Like old times

A recent Journal-Sentinel article, suit targets MATC panel choices
brought a whiff of nostalgia. Apparently the union for the Milwaukee Area Technical College has brought a lawsuit challenging Ken Johnson's appointment of me and three other men to a committee charged with choosing MATC board members. The legal basis of the suit is that we are all men, but the true concern, it is clear from the article, is that we might appoint board members who would be less compliant to the union's wishes.

Recent articles have described a growing backlash against taxes for technical colleges in Wisconsin, along with calls for electing their boards. Since the success of the members of the union is tied to the ability of the colleges to convince the public the tax money is being well spent, one might expect the union to work for highly competent and thoughtful board members. But, as with the MPS teachers union, obedience to the union trumps competence every time.

A gender gap?

An article in the New Republic describes an increasing gap in performance as boys lag behind girls. The information in the article is largely anecdotal although it seems plausible. I can recall attending programs to honor academic achievement in majority black MPS schools and wondering where the boys were.

There has been surprisingly little attention to this issue. School districts such as MPS break out student achievement by ethnicity, but I have not seen any statistics organized by gender. When I analyzed some MPS achievement data, I looked at the effects of ethnicity, poverty (measured by free lunch), mobility, and other factors, but it did not occur to me to look at the effects of gender.

The article questions why this gap has suddenly widened in the last few years. One plausible explanation is that educational materials become more verbal, playing to the strength of girls. Certainly the math texts used in middle school have lots of words and very few numbers and symbols, especially compared to the books I remember.

Florida's court decision

News this morning was that Florida's supreme court banned that state's voucher program which gave students in schools judged failing the right to attend other schools, including private schools. Following the court's reasoning observers speculated that charter schools and a program of scholarships for disabled students could also be at risk.

The court's decision was based on a provision in the state constitution that the schools be "uniform," which the court interpreted as meaning the schools should all be the same. In doing so the court seems to have adopted the one size fits all model of education that says one kind of school should meet the needs of all students. The court ignored the constitution's admonition that the system of education should be "excellent."

The list of plaintiff organizations is ironic--and sad. Ironic because the American Civil Liberites Union has adopted the position that the way to defend liberty is to restrict choices. The NAACP, as in Milwaukee, has become an implacable foe of the interests of black parents in improving educational choices for their children. Sad because each organization has historically played a vital role in expanding the rights of Americans.

Voucher caps and MPS, Part III

Sarah Carr and Alan Borsuk report this morning on the effects of the voucher caps on choice schools. They particularly make the point that the impact would be greatest on well-established schools, since they would be least able to exaggerate the likely number of students.

Until reading the article I had forgotten that there were a large number of schools that never opened, but whose 5,500 claimed spaces would have been included in the count. After the reduction to stay within the cap, these schools would have been assigned about 2,500 spaces. Presumably at some point when it became clear the schools would not open the DPI would reallocate these spaces to schools likely to open. Thus MPS schools might find themselves losing an additional 2,500 students shortly before schools open in the fall. Added to the numbers mentioned in the earlier post, almost 4,000 students could disappear from projected enrollment well after school budgets were completed and staffing levels set.

Another way of looking at this is that about 200 teaching positions would suddenly disappear. MPS has always had a challenge hiring the right number of teachers for the fall. This would only make the situation more difficult.

The article makes a couple of other interesting points:

1. DPI is clear that it will not try to verify the estimates supplied by the schools.
2. DPI is not clear as to when, or whether, it will reallocate unused seats.
   

More on voucher caps and MPS

In my previous post I described a hypothetical calculation of what might happen to the participating private schools and to MPS schools under the voucher cap. Using estimates of capacity and actual enrollments from last year underlines both the incentive to report large capacities and the potential impact on MPS students of a last-minute exodus of students.

If the enrollment caps had been applied to last year's enrollments, schools having to cut enrollment had reported capacities averaging 33% above their actual enrollments while those with no cuts had reported capacities averaging more than three times their actual enrollments. Clearly it is the schools' interest to report capacities as large as possible.

It is unclear if the DPI will try to monitor and challenge the reported capacities. Doing so could be a real challenge. Often schools could expand their capacity by hiring additional teachers or renting additional space. At least they could argue this, knowing that the caps will mean they will never be put to the test.

Using last year's figures, 1,170 seats would be unused. If DPI made a last-minute decision to reallocate these to schools with waiting lists, a number of MPS schools might suddenly find they could not afford all the teachers they had budgeted for--potentially a cut of about fifty teachers.