Wisconsin Republicans, newly re-entrenched in the governor's office and legislature, think it's time to mess around some more with public schools, which they've increasingly starved of cash to fund their increasingly ridiculous private school voucher program. The vouchers started out as a small program in Milwaukee decades ago, described by its advocates as a way to introduce (ahem) "competition" into local public education, but anti-public school Republicans have expanded the program to more and more communities in the state.
Critics of the nationally trend-setting Wisconsin voucher program have complained for years that not only do public school districts have to pay for the "privilege" of losing some of their pupils out of their own property tax revenues (in Milwaukee's case without reimbursement), but also that the private voucher schools are not held accountable to the same performance evaluation standards, if any at all. Indeed, according to recent estimates, Wisconsin private schools wasted some $139 million in taxpayer money that went to pay for student tuition vouchers before state officials figured out those schools had failed.
Whereas public schools are tasked with elaborate state and federal performance evaluation requirements, Republicans who champion the voucher program and other conservative-backed public school alternatives, including a charter school system, have for decades allowed a very laissez faire approach to testing academic performance.
Wisconsin citizens increasingly have become aware of voucher school academic problems and inequities in the way the program spends tax dollars -- as, for example, when the voucher schools cream off top students from public schools, leaving behind poorly performing kids and pupils with expensive, special-education needs. All this has become so contentious that formerly foot-dragging Republicans on up to Gov. Scott Walker have had to assure parents, taxpayers and voters that they're going to create a more equivalent assessment program.
The Wisconsin GOP's latest scheme to accomplish this: A state Assembly bill that would create an "Academic Review Board," which would develop a new evaluation system, looking at student math and reading skills and high school graduation rates.
Despite promises that an equitable assessment system is what they have in mind, Republicans appear once again to have pulled a political bait and switch. More below the fold.
The GOP's proposed academic review board could, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
... convert failing public schools to independent charter schools and cut off all state payments to failing private schools for at least four years, under a draft bill offered by Assembly Republicans Wednesday.
The sweeping measure would create a new board to assign letter grades of A through F to all publicly funded schools in the state and then lay out eventual penalties for those receiving D's and F's. In a shift from current law, the measure would allow private schools to use a different exam from the state test to measure student learning, though it would create a process for comparing those differing tests.
And it gets worse: "The board ... would be made up of 12 members with staggered four-year terms," the Journal Sentinel reported. But when you look at who would appoint which members of the board, it becomes clear very quickly that
a majority of the board would be appointed by Republicans or their enablers. For example, one of the board members chosen by Democratic legislators would have to come from a private charter school, whereas the choices of Republican legislators would not be limited.
One of the first reactions to this proposal came from the conservative side, and was hilarious in its myopia, as the Journal Sentinel reported in a separate dispatch: "Conservative groups say the proposed state 'Academic Review Board,' which would create a new academic review system for all schools receiving public funding, gives the Department of Public Instruction too much authority over private schools that receive state-funded tuition vouchers."
Yes, that's right: Conservative special interest groups are upset that the board wouldn't be tilted enough in their favor. Progressives, on the other hand, note that primary and secondary education in the state are the domain of the Department of Public Instruction, which has an independently elected superintendent, and a state constitutional mandate to regulate schools.
In sum: The GOP proposes to equalize the way Wisconsin treats public versus private schools funded by tax dollars by creating separate -- but equal! -- evaluation systems. Poorly performing schools -- at least the public ones -- would be punished, on up to being forcibly transformed into charter schools not run by the locally elected school district. Meanwhile, poorly performing private schools -- rated, remember, under a different system -- could have their public funding cut off, but could eventually return to the fold.
Thus: A death sentence for some public schools, but only a temporary penalty for their private counterparts, which would be evaluated under a different standard, devised by a board politically rigged to favor GOP and conservative educational policies, and a board that's probably unconstitutional. What could possibly go wrong!?
But the full scope of Republican tinkering is even worse than all of the above. Jay Bullock, a teacher contributing to the OnMilwaukee.com news site, ably described just how byzantine and financially strange education has become in Milwaukee, thanks to decades of Republican tinkering. The state's largest city by far, Milwaukee is home to some of Wisconsin's most challenged children:
In most places around the country, there are just two education "sectors," to use the lingo: regular public schools and private schools, mostly religious.
Here in Milwaukee, we actually have five distinct sectors. There are the public schools, MPS, including some charter schools that are staffed by and run by MPS employees; there are schools chartered by MPS that are staffed by and run by other operators, not MPS employees; there are schools chartered by other organizations, such as the city of Milwaukee and UW-Milwaukee.
Those three sectors are all public, operating exclusively with tax dollars (not counting any private grant money), and all subject to the rules and regulations of the U.S. Department of Education and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, including standardized test requirements, special education compliance, and more.
The other two sectors are private, meaning they are subject to few if any federal or state regulations. These are straight-up private schools that take no public money to operate at all, and schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program, which do take public money and, therefore, must report some information to the state. Most private schools in Milwaukee operate kind of as hybrids between the two, with varying degrees of both voucher-paying students and tuition-paying students. Few are all-voucher or all-private.
From the data we have, we know one thing with certainty: Many of the children in Milwaukee are hard to educate well. Urban, poor, minority children pose a seemingly insurmountable educational challenge.
Bullock goes on to describe some of the strange fiscal and academic problems this complex arrangement is causing. Unfortunately, except in a few grudging instances, Republicans now in control of state government have focused their ire on under-performing public schools; they return again and again to considering ways of not helping but punishing those schools, the very same way they "help" poor people by cutting welfare and food assistance. You see, if your child's fellow public school pupils by and large are malnourished, developmentally disabled, poor and living in broken homes in a dysfunctional neighborhood, lagging student achievement is the fault of public school teachers and the school district "bureaucracy."
And that brings us to another new GOP proposal aimed at Milwaukee public schools, one sounding very much like what Republicans in Michigan did to the City of Detroit: Force outside, locally unaccountable leadership upon "failing" public institutions and then fire up the figurative chain saws.
Bullock describes the considerable challenges confronting teachers and staff at the Milwaukee public school where he teaches, and then reports on the latest GOP plan to "fix" things:
[M]any of you will read this ... as evidence that the school should just be closed, or, if you're State Senator Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), given over wholesale to someone else to run as part of a "recovery district."
That's right, Darling and her allies in the GOP and the local business lobby support the idea of creating a sixth education sector in Milwaukee. Somehow, they believe, a sixth education sector will magically do what the other five have failed to do, and that's educate successfully the most challenging students in the city.
Perhaps it's Sen. Darling, who hails not from Milwaukee but a tony, red-tinged suburb, who needs a "recovery district," one all for herself.
Meanwhile, other state GOP legislators are pushing to appropriate vacant Milwaukee Public School buildings (vacant in part because voucher programs have lured away some pupils) that the school district is unwilling to sell promptly to some of those private competing school districts, even if it has higher purposes in mind.
And to help along that and other transitions, Gov. Walker and his Republican Ledge are busy de-funding public education at every opportunity. As the Madison Capital Times noted:
"Gov. Scott Walker, has drastically cut state aid to public schools and used the savings to finance tax incentives for businesses and to deliver income and property tax cuts — even if the state budget isn't balanced.
"The education cuts, coupled with property tax levy limits, have been particularly hard on rural Wisconsin districts, which for the past two years have been crying out for help to keep their schools viable as they cut teachers and worry over which activities they can continue to afford.
"Early in 2014 a Rural Schools Task Force of legislators found that many small school districts in the state are on the verge of closing schools and cutting programs... ."
It's all social Darwinism of the highest order, with a dollop of profiteering capitalism on top. Because, to the current way of thinking among Wisconsin Republicans, education would be better if it were run like a business. You know, a business like, maybe, WalMart or Goldman Sachs.
Fri Jan 09, 2015 at 6:51 AM PT: The issue of private voucher schools picking up easy cash by creaming off special needs students with relatively minor issues, while leaving students with far greater issues in Wisconsin public schools, has now triggered a reform movement. Stop Special Needs Vouchers, a statewide grassroots, parent-led effort, has been fighting special-needs vouchers proposals. See https://www.facebook.com/... and visit the group's website at http://www.stopspecialneedsvouchers.org/