Deniability and Tests

Many years ago, I worked for a major Milwaukee corporation which became the subject of a criminal investigation of its sales practices. The company eventually went out of business--not primarily due to the fines it paid but because the years of investigation took a huge toll in creativity and decisiveness.

One conversation early in the investigation still haunts me. Two of my colleagues agreed that there was a tacit agreement between management and the sales people. The sales people understood that they should do whatever was required to gain an account, while protecting management's deniability. When pressed, management needed to be able to deny it knew how the sales were made. Several recent events recall that conversation--including prisoner abuse in Iraq, the recent firing of police officers in Milwaukee, and cheating on standardized tests in schools.

The basic characteristic of the deniability culture is a wide gap between the official rules of conduct and the implicit rules. The assumption is that the official rules are useful for public consumption but that anyone following them will be at an advantage. In this view, scruples are for losers. Changing this culture can be very difficult even if management desires to do so; it is assumed that management will loudly proclaim its adherence to the highest principles even while benefitting from corner-cutting within the organization.

In the recent Jude beating case, by firing not only those officers who took part in the beating but also those who refused to report their fellow officers, the Milwaukee police chief does seem to be making a major effort to change the culture. How successful she will be may depend in large part on whether officers view it as simply an attempt by the chief to burnish her image. In a culture of deniability, the boss is expected to express outrage when the facts come out.

There has been a deal written recently about the attempts by lawyers in the Bush administration to exempt the United States from the Geneva convention and to relax the strictures against torture. Most discussion, however, has concentrated on the validity of the legal arguments. What is surprising is that there appears to have been little concern by those involved in the changes about the signal that was being sent to people in the field. The clear message was that scrutiny and oversight would be lessened and that many of the old rules would no longer apply.

If education is to improve, accurate assessment of learning is a prerequiste. Otherwise, schools will continue to invest money and effort into programs that are not effective. Yet there is a culture that accepts efforts to artificially inflate test results. Despite teachers' interest in discouraging cheating by students, some forms of cheating by teachers are obvious to students, such as signaling to the student that an answer is wrong or preparing lessons based on advanced knowledge of the tests.

Other kinds of cheating, such as erasing and correcting students' answer sheets, are not done in front of students. But it is possible to develop measures that detect many of these kinds of cheating, including looking for sudden growth in student scores followed by declines in later years or students getting the hard questions right and the easy questions wrong.

Every superintendent will denounce cheating by teachers. But is this simply part of the deniability culture? That such detection measures are not more widely used suggest that it is. Superintendents' talk about test scores as an end in themselves rather than a measure of learning reinforces the idea that any means of increasing the scores is desirable.

Is Milwaukee creating or losing wealth--or both?

Recently, the Public Policy Forum issued a report comparing the income of people moving into counties with those leaving and those staying. In particular, the average income of people moving out of Milwaukee County was higher than that of either those moving in or those staying.

While not particularly surprising, it is not clear what one should make of these results, or their policy implications. One interpretation is that Milwaukee County is on the way down, as wealthier people continue to abandon it. This seems to be the view of the people the Journal Sentinel found to comment on the study. Why, then, are we seeing the rapid rise in property values, particularly in the poorest sections of Milwaukee?

Another interpretation is that, despite all its trials, Milwaukee continues to play the classic role of the American city over the last two centuries. People with little come to the city because that is where the opportunity is. As they become successful in the city, they move elsewhere to spend their money.

The question about education, then, is which model is it promoting, one of opportunity or one of loss.

Is 4k child care?

On Sunday, the Journal Sentinel published an article about the battle in the state legislature about the battle over whether to extend funding for four year olds. One legislator expressed the fear that four year old kindergarten was "subsidized day care for certain children."

If the legislator was questioning the need for the four year old program--particularly for low-income children--his remarks missed the target. The typical low-income child enters school with substantial disadvantages compared to a typical middle-class student from a well-educated family. There have been several studies, for instance, documenting the strikings differences in the number of vocabulary words recognized.

If the need is clear, it is less clear how well the schools are meeting this need. The usual antipathy among the educational establishment towards measurement is even stronger when it comes to very young children. Systematic testing does not start until third grade. In the absence of data, my guess is that some schools do a good job while at others it really is just "child care." Unfortunately, this legislator seems to have missed the opportunity to push educators to say how they would measure results.

Property values and schools

Recently I advanced the thesis that changes in Milwaukee education are behind much of the recent surge in property values. In essence, by giving families far more choices--within MPS, with charter schools, and with the choice program--homes in Milwaukee become increasingly valuable. Even if many schools remain unsatisfactory, in this hypothesis, the property value effect could still take place since the families most concerned about education will be precisely those most likely to take advantage of the increased options. From the family viewpoint, the question is not how MPS is doing as a whole but how the school their children attend is doing. By being able to pick the school, the family is likely to be far more satisfied than if the school were imposed on them.

I would be the first to admit the thesis is untested. There are a variety of other possible hypotheses that might explain part or all of the increase in property values, such as:

• That it is simply part of a national movement back to the cities.
• That having been down so long, these neighborhoods could go nowhere but up.
• That other local effects explain the results, such as welfare reform.
• That while it appears the poorest districts are taking the lead in the rise, the jumps mainly represent gentrification on the fringes of these districts.
  

It has become increasingly clear that problems with the Milwaukee education were a major factor behind the lag in Milwaukee property values in the 1980s and 1990s, as middle class parents left the city to find better schools. Thus it seems quite plausible that an increase in values would also reflect the schools. However, a number of studies could help better define the role of the schools:

• Comparisons of property value trends in Milwaukee with those in cities that are similar except that control of schools remains centralized.
• Micro analysis of the property values. How did homes attractive to families perform compared to others?
• A history of property values over more years and broken down into smaller geographical areas.
• Comparison of trends in the MPS census data and geographical enrollment data with those in property values. For example, what was the relationship between the number of children and property values, as well as the type of schools they attended and whether the schools were nearby?
  

School board budget hearing

I dropped by Thursday's public hearing on the MPS budget at Madison high school. Compared to previous hearings, where hundreds turned out to denounce the school board, this was a real yawner. There were about as many people on stage as in the audience. Only two members of the public spoke--someone who speaks at almost every meeting and a retired principal--and both left the board puzzled as to what point they were trying to make.

The proposed budget, with less than a 1% tax increase, seems like good news. But that good news is hugely dependent on decisions by others. It assumes both that the state legislature will agree to restore two-thirds funding and that MPS will win the current arbitration on its contract with the union to reduce health care costs.

Director Tom Balistreri (who seems perpetually angry, about what is not clear) threatened to vote against the 1% tax increase. In effect this would be a vote to permanently reduce MPS funding, since revenue caps reflect the previous year's spending. This raises the question: where are organizations like MICAH and the Institute for Wisconsin's Future? For years, these organizations have criticized the school board for not convincing the legislature to increase funding. Yet when a school board member threatens to cut funding, they are strangely silent. For that matter, where is the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association?

Schools and property values

This morning's Journal Sentinel reports on a dramatic rise in Milwaukee property values. This is the most convincing evidence yet that the Milwaukee education reforms are working.

For the past few years Milwaukee has experienced a surprisingly robust boom in condo construction, in areas like the Beer Line and the Third Ward. However, the connection with education reform has been easy to dismiss because the majority of condo purchasers seem to be people with little direct concern about the schools--empty nesters, young professionals, single people, gays.

Yet the growth in property values is quite different. The poorest areas experienced by far the highest percentage increases in property values. (See the graph in the post below.) These are areas with a great many children. Concern about education should have a much greater effect on property values in these areas. Here is my hypothesis about what happened:

The Milwaukee reforms were aimed at empowering parents by giving them choices over their children's education. In recent years, the number of real choices for Milwaukee parents have vastly increased. These include the school choice program (and recall that most residents of the areas with the biggest jumps in property values would qualify for this program), a wide and growing variety of charter schools, and continuing efforts by MPS to restructure its schools to make them more attractive (such as the move from middle schools to K-8s).

All of these changes would have the greatest impact on the areas with the most children and the lowest incomes, precisely the districts seeing the greatest percentage increases in property values. So families that in the past might have struggled to buy a house in the suburbs for better schools now find more opportunities in Milwaukee.

Increases vs Values 

Senate restricts special elections

An article in this morning's Journal Sentinel reports that Wisconsin's senate voted to restrict local school boards' power to call special elections to exceed the spending caps. From a strictly MPS point of view, this measure is a moderately good thing. For a number of reasons, particularly the increasing disconnect between voters and MPS, all informed opinion agrees that a proposal to exceed the spending cap has no chance of passing in Milwaukee. Thus the ability of other districts to (sometimes) get voters to agree to raise their spending limits has the effect of increasing the financial gap between MPS and its neighbors. This in turn makes it more difficult for MPS in the competition for teachers.

That said, the vote is a sad one for what it says about the growing willingness of conservatives and Republicans to violate their own most basic principles. One of the most cogent critiques Republicans have made over the years is that Democrats are too eager to centralize authority when they don't like what local government does. Yet in this vote the Republicans show the same disdain for local government. As more decisions move to Madison, it will be increasingly difficult to interest capable people in serving on school boards or to interest citizens in what school boards do.

In praise of partisanship

Tomorrow's Journal Sentinel has an article by Sarah Carr, "School Board president denies posts to opponents," noting that Ken Johnson did not appoint any of the four Defenders on the board to committee chairmanships. Carr clearly disapproves, predicting the board will "grow more polarized and combative."

Another interpretation is that the appointments represent a determination to make significant progress on improving MPS in the next two years. Reforming large urban schools systems is immensely difficult under the best of circumstances. Putting in place committee chairs prepared to obstruct reform would seem to be a recipe for futility.

One size fits all students

There are intriguing parallels between Joel Klein, the New York City public schools chancellor, and Alan Bersin, the recently-departed San Diego schools chief (who was just appointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger to be education secretary and member of the California school board). Both were federal prosecutors who depended on high-profile educators to pick their instructional programs. Both centralized authority.

Fundamental to their approach is the belief that there is one right model of education that works for all students. Many of their critics believe that Klein, Bersin, and their educational mentors chose the wrong math and reading programs. But even many of these critics believe the same fundamental idea--that there is one model that is right for every student, just not the ones chosen for New York and San Diego.

A contrasting concept is that there is no one right model that will fit every student. This was the central organizing idea behind the Milwaukee educational reforms. In this view as much decisionmaking as possible should be moved to the schools and to parents. As parents search and find schools that work for their children, successful schools will expand or be replicated; unsuccessful schools will change or close. Almost all of the reforms--admissions standards, school councils, neighborhood schools, letting schools choose principals, changing the way principals were chosen and trained, per pupil funding, charter schools, annual testing, and even support of vouchers--can be viewed as tools to make decentralization work.

The challenge for the school board over the next two years is to determine how to make these tools more effective and what additional tools are needed.