Is Governance Reform in the Future for Milwaukee Public Schools?

There is growing consensus that the Milwaukee Public Schools are at a critical moment in their history.  Faced with daunting fiscal challenges last year, some school board members talked openly about dissolving the district, only to later amend their comments.  It was a symbolic protest, they said, an attempt to draw attention to the district’s dismal financial outlook.  But the horse was out of the barn. The board’s “dissolution discussion” opened the door to new debate about MPS’s future.  An independent review of the district’s fiscal situation, paid for by local foundations, was commissioned and should be made public soon.  Once that happens, Governor Doyle is expected to weigh in on the district’s future course.  What that path will be is still uncertain, but last week, we had a fascinating discussion here at the Law School about the possibility of changing the way MPS is governed.

The event was co-sponsored by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and came on the heels of a study that examined five other districts that had changed their governance.  The study was funded by the GMF and conducted by the Public Policy Forum.  We’ve posted a transcript of the event, which featured MPS Superintendent Bill Andrekopoulos, former Superintendent and Distinguished Professor of Education at Marquette University Howard Fuller, Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce President Tim Sheehy, Milwaukee School Board Director Jennifer Morales, State Representative Polly Williams, Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association President Dennis Oulahan, and Milwaukee Common Council President Willie Hines.

You can always listen to the webcast of our event, but the evening had a revealing dynamic to it that makes for equally interesting reading.

Continue ReadingIs Governance Reform in the Future for Milwaukee Public Schools?

It Was a Tulip Craze

This article from Wired Magazine (somewhat similar to this article from the N.Y. Times a month ago) seems to me to confirm that the present financial meltdown was caused by a sort of modern tulip mania, this time for collateralized debt obligations. A taste:

What is the chance that any given home will decline in value? You can look at the past history of housing prices to give you an idea, but surely the nation’s macroeconomic situation also plays an important role. And what is the chance that if a home in one state falls in value, a similar home in another state will fall in value as well?

Enter [David X.] Li…. Using some relatively simple math—by Wall Street standards, anyway—Li came up with an ingenious way to model default correlation without even looking at historical default data. Instead, he used market data about the prices of instruments known as credit default swaps. . . . It was a brilliant simplification of an intractable problem. . . .

Continue ReadingIt Was a Tulip Craze

Litman on the Prospect of Copyright Reform

Jessica Litman, the John F. Nickoll Professor of Law and Professor of Information at the
University of Michigan, delivered the Twelfth Annual Honorable Helen Wilson Nies Memorial Lecture yesterday at the Law School. (Audio available here; a print version will be forthcoming in the Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review.) The subject of Litman’s fascinating lecture was “Real Copyright Reform” — the word “real” referring not to what is likely to actually occur, but rather what sort of changes would truly reform the Copyright Act.

Litman believes that yet another wholesale revision of the Copyright Act, akin to those in 1831, 1870, 1909, and 1976, is in the offing. The warning signs are all there — practitioners are arguing that different meanings should be given to the same terms in different contexts, industry players are opting out of the Act’s provisions in private agreements, and the current Act no longer serves any of its constituencies very well. Those constituencies include not only creators and distributors, the primary movers behind previous reform efforts, but now also device makers and, increasingly, ordinary users of copyrighted works, who in the past were treated by copyright law with benign neglect. Now, as evidenced by the RIAA lawsuits and YouTube notice and takedowns, consumers are no longer below the fray; they are getting drawn into the battles between distributors and device makers.

What can legal scholars offer the copyright revision process? Litman was not optimistic that the legislative process would produce a worthy reform, or that scholars would get to play much of a role in it, but she offered three goals the ideal “Copyright Act of 2026” should meet.

Continue ReadingLitman on the Prospect of Copyright Reform