The MPS medical plan

An article in the Journal Sentinel last week described recent changes in the MPS, medical plan. With the regular insurance plan, employees are now required to make copayments. It is hoped that this will encourage some of the employees to switch to the lower cost HMO plan.

Not surprisingly, this change has been met with complaints from MPS teachers. It is probably not a coincidence that another article reports that teachers have given the superintendent a low rating.

For anyone enrolled in a private-sector plan, however, the striking thing about the MPS plan is how lavish it still is. Apparently teachers and other employees are still not required to make any contribution to the cost of the plan. Thus, except for the co-pays, there is no incentive to move to a lower cost plan. This contrasts to the approach taken by the city of Milwaukee several years ago in which employees were offered an array of plans with the city covering the full cost of the lowest cost plan and the employee making up the difference with higher cost plans.

Sharing school buildings

An article in this morning’s Journal Sentinel describes several buildings that are shared by different schools.

This represents a huge cultural shift for MPS. Schools were always synonymous with their buildings at MPS. In fact, the school’s union representative is called the “building” representative, not the school representative.

By sharing buildings, schools can better respond to a variety of student needs. They can grow, and they can shrink. Extra space can serve as incubators for new schools.

But in the past MPS sharing efforts were notably unsuccessful. The dominant school often made life miserable for the tenant schools. The difference today is budgets. As school control over budgets has grown, schools have become more concerned about sources of revenue. If other schools can help share the building expenses than there is more money for education, a strong motivator for cooperation..

How much does open enrollment cost MPS?

This morning’s Journal Sentinel has an article headlined “MPS loses big in open enrollment.“ I find this a particularly annoying article.

One problem is the mixing of time periods. Most of the dollar figures and enrollment numbers are for a six year period, essentially inflating them by a factor of six compared to annual numbers. Most egregiously, the $32 million calculated as the lost revenue over six years is compared to the annual budget of about $1 billion. The more honest comparison would have divided the $32 million by six.

Likewise, the claim that MPS lost 6900 students to open enrollment is pretty misleading. The more honest figure is 1155 students, the annual number leaving. The 6900 figure does not even give a good picture of the number of students participating over the six year period since many of the same students would have been reported year after year.

Less serious, but still annoying is the lack of any discussion of how the state aid and spending cap formulas work (I used to understand the formula, but at this point, am reluctant to discuss them in detail, particularly because they may have changed over time), but it is not clear that MPS is hurt financially by the exodus of the students. The money transferred to other districts is likely to be less than the total money that MPS receives for those students leaving, some residual. The main problem, of course, is that MPS has yet to bring its capacity in line with reduced enrollment. But this problem is hardly limited to the loss due to open enrollment, which is small compared to combined effects of charter schools, choice schools, chapter 220, and, most particularly, an overall decline in the school-age population.

This article was not written by one of the regular Journal Sentinel education reporters, which may in part explain its problems. But even if the problems can be blamed on inexperience by the reporter, this article is another example of the increasingly questionable judgment of Journal editors that would put such an article on their front page.

MPS Future and Vouchers

I plan to come back to this blog when I find a bit more time, but I wanted to point out two escellent articels by Alan Borsuk in this morning's Journal Sentinel. Both bring us up to date on important developments in Milwaukee education:

• The first is a recap of the series of articles he and Sarah Carr wrote on the voucher program. It even has a web site where information on each individual school can be looked up.
• The second discusses that changes that started with the Neighborhood Schools Initiative five years ago and are still continuing.

Both are sophisticated, nuanced report, in sharp contrast to the one-dimensional attacks on vouchers or MPS reform that are still too common.

This excellence in educational reporting contrasts to an embarrassing episode in the August 21 Crossroads section. A column appeared about appointing US supreme court justices which was credited to Frank Zeidler. The column was a clear fraud, since the positions expressed were standard conservative arguments. (When no correction appeared on Monday, I sent an e-mail to the editor stating flatly that Zeidler could not have written it.) The question is why no one at the Journal Sentinel recognized its fishiness. I think part of the explanation comes in the Journal Sentinel having outsourced its national and international news. People interested in questions of the supreme court would not be attracted to the Journal Sentinel. One hopes the sharp bookkeepers at corporate office won't find a way to oursource education reporting. (For the correction, click here. The whole August 21 Crossroads seems to have disappeared from the Journal Sentinel's web site.)