April 3: The Ultimate MPS Survey

In a few days, Milwaukeeans will elect members of the Milwaukee School Board. Let's hope we choose board members who pay attention to their constituents.

Over the past 30 years, Milwaukee’s children have been subjected to massive busing and racial desegregation; plans to split the district into pieces; efforts to take the schools out of the hands of an elected board and turn them over to the state or the mayor; decentralization; the return to neighborhood schools; No Child Left Behind and high stakes testing; school to work; school vouchers; and now recentralization.

These reforms add up to one rule of life: Education reform is rarely about education. It tends to be about ideology, politics, power, business and money. And often the powers that be don't listen to what children and their parents want and need.

That’s why the Forum, at the request of MPS administrators, conducted telephone interviews last year with 900 city residents. The findings read like a primer on priorities for the newly-elected Milwaukee School Board.

First, most people envision schools as being more like full-service social service agencies. They want MPS to provide adult mentors for children, before/after school programs, employment counseling, measures to improve attendance, nursing services, social services like mental health counseling, housing assistance for poor families, and measures to reduce poverty.

Also, more than 80% think it is extremely important that MPS provides violence prevention services, as well as other measures to improve safety and discipline – such as scanning everyone who enters school buildings for weapons, assigning police officers to work in middle and high schools, using dogs to search student lockers for controlled substances, and drug and alcohol prevention programs.

A related finding is that the worst perceived problems in MPS have nothing to do with the schools themselves – as we think of them with today’s blinders on. The biggest problems - lack of resources, parental involvement, discipline, drugs/alcohol, and student safety - are not internal, in fact, to the actual school system as it is currently constituted. Things more within MPS’s control, such as efficiency, discrimination, quality of principals and teachers’ ability, are not perceived to be major problems.

If MPS is going to listen to its customers, school board candidates – and certainly next week’s winners – need to address these findings.

Specifically, candidates need to contemplate this question: What would schools look like if they were full-service agencies that combined the functions of state, county, municipal and school governance?

The list of “what-ifs” is long and may be helpful for sparking discussion and thoughtful debate:

• What if all three of the largest governments in Wisconsin, not just MPS but also the city and county of Milwaukee, were major players in all MPS schools – and were responsible for MPS outcomes?
• What if current partnerships – such as the new Browning School that shares a building with the Silver Spring Neighborhood Center, or Metcalfe that shares a building with the Boys and Girls Club -were replicated system-wide?
• What if MPS provided more direct services -adult education, health care, job placement, parenting education?
• What if the schools were more of an information clearinghouse and referral service for the families of their students?
• What if every school had social workers doing case management and coordination for all their students and their students’ families?
• What if the informal triage that divides children into future productive citizens and future prisoners were replaced with a coordinated state/county/city/MPS partnership truly aimed at leaving no child behind?

Suppose the school board got creative to address the real concerns of actual children and their families? Then this election could get interesting.

PPF voucher research and the Supreme Court(s)

Jay Bullock, a MPS teacher and blogger (Folkbum's Rambles and Rants), notes that the Forum's latest research on Milwaukee's voucher program did not get great media coverage. His blog entry comes in response to the introduction of the voucher program as an issue in the race between Annette Ziegler and Linda Clifford for Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Whether or not you agree with Folkbum's point, if you're a potential state Supreme Court Justice you might be interested in knowing that there is precedent for the Forum's research to be considered at a "supreme" level. In fact, our work was cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter in his dissent in the Zelman case, which held 5-4 that Cleveland's voucher program is constitutional.

Irony at MPS

Does anyone else see the irony here? First, MPS officials decide that cell phones contribute to violence and start enforcing a no cell-phones rule. Now, MPS decides that videos of fights are helpful in finding all the participants. Good thing the student doing the taping had "illegally" brought a cell phone to class!

UWM student journalist punctures Mayfair Mall media hype

A story on Frontpage Milwaukee, an online newpaper run by UWM journalism students, illustrates how the local mainstream media has focused disproportionately on Mayfair Mall's crime problems. The author, Matthew Hrodey, found:

In 2006, police made 731 arrests at Mayfair Mall, only 11% more than Mayfair's five-year average - and about half the number arrested last year at Southridge Mall, a mall in Greendale that had about 30% fewer visitors in 2006.

In addition, the mall arrest statistics show that adults committed twice as many crimes as junveniles and that most thefts were committed by women and girls. Read the whole article for an in-depth analysis of the arrest statistics for both malls, including demographic data.

The article is a great example of the facts calling our perceptions into question. And yes, I'm tagging this post "race relations."

Hat tip: Mobile's Take


UPDATE: The mainstream media jumps on the bandwagon.

Defense Department cares for children best, Wisconsin is 8th

The National Association of Child Care Resources and Referral Agencies (NACCRRA) has released new state rankings on child care standards and oversight. The report, "We Can Do Better: NACCRRA’s Ranking of State Child Care Center Standards and Oversight," which looked at all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), found that “the DoD child care system stands alone as a model for the states” and is the only system to be ranked in the top 10 for both standards and oversight.

Wisconsin ranks 8th for standards, scoring 62 out of a possible 100, for things such as student-teacher ratios, teacher certification and training, and teacher background checks. Wisconsin does not satisfy the industry recommended standards for child care center directors' credentials because our state does not require center directors to possess a post-high school degree.

Unfortunately, on the oversight rankings, Wisconsin plummets. Our state ranks 47th, scoring 11 out of a possible 50, mainly because the state does not visit licensed child care centers frequently enough, the state licensing staff is not required to have any degree higher than an associate's degree, and parents cannot access licensing reports or complaints online. What does this mean? According to NACCRRA:

It is not enough to be moving in the right direction with strong child care standards if a state’s oversight system doesn’t measure up. Without adequate oversight, there is no way to evaluate whether state standards are actually being met.

Thus, we have an accountability problem. For a government watchdog group like the Forum, this is an issue...why are we spending taxpayer money to license these child care providers in the first place if we don't follow up and ensure they continue to meet the requirements?

(Note, too, that not only are taxpayers on the hook when licensing standards aren't enforced, parents, who pay a pretty sum, are as well. The report finds the average annual cost of child care in Wisconsin is $11,855 for infants and $6,959 for preschoolers.)

Welcome to the new economy, 7 years late

Way back in 2000, the Forum wrote a white paper for the Governor's economic summit (remember those?), which found that while joining the "new economy" was necessary, it could actually harm our tax base in certain ways. We noted especially that our sales tax policies had not caught up to the new phenomenon of Internet sales. At the time, many people assumed that treating Internet stores like mail-order catalogues would suffice...if they had a physical presence in the state, then they would collect sales tax from customers in our state and, if not, then customers in the state would pay a use tax on the goods they purchased. The problem is that this assumed sophisticated retailers, compliant consumers, and tangible goods. And although we did not predict eBay auctions or iTunes (if only I had that kind of prognostication skill!), we concluded that using current sales tax policy to govern Internet sales would surely result in missed opportunity for a larger sales tax base.

Of course, Wisconsin was not the only state grappling with this issue at the time. The National Conference of State Legislatures' Executive Committee established in 1999 a Task Force on State and Local Taxation of Telecommunications and Electronic Commerce, which has resulted in the "Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement" that will not only make collection of sales and use taxes on Internet transactions feasible, it may also make it constitutional. The agreement attempts to remove the burden of tax collections from retailers, level the playing field for bricks-and-mortar retailers vs. e-tailers, and retain states' sovereignty over their own tax policy.

The streamlined agreement is voluntary for both states and merchants and has the support of many retailers and their associations. The intention is for the agreement to serve as the basis for Congress to grant authority to states to require all sellers, regardless of location, to collect sales and use taxes. Currently, as stated in the Supreme Court's Quill case, under the Commerce Clause, unless Congress specifically provides as such, states cannot impose sales taxes on out-of-state merchants. According to NCSL:

The Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement provides the states with a blueprint to create a simplified sales and use tax collection system that when implemented, provides justification for Congress to allow states to request remote sellers to collect sales taxes as was intended in the Quill decision.

Today, 21 states are full members to the agreement...but not Wisconsin. Wisconsin co-chaired the NCSL task force and was lauded by the Forum in our white paper for showing leadership and forward-thinking. But seven years later, we still haven't fully joined the agreement. Our state has debated the issue and did pass legislation in 2001 that got us part way there. Now Governor Doyle's budget proposal includes the necessary legislation to fully join the agreement. This is not a partisan issue; Wisconsin can either lose tax revenue (nationally, state and local tax losses to e-commerce in 2008 are estimated to range from $11.8 B to $17.8 B) or capture it via merchants who will collect it voluntarily. We, as consumers, are already supposed to be paying these taxes...we just aren't. It really doesn't seem like a hard choice.

Wisconsin ranks 7th for pre-K access

The 2006 State Preschool Yearbook released today by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers (NIEER) ranks Wisconsin seventh for access to government-funded pre-K programs for 4-year-olds. The state ranks 22nd in access for 3-year-olds.

The report finds that 49% of all 4-year-olds in our state in 2006 were enrolled in either state-funded K4 (32%), state-funded or federally funded Head Start (9%), or a state-funded special education program (8%). For 3-year-olds, the total figure is 15%.

From the report:
Wisconsin’s state constitution has included a commitment to provide free education for 4-year-olds since it was adopted in 1848. The Four-Year-Old Kindergarten (K4) program dates back to 1873. This initiative continues today, though there was a suspension of state funding from 1957 to 1984. The K4 program is currently available in about half of Wisconsin’s school districts, which receive 50 percent of the standard state per-pupil funding amount to provide half-day classes for 4-year-olds, or 60 percent if the school also offers parent support. Public schools may offer prekindergarten directly, or contract with Head Start, private child care centers, or family child care homes to provide services. The state has pushed successfully for program expansion in recent years, serving more children in districts with existing programs and opening programs in districts that did not have K4 previously. The growth continues, with 23 new districts implementing K4 in 2006-2007.

A Washington Post story about the report notes:
...[R]esearch highlighting the importance of early learning is prompting more and more states to add pre-kindergarten programs. "Virtually every state has a very strong movement toward doing a better job with pre-k," said Arthur Rolnick, a senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and part of a group of business leaders calling for giving low-income kids earlier access to public school.

Nationally, the report finds that states spent a total of $3.3 billion last year on pre-kindergarten, up from $2.8 billion in 2005. The state figures do not include federal and local governments' contributions. Wisconsin state aid totals $62.4 million, or $2,971 per child enrolled, placing us 23 in the resource ranking.

Of the ten quality benchmarks created by the NIEER, Wisconsin programs meet six. Those we don't meet? According to the NIEER, we lack teacher quality and accountability (in the form of state oversight of program sites).

This non-prescriptive approach to program quality is the result of the balance we struck here in Wisconsin between state and local control. Wisconsin allows school districts and Head Start providers to collaborate and contract with private providers. The reasons for doing so vary from keeping costs down, to increasing access, to providing greater choice for parents. We call this community collaboration and the theory is that it will encourage public and private providers to work together to better meet the needs of parents. What we don't know is whether this model is truly meeting Wisconsin parent needs. The Forum is currently drafting a survey designed to help answer that question. We will be asking parents about their experiences with early childhood education, including pre-K, and gathering their opinions about the programs they desire and the programs that are available to them. This survey will be the start of a new three-year project by the Forum to measure the costs and benefits of high quality early childhood education to our regional economy. Stay tuned.