Mr. Keys this is the responsibility of the teachers and administrators and they know better than the members of the Board what should be done in the classroom. However, I would argue that the teachers and administrators don’t know any better than the Board does about what happens in the classroom, and they certainly don’t know what it is like for high ability students in those classes. Those of us who have sat around the kitchen table while our children talk about their boredom, frustration, and lack of challenge need to help them understand and make our voices heard.

Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

East / West Task Force Report: Board Discussion and Public Comments

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Video | MP3 Audio

 Monday evening’s Board meeting presented a rather animated clash of wills between, it appears, those (A majority of the Board, based on the meeting discussions) who support Fitchburg’s Swan Creek residents and their desire to remain at a larger Leopold School vs. those who favor using existing District schools that have extra space for the 63 Fitchburg children (no other students would move under the plan discussed Monday evening), such as Lincoln and/or the Lincoln/Midvale pair.

Continue reading East / West Task Force Report: Board Discussion and Public Comments →

Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, What Can I Do?

06 – 07 Budget Positioning: HR and Business Services Presentation to the Madison School Board

The Madison School Board heard presentations this past Monday from The District’s HR Director, Bob Nadler and Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Roger Price. Both described the functions that their organizations provide to the District.
Bob Nadler’s Presentation: Video
Roger Price’s Presentation: Video

The District’s Budget increases annually ($329M this year for 24,490 students). The arguments begin over how that increase is spent. Ideally, the District’s curriculum strategy should drive the budget. Second, perhaps it would be useful to apply the same % increase to all budgets, leading to a balanced budget, within the revenue caps. Savings can be directed so that the Board can apply their strategy to the budget by elminating, reducing or growing programs. In all cases, the children should come first. It is possible to operate this way, as Loehrke notes below.
Learn more about the budget, including extensive historical data.
Steve Loehrke, President of the Weywauga-Fremont School District speaks to budget, governance and leadership issues in these two articles:

Athletics, Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, Curriculum - Fine Arts, Governance/Board Decision Making, Staff Support

September 20, 2004 MMSD Board of Education Meeting Audio/Video Clips

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Barb Schrank collected video & audio clips from last nights Madison School District Board of Education Meeting:

  • Don Hunt: Retired West High School Art Teacher Fine Arts Statement [MP3 1.4MB] [Quicktime Video] [Transcripts: html | PDF]
  • Barb Schrank Fine Arts Presentation [MP3 1.6MB] [Quicktime Video] [Transcripts: html | PDF]
  • Mariel Wozniak Fine Arts Presentation [MP3 1.9MB] [Quicktime Video] [Transcripts: html | PDF]
  • Juan Lopez lecture to Ruth Robarts [MP3 2.7MB] [Quicktime Video] [Transcripts: html | PDF]
  • Athletic Fees Presentation [MP3] [Quicktime Video] [Transcripts: html | PDF]

Lee Sensenbrenner summarized the meeting as well.