Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Will Any Milwaukee Child Be Left Behind?
Reforms allowed for Wisconsin schools
Last week, Wisconsin received a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requirements, setting up potentially big changes in our state's public schools.
While students in public schools will still be required to take standardized tests—albeit different tests that are aligned with the nationally recognized Common Core program—their performance goals have been altered to be more realistic.
The waiver also changes the labels used to identify struggling schools, a boost for students and teachers in “failing” schools that are show signs of improvement.
That said, the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has developed a “red flag” system that identifies struggling schools early and retains the right to intervene in the lowest performing schools to close achievement gaps, reduce absenteeism and raise graduation rates.
Teachers, too, will be affected by the changes. Students' test results will be one component—but not the only component—of their professional evaluations.
Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), said in a statement that the waiver was “good news” for state students and that it “sets the stage for the state Legislature to adopt legislation to hold all schools that receive taxpayer dollars, including those participating in the voucher program, to the same standards.”
MPS Already Implementing Waiver Requirements
But the reforms will have a mixed impact on Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), the state's largest school district and one that was penalized by NCLB's ever-more-stringent performance standards.
The upside is that the waiver grants MPS, and all schools receiving Title I funding for low-income students, more freedom in how they can use funds that NCLB would otherwise have required them to pay for private-sector tutoring services.
But the state's waiver will have little to no impact on the state DPI's ongoing intervention in MPS, according to documents filed by the state in its request for the waiver.
A spokesman for MPS Superintendent Gregory Thornton said he was still going through the details of the waiver and did not want to talk about the specific impact of it on MPS. But in a statement Thornton said he welcomed the changes in general.
“The waiver raises the bar for our students and holds us accountable and we embrace that,” Thornton said. “We look forward to meeting higher expectations. We are already aligned on a number of issues connected to the waiver, including implementing the Common Core for state standards, expanded ACT participation, graduation rate growth and tougher graduation requirements. We also look forward to working with the Department of Public Instruction to put resources where they're most needed, including having more control over the federal dollars used for tutoring.”
Bonds: The 'Milwaukee Miracle' Is Real
Under the original NCLB, the state was able to intervene in schools and districts that were failing to attain adequate yearly progress standards, which escalated each year. The waiver now eases those standards and implements new performance goals.
By 2014, all schools were expected to achieve 100% proficiency in reading and math, a goal that MPS Board President Michael Bonds called “unrealistic and detrimental to schools” because it labeled too many schools as failures and did not take into account the number of English-language learners, special education students or students living in poverty.
MPS schools have a high proportion of these harder-to-educate students. For example, special education students make up around 19% of the MPS population—higher than other Wisconsin schools and big urban districts around the country—and more than 80% of MPS students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Yet MPS was held to the same performance standards as every other school in the country, rich or poor, large or small, urban, suburban or rural.
“It punished schools when in reality there might be significant changes within the schools,” Bonds said.
While MPS students' test scores and graduation rates are improving, the district had fallen so far behind the escalating NCLB standards for multiple years that DPI directly intervened in the district and instituted a Corrective Action Plan, which DPI says in waiver documents that it will “maintain and enhance... due to the evidence that these structures and interventions have positively impacted individual school performance and student achievement across the district.”
The corrective plan requires MPS to recruit highly qualified teachers, especially in its lowest-performing schools; improve its professional development of teachers; implement one district-wide comprehensive literacy and math plan in all schools to address the high mobility of MPS students; implement “differentiated and customized” instruction; and improve safety in struggling schools. MPS must also continue to work with a DPI-created committee to monitor its turnaround plan.
Bonds didn't want to comment on the waiver's requirements in detail, but he said the corrective plan and Thornton's district-wide reforms have been positive elements in MPS's rising performance rates.
“I thought the Corrective Action Plan really forced us to target schools that needed help,” Bonds said. “I thought that was good. But I thought that No Child Left Behind was a bad policy overall.”
He said that in contrast to schools that are showing signs of quick, dramatic improvement—possibly the result of cheating on tests or falsified data—MPS is showing small but real signs of progress.
“We are doing the real work, the hard, in-the-trenches work that's going to take time,” Bonds said. “We're making incremental changes but they are real changes. These aren't inflated changes. If you actually really looked at what's happening in Milwaukee, you'd call it the 'Milwaukee miracle.'”
While students in public schools will still be required to take standardized tests—albeit different tests that are aligned with the nationally recognized Common Core program—their performance goals have been altered to be more realistic.
The waiver also changes the labels used to identify struggling schools, a boost for students and teachers in “failing” schools that are show signs of improvement.
That said, the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has developed a “red flag” system that identifies struggling schools early and retains the right to intervene in the lowest performing schools to close achievement gaps, reduce absenteeism and raise graduation rates.
Teachers, too, will be affected by the changes. Students' test results will be one component—but not the only component—of their professional evaluations.
Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), said in a statement that the waiver was “good news” for state students and that it “sets the stage for the state Legislature to adopt legislation to hold all schools that receive taxpayer dollars, including those participating in the voucher program, to the same standards.”
MPS Already Implementing Waiver Requirements
But the reforms will have a mixed impact on Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), the state's largest school district and one that was penalized by NCLB's ever-more-stringent performance standards.
The upside is that the waiver grants MPS, and all schools receiving Title I funding for low-income students, more freedom in how they can use funds that NCLB would otherwise have required them to pay for private-sector tutoring services.
But the state's waiver will have little to no impact on the state DPI's ongoing intervention in MPS, according to documents filed by the state in its request for the waiver.
A spokesman for MPS Superintendent Gregory Thornton said he was still going through the details of the waiver and did not want to talk about the specific impact of it on MPS. But in a statement Thornton said he welcomed the changes in general.
“The waiver raises the bar for our students and holds us accountable and we embrace that,” Thornton said. “We look forward to meeting higher expectations. We are already aligned on a number of issues connected to the waiver, including implementing the Common Core for state standards, expanded ACT participation, graduation rate growth and tougher graduation requirements. We also look forward to working with the Department of Public Instruction to put resources where they're most needed, including having more control over the federal dollars used for tutoring.”
Bonds: The 'Milwaukee Miracle' Is Real
Under the original NCLB, the state was able to intervene in schools and districts that were failing to attain adequate yearly progress standards, which escalated each year. The waiver now eases those standards and implements new performance goals.
By 2014, all schools were expected to achieve 100% proficiency in reading and math, a goal that MPS Board President Michael Bonds called “unrealistic and detrimental to schools” because it labeled too many schools as failures and did not take into account the number of English-language learners, special education students or students living in poverty.
MPS schools have a high proportion of these harder-to-educate students. For example, special education students make up around 19% of the MPS population—higher than other Wisconsin schools and big urban districts around the country—and more than 80% of MPS students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Yet MPS was held to the same performance standards as every other school in the country, rich or poor, large or small, urban, suburban or rural.
“It punished schools when in reality there might be significant changes within the schools,” Bonds said.
While MPS students' test scores and graduation rates are improving, the district had fallen so far behind the escalating NCLB standards for multiple years that DPI directly intervened in the district and instituted a Corrective Action Plan, which DPI says in waiver documents that it will “maintain and enhance... due to the evidence that these structures and interventions have positively impacted individual school performance and student achievement across the district.”
The corrective plan requires MPS to recruit highly qualified teachers, especially in its lowest-performing schools; improve its professional development of teachers; implement one district-wide comprehensive literacy and math plan in all schools to address the high mobility of MPS students; implement “differentiated and customized” instruction; and improve safety in struggling schools. MPS must also continue to work with a DPI-created committee to monitor its turnaround plan.
Bonds didn't want to comment on the waiver's requirements in detail, but he said the corrective plan and Thornton's district-wide reforms have been positive elements in MPS's rising performance rates.
“I thought the Corrective Action Plan really forced us to target schools that needed help,” Bonds said. “I thought that was good. But I thought that No Child Left Behind was a bad policy overall.”
He said that in contrast to schools that are showing signs of quick, dramatic improvement—possibly the result of cheating on tests or falsified data—MPS is showing small but real signs of progress.
“We are doing the real work, the hard, in-the-trenches work that's going to take time,” Bonds said. “We're making incremental changes but they are real changes. These aren't inflated changes. If you actually really looked at what's happening in Milwaukee, you'd call it the 'Milwaukee miracle.'”
Lots of them will be if our current Red politics has anything to do with it. Their bottom line, stop the wasteful slide of affluent county money from going to where it only educates those who are referred to as "bromides", and I don't mean the term from chemistry!
Like the YoungStar program for Daycare, penalizing the daycares run out of peoples homes or out of buildings no better than a tax-free storefront church. A Republican backed plan is designed to funnel money to where the money already is, part of the whole "supply-side" plan.
We have a "skills gap", but it is re-defined as not having enough young, trained people to fill jobs that were previously held by people who are now "over-qualified" by virtue of having a higher salary history than what is currently being offered as wages. Young, trained people that were raised in homes that had healthcare to raise them right, but will not need to use healthcare while recovery takes place. These affluent young had parents who could afford to set them up with the car and home needed to execute their job without having the extra burden of survival in the 'hood with riding buses or unreliable cars, not able to focus on their job because they are trying to avoid a drive-by bullet.
Current business intends to use parent subsidized help to finish the outsourcing of American jobs to low-paid foreign lands, leaving America with no more than retail shops for those of us who are not yet too broke to buy the foreign made products.
We can eliminated the % of special education kids by simply reclassifying kids with ADHD as being normal. A good old fashion ass paddling will do more for them than meds.
To close the skills gab, we could train poor inner city kids to work in the agriculture industry picking crops. Currently there is such a short supply of skilled agriculture workers that we must import this labor.
We should also eliminate the free lunch programs. Instead redirect the parents Food Stamp dollars toward the school so the kids get the first dollars toward their school lunch. And no more junk food. Smaller and healthier portions.
Stop keeping score. We all know most of these kids just don't hae the wherewithal to compete, study, or learn. Don't humiliate them with standardized tests. Smart kids will learn despite poor schools and poor teachers. We should be more concerned with physical conditioning so they will be prepared for hard physical work then they leave school
Education as a Threat...
- Educated Voters - must react to the pre-approved, focus-group evaluated news. No free thinking allowed.
- Educated Consumers - must react to the pre-approved, focus-group evaluated advertising. No critical thinking allowed, no evaluating the positives and negatives, no cost benefit analysis.
- Educated Labor - must do as they are told by management. Must not think about whether the workplace's toxins, chemicals, and work practices are a danger to themselves or the environment.
- Educated Supervisors and Middle Managers - Must do as the owner tells them. Pay no attention to whether themselves or their workers will have a secure job tomorrow... Full speed ahead, right up until it is time to close their location.
The only people that those who have power want to see educated are their consultants and advisors, to be "used" temporarily to set up the business. Also may educate their own children, for awhile... Until we get back to where descendents take over the corporate reins by birthright alone.
We don't really want "Liberal Arts" college for all, we just want Vocational Tech training for those we choose to employ, all others need a "babysitter" to manage the kids while both parents work their 70-80 hour a week jobs, to indoctrinate their kids to curl up in a hole and permanently remove themselves from needing material support once they are of no profitable use to society. No hustling off of rich people or choosing to survive by crime or working the black market.