Scott Walker's Hokey Pokey

Eliminating collective bargaining for Wisconsin public employees was all about balancing the state budget. Until it wasn't.

Expanding the Milwaukee voucher program was all about equal educational opportunities for low-income children. Until it wasn't.

Howard Fuller is absolutely right to threaten to "get off the stage" and refuse to strike a deal with the devil.

“I will never fight for giving people who already have means more resources. Because, in the end, that will disadvantage and squeeze out the possibility of poor parents having some of these options,” said Fuller.

This is not to say that Fuller won’t consider raising the income threshold to serve more of Milwaukee’s working poor. In the interview, he talks about aligning the requirements for entry into the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program with those of Wisconsin’s BadgerCare program, which provides health care to state residents who earn less than 300 percent of poverty. “That would capture over 80 percent of the households in the city,” he said. “So if your real objective is to expand the level of support, you could do that and still retain a focus on low-income and moderate-income families.”

But if Wisconsin and other states want to make their vouchers universally accessible to families of any income level, “it may very well be that it’s time for people like me to get off the stage,” he said. “Maybe it has to be a different movement going forward, but if that’s the way the movement has to be going forward, it’s not something that I can be a part of.”

While I disagree with Fuller's approach to expanding vouchers rather than focusing on reform of and investment in public education, I admire his steadfast adherence to principle and his commitment to advocacy on behalf of disadvantaged children and families.

Others in Wisconsin -- including UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin -- need to come to the same conclusion. What YOU may think or want something to be about probably isn't why this right-wing governor is your new friend. Just say "no, thank you." There are alternatives that may need to wait for more thoughtful and progressive leadership in Wisconsin.

Trampling workers' rights. Privatizing public education. THAT's what it's all about.

AP Photo: Andy Manis

Grasping At Straws

Illinois is sure to be disappointed if it continues to move forward with a private voucher program (SB 2494) for Chicago Public Schools. Just ask Wisconsin-- and Milwaukee.

Clearly, the Chicago Tribune editorial board ('Liberate the kids'), which is cheering the process on, has not done its homework, not checked its sources, and not looked to its neighbor to the north for guidance. Or it is simply drinking the Kool Aid mixed by Voucher Inc.:

And there's evidence that vouchers improve public schools. A 2009 report by The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice examined 17 studies on the impact of voucher programs. Sixteen studies found that vouchers improved student achievement in public schools; one study found they had no positive or negative impact. In other words, competition works.

There is also plentiful evidence that vouchers do NOT improve public schools, including the on-going evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program -- the longest-standing voucher program in the country, just a short drive up I-94 from Chicago.

To look to the Friedman Foundation for guidance on this issue is akin to turning to Karl Rove's new book as a definitive history of the George W. Bush administration. From a University of Illinois professor, Dr. Christopher Lubienski, here's a critique of the Friedman report cited in the Tribune editorial:

[T]he report, based on a review of 17 studies, selectively reads the evidence in some of those studies, the majority of which were produced by voucher advocacy organizations. Moreover, the report can’t decide whether or not to acknowledge the impact of factors other than vouchers on public schools. It attempts to show that public school gains were caused by the presence of vouchers alone, but then argues that the lack of overall gains for districts with vouchers should be ignored because too many other factors are at play. In truth, existing research provides little reliable information about the competitive effects of vouchers, and this report does little to help answer the question.

Competition does not work. Plus, what evidence exists to suggest that these Chicago-area private schools will do any better a job of educating the students who would be taken out of the public system? I can't wait to see that evidence because I'm fairly certain that it doesn't exist. That raises questions about the Tribune's utter disregard of this issue: "What if student performance doesn't improve in private schools? Simple: Parents will vote with their feet." But if there's no comparable evidence of student performance between public and private schools, how can parents (consumers) make informed judgments about their child's education? In addition, what if there are insufficient openings at private schools for students wanting to go? Will the voucher be sufficient to cover the tuition and associated costs at these schools for low-income students?

What would be preferable to this exercise in grasping at straws would be energy directed toward a more difficult series of conversations about school-based policies like teacher quality, school leadership, teaching and learning conditions and overall school improvement, in addition to community-focused strategies such as early childhood education, after-school programs, quality child care, and school health in the city of Chicago that get to kids' readiness to learn when they come to school.

Vouchers are not the answer, but a major distraction from more efficacious approaches that should be the focus of the Illinois Legislature.

Image courtesy of Laura Lee.

Movement on Teacher Residency Requirements

As a follow up to my post last September ("Teacher Residency Requirements"), there appears to be legislative movement in both Illinois and Wisconsin to eliminate such requirements in Chicago and Milwaukee, respectively. Both cities require teachers to be residents in order to be employed in the public schools.

From District 299: The Chicago Schools Blog (Alexander Russo), 3/8/2010:

It's an age-old question for Chicago, which is one of few big cities to require teachers to live inside the city limits. Teachers complain about it. Once in a while they get caught living outside the city and have to move or leave their jobs. The recession in making jobs scarcer and the city more expensive. And now State Sen. Steans has introduced language [Residency Bill SB 3522 (Amendment 1)] that, with the support of the CTU, would remove that requirement.

From Wisconsin State Journal editorial, 3/10/2010:

Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature and the state's big teachers union are on the same side pushing for a smart school reform in Milwaukee.

They're backing Assembly Bill 89, which would prohibit Milwaukee Public Schools from requiring their teachers to live in the state's largest city.

My belief is that, while this might be good politics or even economic policy, it is bad education policy. In urban school districts that struggle to attract and retain talented and effective teachers, such a residency policy needlessly reduces the number of qualified candidates for teaching vacancies and lowers the quality of the overall selection pool.

Spin Cycle

Education Next apparently has provided a platform for school choice advocate George Mitchell to shill for voucher schools outside of the state of Wisconsin. Here is his latest spin on a study that shows the high school graduation rate to be 12 points higher in seven Milwaukee voucher schools compared with 23 Milwaukee public high schools.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story by Erin Richards provides the crucial quote regarding causation from the study's author, John Robert Warren, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota:

"We still don't know whether it's going to the voucher school that causes you to be more likely to graduate, or if it's something about the kinds of families that send their kids to voucher schools would make them more likely to graduate," he said.

Then there's the whole question of which and how the voucher and public high schools were chosen for purposes of comparison. More questions than answers. Unlike Mitchell, I neither see this report as providing "another piece of evidence suggesting that urban students benefit when afforded more educational options," nor "new data" to encourage President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan to take "a second look at the power of parent choice."

The study was funded by the voucher-advocacy group School Choice Wisconsin, run by Mitchell's wife, Susan. The Mitchells have split from national school choice leader Howard Fuller who is devoting his current efforts to furthering accountability and quality in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

After the spin cycle, be sure to rinse.

For past perspective on Voucher Inc, please visit here.

Teacher Residency Requirements

Apart from being marginally good local politics to require city employees (including teachers) to live within city boundaries, why would an urban district create barriers that make it more difficult to attract the highly effective teachers that it needs?

Ask Chicago and Milwaukee. (Boston, too, has a residency requirement for city employees, but it excludes teachers.) Any others out there we should be aware of?

From the Chicago Tribune (9/11/2009):

The city, for its part, maintains that teachers should be contributing to the tax base that funds their schools, among other reasons.

From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (1/24/2008):

The residency rule has been controversial for years. Some say it is unfair and MPS needs good teachers too much to restrict the pool of possible teachers. Others say it doesn't actually have much effect on who teaches overall and it's good for the city to have employees live within the city line. Efforts in the state Legislature to repeal the residency rule recently have not succeeded.