School Coice Expanded

Yesterday Governor Doyle signed legislation to increase the cap on school choice enrollment. Only four Milwaukee Democrats in the legislature supported the bill. This strikes me as odd, because the major beneficiaries of the expansion are Milwaukee children. Apparently most feel comfortable voting against their constituents on the assumption that poor people do not vote.

The present political weakness of the Democrats is bad for Wisconsin and the U.S. in my view. But rather than presenting a broader vision, Democrats seem to believe they can ride to power by pandering to various groups, particularly the public employee unions and ideologues whose thinking has been petrified for the past forty years.

Despite the present unpopularity of the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress, it is striking that current polls show two Republicans--McCain and Giuliani--defeating the Democratic front-runners for president. I suspect a lot of this is due to the perception that these men have convictions (in part because they have crossed swords with their own party) and the Democrats do not.

While poor people may not vote, the Democratic party has always obtained much of its moral authority by representing underdogs, those without much power. People want to support a candidate who agrees with their position on most issues, but also one with convictions.

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.

Voucher caps: the threat to MPS

The Department of Public Instruction has recently issued its rules for implementing the caps on voucher enrollments. These could have a devastating impact on MPS schools.

The rules ask each school to estimate its enrollment. The ratio of the cap to the total estimate is then calculated. This ratio is applied to each school's estimate to calculate the number of students that the school may enroll. This creates a huge incentive for schools to inflate their estimates.

Consider this example. Assume that total enrollment with no caps would be 16,000 students. Assume further that schools that would enroll half the students give an accurate estimate (8,000), the others inflate their estimates by a factor of three (24,000). The total estimate, 32,000 is divided into the cap of 14,500 to give a factor of 45%. The schools that exaggerate their enrollment are allowed to accept 10,875 students, but only 8,000 enroll. Those giving an accurate estimate have a cap of only 3,625, forcing them to reject 4,375 potential students.

It is likely that many of these rejected students will enroll in MPS but remain on the schools' waiting lists. Presumably, shortly before the start of school the DPI reallocate unused spaces to the schools with waiting lists. In this scenario almost 3,000 students could make a last-minute switch from MPS to a private school. But MPS school budgets are largely dependent on enrollment, so they would be faced with severe last-minute budget cuts.

More on incentives

I am seeing an increasing number of articles pointing out the growing gap between results of state tests and those on the federal NAEP tests. A number of states report a much higher percentage of students proficient in math and reading than the federal test finds for students in that state.

The explanation, of course, is that the federal No Child Left Behind requires that all children in schools be proficient in reading and math within a few years. But in a bow to states-rights conservatives, it left the testing and the definition of proficiency to the states. The predominant incentive on the states is to set the standards low so that their schools will appear to be turning out proficient students.

One answer would be national tests, similar to those in most other countries. Educationally, this seems like the best solution. Mathematics, for instance, does not change when a graduate crosses the state line. Even though the advocates of national testing seem to be increasing, I doubt that the political will exists for this. Much of the left will oppose it because they hate testing, while many on the right will oppose national testing because it implies national standards.

A possible compromise might be to leave states to determine their own tests but use NAEP results to recalibrate the proficiency levels. For example if 40% of the students in a state were proficient by NAEP standards, the state score corresponding to the 40th percentile would be the cut-off for proficiency.

High school diploma mill

Every month or so, I receive an e-mail that invites me to get my bachelor's, master's, or PhD degree from a "prestigious unaccredited university" with no required classes or exam. In other words from a diploma mill. This morning's New York Times has an article on a high school diploma mill in Florida.

It appears that the major market for this high school consists of athletes whose grade point averages fall below the 2.75 needed for an athletic scholarship and are in danger of failing Florida's required high school graduation exam. In its wisdom, the Florida legislature exempted private schools from the requirement that all students need to pass the exam.

Diploma mills prosper when the symbols of education become more important than its substance. So universities, anxious to rack up a winning season, look the other way when their athletes are unprepared for college work.

Likewise, markets can be very powerful, for both good and ill, as they respond to incentives. When the incentives are to find loopholes, some entrepreneur will find them.

Board civility and MPS progress

A recent J-S article describes incidences of incivility on the Milwaukee school board, implying the board is becoming unglued. In my experience, school boards usually have trouble figuring out when they are a board and when individuals. In some ways board members are like legislators, representing diverse constituencies and issues they ran on. Yet while the governor is elected separately, the board hires the superintendent and is expected to support its employee. I am not sure there will ever be a good solution, particularly when boards disagree on long-term goals. (By contrast, corporate boards tend to be too civil, not challenging the management.)

Despite this, two other recent articles give evidence that MPS continues to progress in responding to parents' desires. One describes MPS enrollment trends, particularly the movement from unpopular programs (like middle schools) to ones parents favor (such as K-8 schools). And despite unfavorable demographic trends, MPS seems to be holding its own. A second describes the increasing demand for Montessori teachers as MPS and districts nationwide respond to growing interest in Montessori education.

(Speaking of Montessori education, click here for an analysis of Downtown Montessori Academy, a school chartered by the city of Milwaukee. Full disclosure: I am on the Downtown Montessori board and am definitely biased.)

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.)

The Journal's series on school choice

I was out of town when the Journal Sentinel published its massive series on school choice and am just now getting around to reading it. So far it strikes me as an excellent job of getting past the cant and presenting a picture of school choice that better reflects reality, both what works and what does not.

It was depressing, therefore, to read the letters in Sunday's paper. Most of them could have been written without ever reading the articles.

One in particular I found especially depressing--that from the local director of the ACLU. Particularly with the blindness of the current Washington administration towards the need for civil liberties and due process, there is a growing need for a credible ACLU. By getting involved in controversies so far from its core mission, the ACLU squanders its credibility and makes itself easy to ignore.

Mayor Barrett's Education Plan

This morning's Journal Sentinel reports that Mayor Tom Barrett issue a plan that included four elements:

1. Restoring two-thirds state funding of education.
2. Increasing the cap on enrollment in the choice (voucher) program by 6,000 over four years.
3. Counting choice students as part of MPS in calculating state aid.
4. Having some accountability measures of choice schools. The article mentions either accreditation or testing.

From the account in the paper, this plan strikes me as very good. All four elements are desirable in themselves. If putting them together makes the plan more politically viable, so much the better.

The Wisconsin state aid formula depends on the ratio of the total property value divided by the number of students. The lower this ratio the more a district must struggle to support its schools, justifying a higher percentage of state aid. By excluding choice students, present law makes Milwaukee richer than it is, unfairly penalizing Milwaukee taxpayers (the same effect could be achieved by neglecting to count fifteen thousand MPS students). The last time a proposal to change this formula was made, it died for lack of Democratic support. With Barrett's support, it may be harder for Democrats to vote against the interest of Milwaukee property tax payers.

I particularly like the idea of including choice students in the testing program. The argument that including such requirements would create constitutional problems strikes me as both dubious and hypocritical. Choice is constitutional precisely because its purpose is to educate children, not to aid religion. Testing that helps determine whether the education is effective fits this purpose. If government did not care whether the education was effective, one might conclude that aiding religion was the purpose of the legislation.

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?