But stirring the pot can move the cooking process forward. Spreading important and provocative thoughts can get people thinking along lines they might not have considered previously. Bringing a wide range of committed people together can lead to conversations – informal, as well as formal – that start something rolling.

I hope, and I’m even a bit optimistic, that we served some of those purposes at the conference, sponsored by Marquette Law School and the Marquette College of Education and attended by almost 200 people. The audience included key education policy figures across the spectrum, from union leaders to an advisor to Gov. Scott Walker.

I thought of the conference as a musical piece in four movements: What can be learned from what has been done in developing a new school system in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005; getting a handle on the rapidly developing movement nationwide to overhaul teacher evaluations as a key to improving teacher effectiveness; a look at community efforts to improve educational outcomes overall in Milwaukee; and general assessments of what is needed in educational thinking to move Wisconsin forward. That meant we had three keynote speakers, all of them figures of national standing who were fresh faces to Wisconsin’s educational debate, and more than a dozen panelists, including important  figures in state and local education policy.

Feel free to sample the nearly five hours of video that we have posted online from the conference. And let me share with you a few moments that stick out for me:

Paul Pastorek, the former superintendent of Louisiana schools who was one of the architects of what has happened in New Orleans, railing against conventional school systems that he said are broken when it comes to giving many kids a chance to succeed. Pastorek said, “My argument is not against unions, it’s not against teachers, it’s not against administrators, it’s not against legislators, it’s against the damn system. If people work in a broken system, the system designed to achieve the results we’re getting, they cannot be successful.” He called for systems that support strong leadership of individual schools, with strong accountability for results.

Pastorek and Sarah Carr, an education reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, touching nerves in the debate over the impact of high levels of poverty in shaping educational outcomes. They were joined by Marquette’s Howard Fuller, who has also worked extensively in New Orleans, and Prof. Brian Beabout of the University of New Orleans. (If you’re going to watch one thing from the video, go to this exchange, starting at 1hour and 23 minutes.)

Carr said, “I do think the leaders in New Orleans have made a mistake in viewing school change in isolation from broader societal change.” She said poverty cannot be used as an excuse for why children don’t succeed in school, but issues such as early childhood education, criminal justice, and mental health services need to be addressed as part of “a broader revisioning” for New Orleans.

With some heat, Pastorek responded, “I would argue that as far as educating kids is concerned, what comes first in getting success with kids is getting success with the classroom. . . . Educate the kids first in the classroom successfully and then the dynamics in the outer environment change.” 

Fuller said, “There’s a difference between saying you got to end poverty before you can improve schools and saying ending poverty is a critical factor in our overall effort to improve schools.” He said if people such as Pastorek and himself don’t listen to what Carr is saying, many people won’t regard them “as real.” And he drew applause when he added, “You can’t support stuff that says, I’m all for the kids in schools, but I’m going to take away health care, I’m going to take away jobs, I’m going to take away housing, I’m going to take away every single thing those kids need — but I’m with you.”

Sarah Almy, director of teacher quality for the Washington-based Education Trust, pointing to places around the country, as close by as Illinois, that are making major strides in improving the way teachers are evaluated and using the results to spur more effective teaching. Mike Thompson, deputy Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction, followed by describing how Wisconsin is joining that effort, and Bob Peterson, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, said a joint management-union initiative in Milwaukee Public Schools is well ahead of what the state is doing.

Republican State Sen. Luther Olsen, a key figure in legislative action around education, saying that the goal is to improve teaching and not to be vindictive against teachers, as many teachers fear. “The most important thing in teacher evaluation is the professional development that comes afterward,” Olsen said. (But, so far, seeing that this happens is a question that hasn’t been addressed.)

Dan McKinley, executive director of PAVE, an organization that primarily has assisted private and charter schools in Milwaukee, invoking the Dalai Lama, with a simple prescription for improving the overall scene: Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work. 

Bill Raabe, director of the National Education Association’s Center for Great Public Schools, calling for teachers to be given an important voice they often haven’t had in figuring out how to accomplish better results for children. He said that beyond disputes over collective bargaining, there need to be ways to use the knowledge of those who know the most about what is going on in classrooms.

The conference certainly filled a central goal for public policy programming in Eckstein Hall: to provide a forum for intelligent, fair-minded discussion of important issues. And maybe it did more. At a time when Wisconsin’s educational landscape has changed dramatically and every educator and advocate is trying to figure out how to move forward, maybe we gave the pot a useful stir.

“I think it’s huge” that people who weren’t part of past events are now stepping into key roles, Ellen Gilligan, president and CEO of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, told Mike Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy in the last “On the Issues” session for this semester.

Gilligan is the key figure behind the recent launching of Milwaukee Succeeds, an effort that has brought together more than 40 key leaders and organizations with the goal of improving Milwaukee’s record in moving children successfully “from cradle to career,” to use the effort’s subtitle.

Asked by Gousha how she responds to those who have been skeptical of what the effort can accomplish, Gilligan said she shows them “a lot of optimism.”

“Timing is everything,” she said. “Sometimes the stars align. Sometimes there are opportunities for certain things to happen that might not have happened 20 years ago.” She thought Milwaukee was ready for an effort such as this one. One of the reasons? The election of Gov. Scott Walker and the aftermath of that election, which, for better or worse, she said, created a climate in which working together had a stronger draw to more people.

And then there’s the new-leader factor. Gilligan came to Milwaukee a year ago from Cincinnati, where she was a top figure in that city’s community foundation and where she was deeply involved in launching the Strive Partnership, an effort that is a model for Milwaukee Succeeds. She is one of several relatively new figures in major positions in Milwaukee.  

“I am an eternal optimist and I don’t think we have a choice,” Gilligan said. “That’s part of sending in new troops. You have fresh blood who view this situation differently, who are not beaten down by past history. I am not beaten down by the past history. I am optimistic that we can make a difference and that we have to make a difference. We don’t have a choice.”

Gilligan said she was not very interested in taking part between advocates for Milwaukee Public Schools and advocates for Milwaukee’s private school voucher program. “I’m not sure it’s terribly productive,” she said. “I’d rather focus on the children.”

She said the concerns underlying Milwaukee Succeeds are matter such as whether third graders can read on grade-level, not whether they went to schools in MPS or charter or voucher schools.

She told Gousha Milwaukee Succeeds is “a process” and not “a program.” No new initiatives were announced in launching the effort. Instead, participants are working on creating a list of key, measurable indicators that can show whether Milwaukee is making progress. Then, the focus will be on how to align efforts throughout the city to improve outcomes. She said it is an effort that will take years.

She said she views herself as “a collaborative leader.” But she clearly is determined to  push forward

To watch the video of the “On the Issues” session, click here.

In an “On the Issues” session with Mike Gousha at Eckstein Hall on Tuesday, Ramirez described the work of Schools That Can Milwaukee, a year-old organization that has the goal of increasing the number of students in high-performing schools to 20,000 (more than twice the current total) by 2020. Ramirez is executive director of the organization.

“If you haven’t seen a high-performing school, go visit one because it will change your belief in what’s possible,” she told about 150 people at the session hosted by Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy. She said you can tell in such a visit that the program is different – more energetic, more focused, more committed to meeting ambitious goals – than in schools where there is an underlying belief that the students aren’t going to do well because of factors such as poverty.  

“Expectations are huge” as a factor in putting a school on the path to high levels of success, she said. She also said the leadership of the school is a crucial factor.

Ramirez said the organization, affiliated with a national Schools That Can effort, was founded around three high-performing schools in Milwaukee, St. Marcus Lutheran School, Bruce-Guadalupe Community School, and Milwaukee College Prep. It is now working with two dozen schools that meet or are working to meet the standards for academic success, attendance the group uses to define a high performing school.  The large majority of students at each of the schools are from low-income homes. The schools include five from Milwaukee Public Schools; the rest are either charter schools or private schools in the publicly-funded voucher program.

Ramirez said Schools That Can has three strategies for increasing the number of high performing schools: Expand the ones already here (both Milwaukee College Prep and St. Marcus have expanded substantially this year); bring up the achievement in existing schools that are willing to wade into the hard work the organization envisions; and recruit strong charter school operators from around the country to open in Milwaukee.

In dealing with the last route, Ramirez has been a central figure in efforts to bring Rocketship, Education, a San Jose, Calif., charter school operator, to Milwaukee. She told Gousha she hopes Rocketship will open in Milwaukee in 2013 and grow within several years to eight schools.

She urged people who want to help improve Milwaukee’s education picture to get involved in ways that focus on quality schooling and not on whether a school is a traditional public school, a charter school, or a voucher school. She suggested getting involved on the boards of schools, volunteering as mentors or in other roles at schools, making financial donations to schools, and advocating for quality education as part of political activity. “Make education your issue,” she said.     

The hour-long sessions can be viewed by clicking here.

On Wednesday of this week, the world lost several visionaries. Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a prominent civil rights activist, and Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Inc. both died.  But there was a third visionary whose light went out on Wednesday:  Derrick Bell.

Bell was a visiting professor of law at New York University School of Law when he died. He is considered a pioneer of critical race theory, which theory examines issues of race, racism, and power in law and legal institutions.  But while he had spent most of his life as an academic, his roots – and his defining experiences – were in civil rights. Bell graduated with an LL.B. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1957 and, after a short stint in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Justice Department, went to work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, working closely with Thurgood Marshall, who recruited him.  According to Bell’s biography on TheHistoryMakers, while he was at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he oversaw more than 300 school desegregation cases.  His experience with those desegregation cases factored significantly in his developing interest convergence theory, which he wrote about in law review articles as well as in the 2004 book Silent Covenants:  Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform.

I read Silent Covenants last year.  It is an amazing text that directly challenges the iconic U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.  While that decision seems to remain what Bell called “the Holy Grail of racial justice,” Bell found the decision to be less about racial equality and more about national security.  Claims Bell, in the aftermath of World War II and rise of the Cold War, America found itself in a bit of what one might call a public relations bind.  It billed itself as a world leader in democracy, yet at that time de facto if not de jure segregation prevailed across the country. African Americans who enlisted in the armed services to fight (in their segregated units) Hitler and fascism in the name of freedom and justice returned home to find that they still were not allowed to eat at the same lunch counters or stay in the same hotels or go to the same schools as the whites for whom they had risked their lives.  This discrepancy did not go unnoticed by the Soviets, whom some feared would use America’s racial inequality to recruit members for the communist party.  So when the NAACP brought the Brown case to the U.S. Supreme Court, the timing was right to make some changes in America’s racial policies.

Said Bell in Silent Covenants, “Black rights are recognized and protected when and only so long as policymakers perceive that such advances will further interests that are their primary concern.”  Thus Bell introduces his interest convergence covenants, events in history where black rights were recognized but the underlying reasons were not recognition of the rights for their own sake but recognition because such rights served broader interests.

In his view, Brown should not have dismantled Plessy v. Ferguson as it did.  In fact, Bell claims, the Court should have upheld Plessy and actually enforced the “equal” part of “separate but equal.”  In this way, Bell believed most school districts would either be able to truly equalize their segregated schools or degregate on their own because they would not be able to afford to equalize.

It was typical of Bell to find that race mattered in a whole host of ways in a whole host of situations.  In fact, one of the criticisms levied against him was that he was often too quick to “play the race card.”  But he probably isn’t wrong.  Perhaps Bell saw racism everywhere because it is everywhere, although sometimes it manifests only in the most subtle of ways.

Thank you, Professor Bell, for your contributions to legal theory.  You will be missed.

RIP Derrick Bell, Pioneer of Critical Race Theory

In June 2004, however, Perich developed symptoms of a medical disorder, eventually diagnosed as narcolepsy. Despite obtaining in February 2005 a doctor’s certification of her ability to return to work, the school had already made alternative arrangements and proposed that she resign her call. After she threatened legal action for alleged disability discrimination, the congregation then rescinded her call and she was duly terminated from her teaching position at the school.

Immediately she filed a charge of discrimination and retaliation with the EEOC, which eventually initiated a federal district court action against the school. Though the school prevailed at the district court level, it then lost before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Underlying the district court’s ruling, and rejected by the Court of Appeals, is a doctrine called the “ministerial exception.” Her case—and indeed the fate of the ministerial exception—are now before the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted review of the Sixth Circuit’s decision last spring and is scheduled to hear oral arguments on October 5.

What, then, is this “ministerial exception” and why is her case potentially of great significance? In essence the ministerial exception is a judge-made exemption from several federal civil rights statutes, such as Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act, that the courts believe is compelled by the Constitution’s religion clauses. The exemption extends to religious organizations’ employment decisions where the employee, regardless of his or her title, serves functions comparable to those of traditional clergy. Importantly, it is a categorical exemption, potentially barring suits alleging discrimination on any statutorily protected basis, including race and gender.

From the petitioner’s initial standpoint, as evidenced in its principal brief on the merits, the issue was simply the Sixth Circuit’s application (or, in its view, misapplication) of the exception. The respondent, however, has effectively challenged the validity of the exception itself, capitalizing on two critical realities: first, that the Supreme Court itself has never adopted the exception, even though every federal circuit court (beginning in the 1970s) has done so, and second, that the exception is seemingly at odds with the Supreme Court’s free exercise doctrine, which it substantially reworked in 1990. It thus comes as no surprise that the bulk of the petitioner’s reply brief only cursorily dwells on Cheryl Perich’s actual circumstances and instead spends most of its pages vigorously defending the exception itself.

Thus, all of a sudden, though not entirely unpredictably, the case has now become a vehicle for potentially abrogating over thirty years of lower court rulings. Will the Court view the exception as a misapplication of the Free Exercise Clause, which in 1990 it held does not ordinarily shield religious conduct from the application of neutral and generally applicable laws? Or will the Court view the exception as a viable component of the Establishment Clause insofar as the government is unduly entangling itself in the internal affairs of religious bodies? The fact that the lower courts have unanimously adopted the exception in one form or another is, to be frank, not necessarily the Court’s problem or concern, and the fact that the lower courts have grounded and conceptualized the doctrine in several ways only works against the supposed significance of their unanimity.

The October 5th oral arguments will ideally shed light on the Court’s inclinations, but given the stakes and the multi-tiered nature of the case, not to mention the very able counsel on both sides and a literal deluge of amicus briefs, the likelihood of such illumination is not great. The only definite aspect of the case, it seems, is that Cheryl Perich and her disability-related claims—the very genesis of the litigation—have become merely a secondary story in what is now a major contest over the First Amendment.

In fact, when the law went through the legislature in the late 1990s, it was handled in the tourism committees of the Assembly and Senate, and not in the education committees, even though the subject was school calendars. I’ve always thought that said something about priorities in Wisconsin.

School opening dates in many districts had moved up over the years into late August. This was a problem, in the eyes of those in the tourism business. They said they wanted kids and parents to have the maximum opportunity to take vacations that build healthy family bonds and life-long memories. (As the song from Man of La Mancha put it, I’m only thinking of him.)  Let’s assume they also wanted to maximize their summer season and hold on to their high school student employees longer.

So, since 2000, state law 118.045 has specified “no public school may commence the school term until September 1.”   Athletic contests are exempted, as are in-service days for staff (which is why most teachers went back to work Tuesday or so).  Schools on so-called year-round calendars (which mean they take  shorter summer breaks but have the same total of school days) are exempt. And other schools that convince the state Department of Public Instruction there are “extraordinary reasons” may be granted exceptions. In Milwaukee, that includes several schools that have International Baccalaureate programs that call for starting in August. Private schools and higher-education institutions are not included in the law.

Many people were under the impression that the law called for starting after Labor Day, and in many years that is the way things work out. But this year is one that shows the difference between calling for a post-Labor Day start and a post-August start. Getting in the two days of school before Labor Day helps protect such things as a full Christmas vacation and an end to the school year early in June while still allowing districts to meet the state’s minimum requirement for school days (generally, 180 each year). Next year, Labor Day is Sept. 3. It will be back to a post-Labor Day start for the next several years.

Does the date school starts have any effect on education? Probably not. The total number of days remains the same and there is no change in the total length of summer vacation (many experts think such a long break from school has negative educational effect on many kids). But some would say there is one downside: Because Wisconsin gives its standardized tests early in the school year (generally, in November), there is a short window between when school starts and when the main annual measure of a school’s performance is administered. Some educators think this is one reason scores aren’t better.

More broadly, the September start shapes the daily life of tens of thousands of families in the state each year in both major and minor ways. For example, it creates more chances in August to gain life-enriching memories of water parks in the Dells.

That’s certainly as good a way as I can think of to explain what is clearly an effort by Walker to move toward the middle on at least some issues, particularly education quality matters. In just over a half year in office, Walker has become an especially polarizing figure. Many on the right think he has changed the long-term future of Wisconsin for the better and praise him enthusiastically. Many on the left think he is so bad that they will succeed in bringing him to a re-call election next year. Some polls show that there are stronger feelings about Walker, both pro and con, with little middle ground, than is true for any other governor currently.  

But, ultimately, in a state that is as politically split as Wisconsin, it is valuable, if not essential, to have support among many of those in the middle. And Walker’s overall poll numbers are down in the light of the ferocious battle over the state budget.

So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when Walker took more moderate positions in an interview I did with him on July 1 on education issues. He referred several times to his desire to build consensus on some major issues and said it was “the Wisconsin way” to get a wide range of people together to work on issues. He talked about how he was building a strong relationship with Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, on matters such as a new school accountability system, new state tests, and an initiative aimed at increasing the overall quality of the work of principals and teachers. The generally-liberal Evers has been backed by teachers unions and was strongly critical of some major parts of the budget proposals from Walker, a conservative Republican.

Walker’s comments and subsequent conversations with him and Evers led to a story I wrote for the July 10 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a column I did on Walker’s education thoughts on July 17. The audio of my interview with Walker is availabkle on the latter Web page. 

Walker has also sent some other signals he is tacking toward the middle just ahead of recall elections for nine state senators. Those signals include dropping his support of repealing the state ban on smoking in public places and dropping efforts to keep Wisconsin from receiving federal funds for some health programs.

Is this more-moderate Walker here to stay? Will more middle-of-the-road stands help his polling numbers? My guess is that feelings on Walker are so strong in both directions that it will be hard to shake them. But I admit I’m glad to see Walker and Evers cooperating on some important education steps.

Several other items in the educational policy arena:

On the local front, the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association is asking its members to vote on what they think the union should do in response to a request from the Milwaukee Public Schools board and Superintendent Gregory Thornton that members pay 5.8% of their salaries toward their pensions in the two years remaining on the MPS labor contract. Management says it will recall about 200 teachers who have been laid off if teachers agree to the step. Including those 200 teachers, MPS is shedding almost 1,000 positions this fall.

Publicly, the union’s leaders have resisted making concessions, but the subject apparently has been the subject of a lot of discussion behind the scenes. The request to teachers to state their views by responding to a mailed questionnaire is a rare step by union leaders.

Thornton waded into the vote with an appeal posted on his blog Monday for teachers to support the concessions.  He wrote, “I make my personal pledge that the dollars the district would earn back from such concessions would be immediately used to bring back teachers we had to lay off in late June.  Every cent we get back will be used to bring back teachers. These are teachers who may have been in the classroom next door to yours.  They are teachers with whom you have shared break time, and whose children’s names you may know.  There are families on the line here.”

In national news, two development worth mentioning:

The Washington Post reports that District of Columbia school leaders have fired 206 teachers who got poor ratings on the groundbreaking evaluation system that was brought in while the controversial Michelle Rhee was chancellor of the system. Even with Rhee gone, her successor, Kaya Henderson, is continuing the system, known as IMPACT. And Mayor Vincent Gray has supported the step.

And New York City school officials are giving up on a system implemented there several years ago that gave the staffs of schools incentive bonuses if the schools met goals for improved student achievement. The system was intended to avoid the problem of giving some teachers bonuses but not others and it aimed to create a sense of staff unity in pursuing broader success. The program had come to be considered a failure.

Teacher evaluation systems, the idea of firing low performing teachers, and incentive or performance pay for teachers are all on the agenda in Wisconsin now. But effective ways of succeeding at all three remain hard to find.

But the current test-score cheating scandal in Atlanta is a different matter. It is pretty much the most disturbing and shocking single episode in American education that I can think of in the last decade. This is a case of teachers and administrators being shown in real life to have engaged in vividly discrediting educational practices. 

I heard or read often in recent years about the successes of the Atlanta public schools. Test scores had risen, the elected school board was a model case for those who opposed mayoral control of schools, and Superintendent Beverly Hall was one of the most honored and respected school leaders in the country. I remember then-MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos telling me several years ago what a great person Hall was, and that view was definitely in the mainstream of educators.

All of that makes the scandal that has been unfolding in Atlanta for months all the more stunning. The Atlanta Journal Constitution deserves a lot of credit for pushing hard to bring to light a sweeping culture among teachers and their superiors, right up to Hall, in which doctoring students’ test scores sheets was done routinely, almost openly, and with indifference to both the rules and to children’s actual education needs. A culture of cheating, with a partner culture of intimidation of those who might resist it, pervaded Atlanta’s school system.  Hall has resigned and is now considered highly discredited, the school district has fallen into turmoil, and criminal charges may lie ahead.

The Journal Constitution’s story about a special investigative report released by the governor’s officeTuesday, summarizes the scandal in revolting detail.

Critics have long argued that standardized testing is a bad way to judge kids and, among other problems, leads to cheating by educators who have strong incentives to show good results for their students. My guess is even few of the critics thought there was a scandal of the dimension now unfolding in Atlanta. From now on, the word “Atlanta” is going to be to debate about high stakes testing what the word “Columbine” is to discussions of student violence.

Will the Atlanta situation change the course of the movement that has made standardized testing a key part of accountability around  the US? My guess is that overall, it won’t. But it certainly should cause everyone to think deeply about how to make testing a constructive step. That includes more work on improving test security, creating climates of ethical practices around testing, and monitoring the pressures being put on educators to come up with good results.

Results on state standardized tests for Milwaukee school children may be discouraging, but at least they are, to the best of my knowledge, generally honest. I’m only aware of one real cheating scandal in Milwaukee Public Schools in the last decade or so. It involved one school a few years ago, and, while MPS succeeded in keeping most of the details from public view (it was labeled an employee discipline matter), best as I could tell, the district dealt with it reasonably well.  (By the way, speak up if you know differently, not only with MPS but any school or district.)

I used to think it would be nice if Milwaukee had Atlanta’s record when it came to rest results. Obviously, it is time to think the reverse, especially when it comes to integrity.

The two waves – and there will be at least a few more new principals before September – are both a major opportunity and a major concern. Principals are crucial to a school and, if the new batch has good impact overall, that will be a big plus for MPS. But the unusually large number of new principals means almost a quarter of all MPS schools will be under new leadership, which can be a stressful development for a school.

Assuming the committee and, next week, the full school board approve, the new group will include five current MPS principals who are being trasnferred to new assignments and 14 people who are being hired for or promoted to principal jobs. Among the newcomers to the ranks of MPS principals will be Peter Samaranayke at Rufus King High School, the most prestigious high school school in the system; Michael Cipriano at Hamilton High; and Brian Brzezinski at Pulaski. Cynthia Eastern, who has been principal of Pulaski the last several years, will become principal of the School of Career and Technical Education, which is being created as part of the overhaul of Custer High School.

A couple other education items of interest:

I admit I always think about the future of MPS when I read about developments in Detroit, which is widely regarded as the most troubled public school system in the country. In the latest of many changes in recent years (none of which have really put the brakes on the slide of Detroit public schools), Michigan officials announced Monday that they were going to create a public-private authority to take over 39 of the lowest performing schools in the city for the 2012-13 school year.

According to the Associated Press and Education Week, the schools will not have a central administration and principals will hire teachers directly.

It’s not on the table now and presumably wouldn’t be any time soon for MPS, but if the system breaks down under its many stresses or if Gov. Scott Walker and the legislature’s Republican leaders want to see it, could a similar authority end up overseeing some hunk, if not all, of a revamped MPS system of schools operating individually?

And from Florida, the news this week that Gerard Robinson, who has been the education chief in Virginia, has been hired by Florida’s state board of education as commissioner. The announcement said Robinson was a senior fellow at the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette from 2004 to 2006. He has been a close associate of Howard Fuller, the head of the institute. Robinson also served as president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national organization that Fuller co-founded. Robinson is known for his advocacy for charter schools and school choice programs.  Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who asked Robinson’s predecessor to leave over differences in philosophy, praised Robinson’s appointment in a statement.  

In 2001, and with strong bipartisan support, Congress approved the No Child Left Behind education reform law. Amid its complex notions, there were some clear intentions: Congress and the president (George W. Bush at that point, but Bill Clinton and Barack Obama would say much the same) were tired of putting a lot of money into schools across the country and not seeing much to show for it. They wanted to see the American education world buckle down to work especially on improving the achievement of low income and minority students. And they wanted every child to be reading and doing math on grade level by – oh, pick a date far away – 2014.

So they called the law No Child Left Behind. A wonderful idea – are you in favor of leaving some children behind? I’m not.

But given the real state of children, the obstacles so many face, the entrenched depth of so many issues, and the simple realities of what could be accomplished, it was an unrealistic idea. Even if everything went great, we were never going to reach 100% proficiency by 2014, or by any date.

Especially publicly, and sometimes even behind the scenes, people such as top officials in the Bush Administration, were adamant about the 100% goal. (Education writer Linda Perlstein wrote several years ago that if you asked some No Child Left Behind advocates whether 80% was a more realistic goal than 100%, they would ask why you hated the other 20%.) I was part of an editorial board meeting at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with then-Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings several years ago. I told her she was welcome to get in a car with me and in 15 minutes, I would have her at the door of any of at least 50 schools that would never reach even close to 100% proficiency within current realities. She said I was wrong and all of these schools could get every student up to up to grade level. Mind you, I thought these schools could all be improved and could get better results. But I thought a greater sense of reality and an accountability scheme that was in touch with reality was a valuable step toward improvement.

In 2001 or so, the presumed route out of this was that the law was due to be reauthorized – basically, overhauled – in 2007. Things would be adjusted then. But partisan gridlock over education kept that from happening. Wait until after the 2008 presidential election, people figured. It didn’t happen then. And now, in the all-the-more partisan and gridlocked situation in Washington, it still isn’t happening.

So the original law remains in effect. It’s 2011, the number of schools that are not meeting the achievement and progress requirements is rising, and you can see the time coming when every school in the nation will be officially labeled as not meeting its requirements under the federal law. In Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction, under then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster, kept the achievement bar set low for the first bunch of years under No Child Left Behind, and back loaded the period when proficiency needed to shoot up to 100%. So far, the number of “schools identified for improvement” remains relatively, as DPI announced a few days ago. But the ramp up is accelerating and will get much more pronounced in the next year or two if nothing is done.

So, with prospects for some breakthrough in Congress uncertain, at best, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced this week that he’s getting ready to take action. He said he will use regulatory authority to re-do important parts of the scheme of sanctions set in the law, pretty much erasing the 100% goal. He said his department is working on new rules that would emphasize such things as improving teaching quality, raising standards, and improving accountability.

“Everybody agrees on one thing: the law is in dire need of reform,” Duncan said in a phone press conference. He called the current state of No Child Left Behind “a slow-motion train wreck.” He said Plan A is to have Congress act, but he’s developing Plan B for his own action, which he indicated he will impose before September, when the new school year starts. “We can’t just sit here and do nothing,” he said.

My advice to you: Pay less and less attention to lists of schools not hitting their No Child Left Behind marks (which too often have been labeled failing schools). Don’t expect anything to come out of Congress (which has too many divisions on education and spending issues and too many other things on its plate). Keep an eye on Duncan. He might do some interesting things.

And keep hoping and striving for better things for all of our children, including those with the greatest needs. But do that realistically.

The first was that, due to langauge in the bill backed by Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators, if the MTEA agreed to any changes in its contract, which goes through June 2013, the entire contract would be wiped out. The second was that the union had already made concessions when it settled in September 2010 and just wasn’t going to make any more. 

The first line of defense stands to be erased in the light of changes made by the legislature’s joint finance committee that would allow the MPS contract to be changed without bringing down the roof.

And the Milwaukee School Board, as described ina Journal Sentinel story,  put the question squarely to the union last week of whether it is going to stick by the second response. The board asked that the union to agree to have teachers pay 5.8% of their salaries toward their pensions. Although that is technically the way the system works now (with MPS paying a matching amount), MPS and many other school districts have paid both shares of the pension payments for many years.

There is no indication I know of that the union is going to budge on this, even in the light of the School Board saying almost 200 teaching jobs could be saved with the expected savings (more than $19 million next year). 

I got a strongly worded e-mail from an elementary school teacher who said teachers had made big concessions already, saving MPS more money than the Walker plan for increased health insurance and pension payments would save. I’m not so sure about that claim, but even if true, the pension cut proposal is a major test of the union and of teachers. 

The teacher wrote, ”So essentially he (Walker) just wants to cut as many services to public school children (50% plus poor) and to take more of our salary. . . .  We have already signed a contract where it is not necessary to take that much from our salaries to save more. 

“No art, no gym, no music, no library, no nurse (I have a student who has severe diabetes and has to have his levels drawn 2x a day in school and given insulin as needed), no help running the school – one principal with NO support for 540 students, para professionals cut, no vice-principals anywhere, no math team leaders, no curriculum generalists, no literacy coach.  33 children in my class next year. And oh yeah, computerized tests for 4 YEAR OLDS and older.  4 YEAR OLDS.  Unbelievable.” 

I certainly understand what people, especially teachers, are saying when they look at what the cuts in the state budget mean to the daily life in their schools. It’s a bad climate right now. I also agree that what the board is asking  is a lot. The pension payments would mean more than $2,300 a year for any teacher making more than $40,000 a year.

That said, I’m also deeply concerned about the staff attrition the teacher described at her school and at many other schools. If agreeing to pay the pension share could mitigate that in a significant way, would it be worth doing? What would it mean to students? What would it do to teachers? In most school districts in Wisconsin, teachers are (not very willingly, I grant) going to make that concession, along with bigger contributions to health insurance costs than MPS teachers are going to pay, and, in some cases, along with zero increases in pay. There are pay increases built into the pay scacle in the MPS contract for next year, and a large number of teachers will also get “step” increases for having one more year experience on the salary chart.

Politically, where does it leave the MTEA if it refuses to make concessions that teachers statewide are making? I suspect many (maybe even some teachers elsewhere) will take it as proof that the Milwaukee union and its members place their pay and benefits above their students well-being. As much as the current circumstances are upsetting to many teachers, I kind of doubt that very many other people will see it as a rightful and wise response to what is going on. My guess is Scott Walker will think, if the union turns this down, that it’s proving his point. 

I’m not aware of many teachers who regard this as a good time for the profession. And I can’t think of any evidence to regard the current administration in Madison as friendly to MPS. It’s easy to believe they are looking for MPS to wither. 

What can teachers and the MTEA do to respond to that and to proceed in a way that is best for the students in MPS, as well as best, in the big picture, for themselves? That’s a pretty important question right now.

MTEA executive director is out: Stan Johnson, the executive director of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, is out, continuing a period of difficulties and instability in leadership of the union.  Johnson resigned last week “for personal reasons,” according to a union spokesman who said there would be no further comment. But Johnson’s abrupt departure suggested it was not an amiable matter.

Johnson was previously president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the union organizations which has been at the heart of education politics in Wisconsin in recent decades. He was one of the most widely known teachers’ union figures in the state.

 In a period when all teachers’ unions have been facing a lot of challenges, the MTEA has had had the complication of continuing leadership issues.  Tom Morgan was named executive director in 2007, succeeding long-term union leader Sam Carmen. But Morgan died of a heart attack while on a vacation cruise in March 2010. Since then, the union went through several interim directors and a search for a new executive director that ended with no candidate being selected Carmen came out of retirement for  several months and it was during Carmen’s return that the MTEA reached a four-year contract agreement with the Milwaukee School Board. Johnson was hired after Carmen returned to retirement last fall.

With Johnson gone,  long-time union staffer Sid Hatch has been named acting executive director. Separately, the union is installing a new president this week. Mike Langyel, who was president the last two years (and was president from 1991 to 1993 as well), has retired and Bob Peterson, a veteran teacher who is nationally known for his work on social justice issues and his founding of the Rethinking Schools education publication, is the new president.

Testing for voucher students:  One of the unpublicized aspects of the voucher proposal approved last week by the legislature’s joint finance committee was a plan for students who use publicly-funded vouchers to attend private schools to continue to take the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations, the tests taken by public school students. But there is a twist to the decision that will make it a little tricky to compare the results from voucher schools and public schools.

Last fall, for the first time,  thousands of voucher students in Milwaukee took the WKCEs and the overall scores of the private schools were made public this spring. The results showed that there were no big differences in how students in Milwaukee Public Schools and voucher students rated. In fact, MPS outscored the voucher schools in some instances.

In his budget proposal, Gov. Scott Walker came out for lifting the WKCE requirement for the voucher schools, although each private school would have had to administer a different nationally recognized test. That led to concerns that the private schools would not be subject to the degree of accountability that goes with having test scores that can be compared with public schools.

The Republican-controlled finance committee agreed to keep the WKCE requirement, but said the results for each voucher school would be presented based on only the students who took the test. What does that mean? In some private schools, such as Downtown Montessori, a large number of parents used their legal option to withdraw their children from testing. But the overall results for those schools were presented as if those students had scored zeroes, which made the schools look pretty weak. Now, the results will be presented based on only those who take the tests, which will mean much better looking results for a school where a significant number of students opt out.

But public schools are required to report the results based ion all students, including the kids who opt out. (In general, very few do that). Therefore, there might be an issue of comparability between schools where all students are in the results pool and schools where only those who take the test are included.   

Old faces at new schools:  A brief note about plans to turn around two of MPS’ most troubled high schools, North and Custer. Work has been underway for months to select an organization to run the new North. Mosaica Turnaround Partners, a national school operator, was selected after submitting the only bid, but trepidations about Mosaica were substantial, based in large part on problems the company has had in other places. Mosaica has now withdrawn, and the Milwaukee School Board decided recently to turn North into a charter school with teachers who are MPS employees. Rogers Onick, who retired after many years as principal of Morse Middle School for the Gifted and Talented, has agreed to oversee the launching of the new operation.

Custer High School is also undergoing an overhaul of its programs (and is losing that name). What will be called the School of Career and Technical Education will now occupy much of the building at 5075 N. Sherman Blvd. Plans call for it to serve sixth through twelfth graders. It also will be a charter school where the teachers are MPS employee. And overseeing the new program will be Gloria Erkins, retired principal of Vincent High School.

Also in the Custer building will be the former 35^th Street School. No longer on 35h Street, plans call for it to be named after President Barack Obama.

Extra funding for special ed students?  In a recent opinion column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, two of the key researchers who have studied Milwaukee’s schools, particularly the private voucher schools, wrote, “Public schools have both strong incentives to classify students as requiring exceptional education, because they receive extra funding to teach such students and well-established protocols for doing so. Private schools have neither. A student with the same educational needs often will be classified as exceptional education in MPS but not so classified in the choice program.”

The two were addressing the issue of why students identified as needing special educations services are found so much more frequently in MPS schools (about 19% of all students), compared to the voucher schools (some say under 2%, some say the number is more like 8%, except many of them are not officially labeled as special ed students).

That raised the hackles of MPS Superintendent Greg Thornton. He wrote on his blog, “Really? Can they honestly believe that?” He said it is not true that MPS has strong incentives to classify kids as needing special ed. “Due to low and declining levels of reimbursement from the federal and state levels, the costs associated with providing needed services to students with disabilities far outpace any so-called ‘extra funding,’ Thornton wrote. “ In the 2009-10 school year, using the most conservative method of calculating special education funding, Milwaukee Public Schools incurred unreimbursed special education costs of $42.2 million.”

Michael Bonds’ bankruptcy: Is it a big deal that Michael Bonds, president of the Milwaukee School Board, has filed for personal bankruptcy? In many ways, no. It’s his personal business and most likely won’t affect what he does as board president. But  I suspect the matter is going to stick in people’s minds for a long time and become part of the general climate of doubtfulness about the competency of the School Board to manage MPS. Is that fair? You’re welcome to your own opinion. But I suspect it is reality.

One: Legally and politically, this is almost surely idle thinking, but what if the private schools that are in Milwaukee’s voucher program had to face the same kind of consequences for getting weak results that charter schools and, of late, conventional public schools face?

Charter schools, which are independently operated, publicly funded schools, are generally given five-year contracts by a government body. (In Milwaukee, charter contracts are granted by the School Board, city government, or the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.) It is not unusual for a charter school to be closed if it is not getting good results at the end of five years, or sometimes sooner.

In the conventional Milwaukee Public Schools system, school closings are becoming common. Tightening finances and declining enrollments are key reasons, but getting bad results is also a factor. And a list of schools, including several major high schools, are under orders, based on federal policies, to take steps such as overhauling their programs and staffs and getting new principals because of low student success.

Although the regulatory climate around voucher schools has gained significant muscle over the last decade, the accountability tools are still much different than those for the other kinds of schools. Basically, if a private school runs a relatively competent operation and parents decide to enroll their children and keep them there, the school can keep operating, no matter how poor its outcomes are. And, based on test scores released recently, some of them have very poor outcomes. But it is after all, a parental choice program and if parents choose to send their child to a lousy school, so be it.  

Evers argued in his memo that many of the voucher schools are really public schools in the sense that almost all of their money comes from public dollars. This year, in half of the 100-plus schools involved in the voucher program, 94% or more of the students were on vouchers that generally bring $6,442 per child to the school.    

Evers’ memo said, “A significant number of choice schools perform below the MPS average in reading and math. While this is also true for MPS schools, those schools are subject to federal and state sanctions and turnaround requirements. In light of this, the state may need to impose improvements requirements on consistently low-performing choice schools.”

He also wrote, “If the choice schools are really some kind of quasi-public schools, then in keeping with national efforts to turnaround struggling schools, it may be necessary to subject low-performing schools to financial sanctions, turnaround efforts or even closure.”

So what if a voucher school, every five years or so, had to get reauthorization to get public money, based on demonstrating it was operating a quality program? That would be interesting – and, frankly, some of them would definitely not survive.

There is such a screening operation now for private schools that want to join the voucher program, and it has effectively cut the flow of new choice schools to a trickle.

But politically, at least as of now, the Republican control of the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature has put all the momentum on the side of broadening the voucher program, not putting some clamps on it. Furthermore – I should warn you that I am not a lawyer, despite being employed by the Law School – there could be a complicated legal dispute if the state tried to impose orders on voucher schools to change their academic ways. In 1998, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court approved inclusion of religious schools in the voucher program, one of the keys to the prevailing decision was the argument that the state would not become entangled in overseeing private schools in a program built around parent choice.

All this said, it is interesting to wonder what would happen if the heat was put on some of the weakest private schools the way heat is being put on conventional schools and charter schools.

Two: You could have a long discussion about the reasons and the exact data, but it is indisputable that MPS has a far larger share of Milwaukee’s special education students than the private schools do. Evers’ report put forward some figures I had not seen before.

“The data shows a significant enrollment decline in MPS among regular education students, but not corresponding change among special education students,” he said. Specifically, over nine years, the number of special education students in MPS rose slightly – from 15,912 in 2001-02 to 16,078 this year, an increase of 166. But the  number of MPS students overall fell during that period from 97,762 to 80,923, a decline of 16,839.

From 2001-02 to this year, the percentage of MPS students who disabilities rose from 16.3% to 19.9%. For private schools in the city, Evers’ data put the total at less than 1% of enrollment. Voucher school advocates say the real figure is higher than that, but that often students in private schools are not given the special education label.

Even if you think MPS calls too many kids special ed students and the voucher schools have more than the official figures, it is inescapable to see how much special education is increasingly influencing what goes on in MPS, and how big a difference there is on that score between the voucher schools and MPS. 

Three: It’s worth noting that Evers is fighting the voucher expansion proposals so actively and openly. Such aggressive action hasn’t always been the practice of state school superintendents. With school aid being cut so strongly and with the war still raging over eliminating most of the collective bargaining power of teachers, sources have said Evers has been getting lobbied by public school advocates to take a stronger role in fighting Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans. It looks like he is taking that advice.

Obviously, very young children are entirely dependent on their parents’ efforts to get them to school, and to make sure that they have the necessary materials and support in order to attend consistently. However, problems of school truancy and failure to adequately fulfill academic requirements are more often seen and discussed as children enter the middle school and high school years. When we look at the issues facing these older students, are parent-directed laws a viable solution to the problem of kids failing in school?

To answer that question, we first need to know why kids fail, skip, or drop out of school in the first place. Although it is easy to dismiss truancy or school failure as results of parental laxity, research shows that the reasons for troubled school performance are complex. Educational researchers do not agree on the main causes of poor school performance by children. Students who are members of racial minorities or whose families are economically disadvantaged tend to be on average lower achievers in school, but it is not clear whether the different performance levels are due to different levels of stimulation and language limitations in their home environments (as suggested by researchers such as Bernstein, West, Denton, and Reaney), differences in habits and attitudes between the lower and middle classes (as theorized by DeMarrais and LeCompte), differences in school resources (suggested by Kozol and others), low teacher expectations (theorized by Steel, Aronson, and Casteel), or oppositional attitudes developed by students themselves in response to perceived oppression or discrimination (suggested by Farkas, Lleras, and Maczuga, among others). Research does not uniformly support the claim that children perform better academically when their parents are involved in school, so laws forcing parents to achieve a certain level of involvement do not seem likely to improve cognitive performance of students.

However, there does seem to be a correlation between parental involvement and children’s behavior in school: the higher the level of parental involvement, the fewer child-related behavior problems. Since truancy is popularly viewed as primarily a behavior problem, coercing – or at least strongly incentivizing – parental involvement at school seems like a rational way to address the problem. But is excessive school absence always a behavior problem in the usual sense of the word? Kids miss school for all sorts of reasons: illness, fear of bullying, being needed at home to babysit younger siblings, or just feeling like they want to skip. The hope in using carrots and sticks to elicit parental involvement in school is that the positive benefits known to correlate with parental school involvement will occur. If parents are more connected with the school (the thinking goes), they are likely to convey higher expectations and positive attitudes about school to their children. If parents have more connection with the school, they may become aware of problems experienced by their offspring in time to help the kids deal with the issues without skipping school or dropping out entirely. Thus truancy will go down, student performance will go up, and education will run much more smoothly. But will it, really?

As well-intentioned as some of the parent-directed legislation may be, it ignores some important facts. For one thing, studies that show correlations between parental school involvement and positive educational outcomes examine voluntary parental involvement. The parents may have been predisposed to get involved at school due to personal characteristics which themselves increase the likelihood of their children’s success and decrease the likelihood of child truancy, or the school may have presented an attractive environment in which to become an involved parent, which atmosphere might also be partly responsible for school success. So the cause-effect relation is not entirely clear Even if the willing parental involvement is by itself responsible for part of the good educational outcome for some kids, it is not certain that coerced parental involvement will have the same positive results.

Another concern is that “grading” parents may undermine their status or authority in the eyes of their children at a time when those children are in the throes of normal adolescent rebellion. This could be counterproductive, giving kids another excuse to reject school and eschew any personal responsibility for their own success or failure. In addition, some studies have shown a strong correlation between peer group influences and truancy. It is notoriously difficult to control peer group access as children become adolescents, so short of moving, parents may have very little control over their children’s associates. If destructive peer groups are the real problem, pressuring parents to get involved in school or ridiculing their parenting may increase their stress levels without real results for their kids. Finally, there are some researchers who have posited that truancy is a rational response when a school is truly inadequate, and solutions ought to focus on providing alternative schools or even viable home-schooling. In this situation, the research suggests that parents should be allowed to look outside of the school itself, rather than becoming more involved in the school and its rituals.

The blame-the-parents mentality of the proposed legislation is especially troubling given that there is apparently no provision for individual fact-finding about whether a parent’s lack of involvement is actually causative of a student’s difficulties rather than a reaction to them. Equally troubling is this: since failure and truancy rates are on average higher in inner-city schools, the burden of the laws’ enforcement is likely to fall most heavily on parents who are already struggling with poverty, unemployment, and underfunded schools. This is not likely to result in the kind of school-parent alliance that best serves kids.

One high-profile position on the new list: Mike Roemer was chosen to be principal of Ronald Reagan High School. The south side school, with its full international baccalaureate program, has been one of the brightest success stories in MPS in the last decade. Its high-profile founding principal, Julia D’Amato, retired several months ago. Roemer was the assistant principal under D’Amato and has been acting principal since she left. The school community lobbied hard for him to get the job.

Overall, the list of new principals includes four existing principals who are getting new or amended assignments and 17 people being promoted or hired to principal positions. The reassigned principals are appointed at Thornton’s discretion, but the promotions and new hires have to be approved by the School Board. A board committee will take up the recommendations at a meeting Tuesday.    

The list can be viewed by going to this Web page and clicking on “5-24-11 AFP Blue Book Advance Copy” on the right side of the page. Then click on Item 3 on the left hand side of the document that comes up.

There are more choices to come. More than 30 principal positions, nearly a fifth of the total in the system, have been posted recently. And some major positions are not on this list, including several large high schools. Rufus King High School, the college-prep school that has been the long-term flagship of MPS quality, is one not on the new list. According to sources, Thornton was not satisfied with the first round of applicants for the position and asked that a second round be undertaken.

There is almost no disagreement among educators that a school’s principal is crucial to the life and success of a school. Both tangibly and intangibly, a principal can do much to shape the culture of a school – how smoothly it operates, how ambitious its goals are, how united its staff is, and so on.

So the choices Thornton is making may well be some of the most important of his tenure as superintendent in Milwaukee.

Amid all the cuts, one proposal that has attracted particularly strong opposition in public hearings: Eliminating free busing for three- and four-year-old kindergartners. Representatives of Montessori schools and the Starms Early Childhood Center have passionately argued for the importance of starting children in their programs at early ages. Busing is critical to getting the young children to school, they argue. School administrators estimate that there will be more than 2,700 three- and –four-year-olds bused next year, based on current practices.  

Board members are clearly sympathetic to keeping the busing. Two amendments to restore it will be considered at a meeting tonight. There’s one major problem: Neither of the proposals specifies where to come up with the almost $2 million to cover the tab for the young kids. The budget already calls for spending the most MPS can spend legally.

Official information on a proposed budget amendment from board members Terry Falk and Peter Blewett simply says, “$1,942,569 needs to be identified to fund this amendment.” An amendment proposed  by board member Larry Miller favors charging families for the busing, unless the children qualify for free or reduced price lunch. The proposal does not estimate how that might work and, as MPS budgeters said in their comments, “Further investigation is needed on legality of charging for transportation.”  

Overall, MPS has been trying for years to cut the amount it spends on busing. The figure hung around $60 million for quite a while, but has been dropping. For 2009-10, it was $56.8 million. The budget for this school year is $55.1 million. Including eliminating the three- and four-year-olds from busing, the proposed amount for next year is $51.3 million. That’s a little under 5% of the total MPS budget.

The landscape is much different now, thanks primarily to the 2010 elections and the wave of Republican victories.

There’s legislative action on multiple fronts in Wisconsin. Bills to lift the enrollment cap on Milwaukee’s voucher program and to allow suburban schools to accept city of Milwaukee voucher students are moving ahead. A proposal to phase out the family income limits for voucher recipients has brought  controversy and seems likely to morph into raising, but not eliminating, the income standard. And this week, Gov. Scott Walker said he supports expanding the program to include Racine, Beloit, and Green Bay.

It is useful to put the local developments in national context. Here are three examples of what’s going on:

Indiana – Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels signed a bill last week that will make voucehrs available statewide. By the third year, the number of students who can receive them will be unlimited.  The plan has some differences from the one in Milwaukee, but some strong similarities and it could have a sizeable impact on the educational scene across the state.

Washington, D.C. – As part of the deal struck a few weeks ago to keep the federal government from shutting down, Republicans were adamant about including revival of the Washington Opportunity Scholarship program which provides money for several thousand low income students in the District of Columbia to attend private schools.  House Speaker John Boehner is a leading supporter of the program. President Barack Obama signed the agreement. At a national conference this week of voucher supporters, a prominent point was made of  the fact that that this made Obama the first Democratic president to sign a voucher plan, even if he didn’t actually support it.

US Supreme Court – Particularly in places where the state constitution bars straight voucher payments, an alternative in which donors are given a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for money they give to private schools has been an alternative.  In a 5-4 decision, the high court ruled that a tax credit is not the same as a payment of government money, even if it reduces government income by the same amount. This could lead to growth of tax credit plans.

Expect more news on the voucher and tax credit front from other states. There still isn’t much strong evidence that student achievement improves because of voucher plans. But the movement is on the march.

The Education Writers Association, a national organization of education journalists, named the project the best series of 2010 by a large publication. The series resulted from collaboration between the Law School; the Hechinger Report, an education journalism organization that is part of Columbia University; and the Journal Sentinel, including reporters Amy Hetzner, Erin Richards, and Becky Vevea.

Borsuk helped design the plan for the series and wrote three of the eight pieces. Borsuk, a longtime reporter and editor for the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, joined the Law School staff in 2009. He writes and edits pieces for Marquette Lawyer magazine, writes for the Law School’s web pages, and is involved in a variety of public policy activities. He also writes a Sunday column on education for the Journal Sentinel.

The education writers’ contest is judged by experts who are independent of the publications that enter. This year’s judging was directed by Tamara M. Cooke Henry, of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

The series can be found at http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/111494694.html.

This is going to be a tumultuous and momentous spring and summer when it comes to education issues statewide. I wonder what all will be different when it comes time to open schools in September.

Permit me to venture into one aspect of what lies ahead that I specifically wonder about:

Walker proposed that public employees pay 5.8% of their salaries toward their pensions and 12% of the cost of their health insurance coverage.  While I wonder how that’s going to play out across the state, I especially wonder how it will play out in Milwaukee Public Schools.

Why? Because MPS management and the Milwaukee teachers’ union agreed last fall to a very unusual four-year contract, retroactive to July 2009 and going through June 2013. In other words, MPS teachers have a contract for the next two school years that includes no payments toward their pension costs and payment of either 1% or 2% of health insurance, depending on whether an employee has a single or family plan.

So what happens if the state, as seems likely, sets the annual cap on spending for general school purposes factoring in higher pension and health insurance payments? And sets the formula for state aid for schools based on schools spending less than originally forecast on benefits? Other school districts have contracts that expire in June. They at least have new contracts to work on for 2011-13 that can be based on these factors. Will MPS be faced with dealing with aid and revenue caps based on Walker’s thinking, but commitments to teachers for the next two years based on decidedly more generous benefit support by the government?  

If so, the squeeze on teachers in terms of job cuts might be worse in MPS than in other school systems – and it’s already shaping up as bad. Just how bad are cuts going to be in MPS and what will they mean in terms of what is offered in schools? Class sizes? School closings?

Will MPS union leaders, already in a surly mood due to what is happening, be willing to re-open the contracts due to the changed financial picture and in order to save jobs? History would suggest that is unlikely at best, but these are sharply different times.

All this is assuming that the Legislature will support something at least close to what Walker proposed, which seems likely. There will be a host of ways these dramatic changes will play-out. But keeping an eye specifically on what happens within MPS will be especially notable.

But the WEAC stand in favor of breaking up Milwaukee Public Schools into “smaller, more manageable districts” caught people (count me in) off guard. It’s just not something to which the union had shown previous inclination. And the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, WEAC’s largest affiliate, strongly opposes such ideas.

There were clear indications in the way things happened this week that the gap between leaders of WEAC and the MTEA is now wide and sharp, and communication among them is not friendly. 

Consider what the MTEA said Tuesday on its Web site (www.mtea.org):

“The first time WEAC provided MTEA leaders with any information about their proposals was through a phone call Monday.  WEAC had already informed legislators of its proposals.

“MTEA President Mike Langyel told WEAC that our union absolutely opposed breaking up our district and asked WEAC to cancel the news conference.  WEAC refused.”

This doesn’t sound like one of the verses of “Solidarity Forever.”  And telling legislators before telling the local union that would be affected shows where WEAC’s feelings are about the MTEA. History and the dynamics of the current situation both suggest this gap will have a significant life span, and it may have a bearing on issues that go well beyond whether MPS should be broken into pieces.

I need to look back into history a bit, but I know there was a rupture between WEAC and the MTEA in, I believe, the 1970s and ‘80s. The MTEA withdrew from WEAC and held its own teachers’ convention each fall, among other things. Eventually the two re-united, but relations have been uneasy. In addition, relations between WEAC and the Madison teachers’ union have a long history of rockiness.

Some regard WEAC as primarily identifying with teachers in the out-state districts, while the MTEA, of course, is all about Milwaukee and MPS. One of the unspoken messages in the WEAC announcement Tuesday is how little sympathy there is for MPS and the MTEA outside of Milwaukee, even from fellow unionists. That is almost certain to be a relevant dynamic at a time when Milwaukee has so little political clout in Madison and so many big issues about education are going to be decided in Madison.

Permit me to repeat what I said a year ago concerning Prof. Rofes. The context was my reporting to students, in my beginning-of-semester letter, that Prof. Rofes had elected to return this academic year to full-time faculty duties, in the tradition of the Law School, after lengthy service as director of the part-time program and associate dean for academic affairs. I wished to explain “my thanks and admiration”:

I have been especially impressed by Prof. Rofes’s ability—even while administering the academic program, including determining course offerings, working with full-time and adjunct faculty, overseeing the schedule, and running the Academic Support Program—never to lose sight of the individuals with whom he works and never to fail to make time, for example, for the individual in need of time, attention, or assistance. There is a lesson for you in his work. For your work as a lawyer also will be in support and service of others; indeed, the work of the lawyer inheres most basically in the attention to and care for another. I express at graduation my hope that you have found some models in these, your early days in the profession. You—we—would do well especially to consider the important ways in which Prof. Rofes is an exemplar.

Congratulations, Peter—and thank you.

Over the lunch hour, National Teacher of the Year Rafe Esquith talked about his experience working with inner-city kids in Los Angeles, and some of his fifth grade students — the Hobart Shakespeareans — performed Shakespearean scenes and a couple of rock n’ roll songs. And, in the evening, Rafe and the Hobart Shakespeareans spoke to, and performed for, an audience of education students, faculty, local educators, and interested community members (thanks to all of those at the College of Education for making the evening such a great success). Cross posted at the Marquette Educator >>

First, this was a banner outcome in the eyes of voucher and charter school leaders. Governor-elect Scott Walker is a long-time ally of those promoting the 20,000-plus-student private school voucher program in the city of Milwaukee, and he is a booster of charter schools both in Milwaukee and statewide. But just as important as Walker’s win was the thumpingly strong victories for Republicans in both the Assembly and State Senate, which will now come under sizable Republican majorities.  

What will result?

Let’s assume it’s good-bye to the 22,500-student cap on the voucher enrollment in Milwaukee. Will Walker and the Legislature expand the voucher program beyond the city, perhaps, for openers, to Racine? Will they open the doors wider for charter schools, for national charter-school operators to come into Wisconsin, and for more public bodies to be given the power to authorize charter schools? (Currently, UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee City Hall, and UW-Parkside are the only ones authorized to do that, other than school boards.) Perhaps most important, what will the Republicans do about the per-student payments to voucher and charter schools? School leaders now are chafing under the impact of receiving less than $6,500 per student for each voucher student and less than $8,000 for each charter student. Will this be one of the very few spots where the Republicans increase the state’s financial involvement? Pretty good chance the answer is yes to all of the above.

Second, among the really big losers Tuesday was the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), the major state teachers’ union.  Steve Walters, former Madison bureau chief for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and now a freelance columnist for the paper, made some important points in a piece that ran last Sunday. He showed how WEAC had directed almost all of its political money into supporting four incumbent Democratic senators who were seeking re-election. The strategy was clearly to write off the governorship and Assembly elections as lost causes, but fight to keep the Senate under a Democratic majority that could at least put the brakes on Republican education ideas. The strategy failed – three of the four Democrats (Lehman, Sullivan, and Kreitlow) lost and the fourth (Vinehout) is holding on to a slim victory that might be challenged. In addition, Russ Decker, who had been the Senate Democratic leader and a close WEAC ally, lost.

So now what will happen on issues that affect teachers, including pay, benefits, and tenure? What will be the approach for WEAC and union leaders from around the state, including Milwaukee’s MTEA? Will either Republicans or union people be willing to work together within the new reality? Or will they stick to being combative, the one empowered by big victory, the other aggrieved by big defeat? How teacher issues play out ahead will be very interesting and important.

A teacher at a Bronx elementary school has been reassigned after writing on a Web site about her past as a sex worker.

In a short online article in The Huffington Post on Sept. 7, the teacher, Melissa Petro, criticized Craigslist for shutting down its “adult services” section, which carried sex-related advertising.

Ms. Petro wrote that from October 2006 to January 2007, she “accepted money in exchange for sexual services I provided to men I met online.”

She said that she used Craigslist to meet men and it provided “a simple, familiar forum through which I could do my business with complete anonymity, from the safety and convenience of my own home.”

This is a fairly standard public employee free speech case applying the Pickering framework, probably coming down to whether the online article in question substantially disrupted the teacher’s ability to be an effective teacher in the school (by dint of her relationship with her supervisors, colleagues, parents, or students). When you are talking about elementary school, you also have to consider concerns about good role models and the impressionable age of the children.

The interesting part to me and my student was the tenure part. Most tenure protections at the K-12 level provide some type of statutory just cause protection.  Did the school district have good cause to terminate her based on exposing herself (pun intended) as a former prostitute?  Who knows how an arbitrator might rule, but I think good cause could be found.  So as long as the school district here affords the proper procedural protections a la Roth and Sindermann, I do not see a problem with the school district’s actions.

Do I condone the firing personally?  That’s a hard one, especially since I have children currently in elementary school.  I can’t imagine her past occupation coming up in the classroom or the children finding out (unless a parent shares this information with their children), but really who knows?

What did she do in between? She joined Teach for America, the nationwide organization that puts thousands of high-caliber college graduates into high-needs classrooms for the first two years after graduation. Gigot has been teaching this year at Northwest Secondary School, a Milwaukee Public Schools middle and high school program near North 72nd Street and West Silver Spring Drive.

Wendy Kopp, the founder and CEO of Teach for America, received an honorary degree at the commencement and, in her strongly localized speech, described how much Gigot had accomplished in her year teaching math to sixth and seventh graders.  Students who were generally three years behind in their math skills have made substantial progress, the learning atmosphere in Gigot’s classroom has improved sharply as the year has gone on, and Gigot has gone to lengths to get to know her students and their families, including home visits of seventy-two of them, Kopp said. 

“She holds office hours at McDonald’s every Saturday morning,” Kopp said, and Gigot works regularly with dozens of students after school. Now, “visitors would wonder if it was the same set of students as she had at the beginning of the year.”

Kopp said seventy-five Marquette graduates have joined Teach for America in recent years, including fifteen from this year’s class who are set to begin teaching in the fall.

Kopp praised Milwaukee College Prep, a kindergarten through eighth grade charter school on North 36th Street north of North Avenue, which has recorded test scores above the state average year after year with students who are almost all from low-income homes.

Kopp said recent test results showed Milwaukee Public Schools students scoring near the bottom among eighteen urban districts that took part in a federal testing program. The Milwaukee scores were so low that some experts wondered whether eighth graders in MPS had been in school in the previous four years.    

“In the face of what Milwaukee College Prep shows is possible, this is unconscionable,” Kopp said. “Milwaukee College Prep shows us it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Kopp said the prevailing view among policy makers nationwide has changed for the better in the light of the success of schools such as Milwaukee College Prep. Five years ago, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., were each regarded as among the worst school districts in the U.S., and each is now making major progress, she said.

“The question is no longer whether it is possible to put children growing up in poverty on a level playing field, but rather how to achieve such success on a significant scale, and that is a very different question,” Kopp said. She said there is increasing evidence that the answer to the latter question is yes.

Kopp challenged the graduates to do things in their first years out of college that aim to make differences in improving the problems that the world faces. That’s what she did by launching Teach for America two decades ago as a graduate from Princeton.  Next year, there will 7,500 TFA teachers at work in urban and rural schools from coast to coast.

But Kopp’s second challenge was also important: If Kalyn Gigot can progress, if Milwaukee College Prep can make progress, why can’t progress be more widespread in Milwaukee?

Kopp’s speech can be viewed between minutes forty-four and seventy of the video of the commencement ceremony.