RAISING THE BAR MEANS MORE MINORITIES MUST FAIL "The statement or reform initiative that we must raise the academic standard or raise the academic bar because too many students are passing the exams is a racist statement and leads to institutional racist practices of denying poverty class children of color a diploma. The statemaent that too many students are passing the graduation standards is the same as saying that more students, read more black students, must fail these standardized test year after year or the test is no good. " Leon Todd Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 15:23:45 -0500 (CDT) From: Leon Todd To: "MJS: Joe Williams" Cc: "Reporter: Steve Schultz" , "MJS: Dan Bice" Subject: Categories & Classifications of MPS Reform Initiatives Let look at who supports what. There are many types and classifications of MPS reform initiatives delineated below. Success and failure follows the various categories rather systematically. Obstruction and attack on classroom initiatives which goes to the kids is more than just interesting. Support for the failed reform initiatives of the past which have nothing directly to do with the classroom is scandalous. Just thought you might be interested. Why the attack on what works and the support for what doesn't work by the forces outside of education? Give me your thoughts. Categories or Classifications of Reform Initiatives: I. Classroom & Instructional Reform Within Public Education - Magnet Specialty Focus School Initiatives (1975 to Present?) - Montessori - Foreign Language Emersion - Arts Curriculum - IGE Curriculum - Results: - Student School Stability - Stable Curriculum Focus - Parent Choice or Market Demand Model - Achievement - Low Truancy - Low Drop Out - Parental Frustration With Over Subscription - RISE School Initiative (1980 to 1989) - Target: All Black Failing Schools - Triple A School Reform Package - Achievement - Attendance - Accountability - Small Class Size - Regular Principal Evaluation - Summer School Letters for Failing Students - Four Urban Initiatives (1996 to Present): - Smaller Class Size (15 to 1) SAGE Researched Reforms - Lighted School House (Evening School) - Performance Accountability - Rigorous Curriculum - Brown Street Academy implemented late 1970s - Brown Street Very Popular and Over Subscribed - Results: - First two concepts (class size and all day school) generally supported and accepted - Accountability (MPS currently struggling) - Standards (raise the bar) controversal - Four initiatives Never Really Implemented - Professional Jealously - Political Envy - Supports choice within public school education - Supports Public School Charter Schools & Partnership Schools - Supports small private non profit school alternatives for at risk kids - Supports academic system of school alternatives within public schools - Brings back summer school or tri semester initiative - Technology utilization for the virtual classroom - Has everything to do with education - Not supported by the MMAC - Not supported at all by the superintendent - Supported by the labor community and the school board majority II. Administrative Re-organizational Reforms1 - Focus is on reorganization within MPS - Decentralization/Recentralization cycle - System of Schools / Eliminate the old central business manager functions - Budgeting, - Contracting, - Purchasing, - Accounting - Innovative school proposals?? - Charter School Districts: - City - MATC - UWM - Charter Schools Expansion for number of schools allowed - DPI rules and regulations eliminated - School Board Policy eliminated - Are standards essential or are they just for public schools? - Are DPI regs there for a reason - District leadership will be more difficult - Will breeds inequality of educational opportunity over time? - Nothing to do with classroom education - Controversial - Partially supported by the labor community - Contractual implication - Supported completely by the MMAC and the Fuller administration - Supported partially by the board under duress and intimidation - Not generally supported by the teachers and labor community? - Supported by MMAC & Fuller Superintendency, MPS board, & MTEA III. Privatization1: For-Profit Reform Outside MPS - Edison/EAI classroom instruction out sourcing - Supportive services out sourcing - Aids, - Secretaries, - Food Service, - Custodians, - Building Services - Buildings and grounds outsourcing - Leasing (White Elephant Partners, Grand Ave, Schlitz Park MEC) - Decentralization allows for For-Profit Privatization at both the school & district level - Edison and the ethical controversy - Charter school expansion - Has little or nothing to do with classroom or academic education - Supported by the MMAC and the Fuller Superintendency - Not supported by the labor community and the school board majority IV. Privatization2: Religious Choice or Sectarian Reform Outside MPS - Empty or partially empty inner city Sectarian/Religious Schools the focus - Forty religious inner city schools have capacity in Milwaukee - Voucher & Charter School Legislation expansion necessary - Constitutional challenge inevitable - Would prevent or delay the need for another referendum? - Supports choice outside of public school\s - Supported by MMAC & Superintendent - Not supported by the labor community and the school board majority V. Employee Group Reform - Eliminate Tenure - Eliminate Seniority - Scale Down Collective Bargaining - Supported by MMAC & Fuller Superintendency - Not supported by the labor community - School board divided - Mayor supports - Has little or nothing to do with what goes on in the classroom VI. School Board or MPS School Governance Reform - Quarterly committee meetings (Limited Pubic Input) - Eliminate committee structures (Concentration of Power) - Has nothing to do with education - Has everything to do with open and clean government - Split board - MMAC supports - Mayor Supports - Labor community doesn't support VII. Fuller's Failed Reform Initiatives Morning Mail Letter to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editors Re: Fuller's Failed Reform Initiatives 3/31/98 Burying a false Icon Your cartoon of the Neanderthals burying the false icon of a former superintendent in yesterdays paper was an amusing but tragic commentary on the non-efficacy of a host of unfortunate reforms of the recent past that have actually hurt the academic record of public school children. Many of these most recent reforms like: 1) ending summer school, 2) burning the MPS district wide curriculum materials, 3) ending entrance standards for specialty schools, 4) contracting successful special curriculum magnet schools aimed at poverty class minority children, 5) taking the essence of work out of school-to-work, 6) dismantling essential industrial art technologies like welding shop classes, 7) destroying MPS cable technology (Channel 50) for distance education, 8) decimating the highly successful and popular RISE school initiative aimed at underachieving students of color, 9) implementing whole language curriculum along with inventive spelling, 10) stopping direct systematic phonics, 11) throwing out other core knowledge curriculum components, and 12) introduction of a heathen and pagan multi-cultural curriculum in place of a traditional core knowledge public school curriculum are all directly responsible for the district's dismal achievement record, gloomy truancy statistics, and unfortunate dropout rates and need to be buried. Other ominous reform initiatives like for-profit privatization of public education were stopped by the voting public in a stellar sequence of elections of school board members that advocated substantive education at the classroom level and not this political reform experimentation for public schools. The public continues to emphasize issues over personalities in the never ending battle for control of the politics of public perception. As a MPS school board director, I've never been characterized as 'Attila the Hun' before, but my enthusiasm for burying the failed reforms of the past was accurately represented. It was not surprising that the satire represented burying the icon of a cult that has failed to achieve equality of educational opportunity for all children. MPS cannot continue to use poverty class children of color as guinea pigs for unsound and unproven reform initiatives. Sound legitimate educational practices of the past need to be restored to a district overstressed by meaningless reform and reckless change initiatives. Regretfully, politics and profiteering have come before academics. To subject the new superintendent, Alan Brown, to the Neanderthal politics of city hall and other special interest groups is an unfortunate commentary of the politics that continue to distract the district from the pursuit of academic excellence. It is no wonder that MPS academics have continued to slide at a precipitous rate. Director Leon Todd MPS Board of School Directors Milwaukee, WI Phone: 414-444-9490 FAX:414-444-3997 E-mail: leontodd@execpc.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is no time to roll back MPS [failed] reforms Editorial From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel April 01, 1998 When he was Milwaukee school superintendent, Howard Fuller pushed reforms that generated a sense of momentum. He seemed to be nudging the huge school system toward a day when it would work for all students. Even after Fuller stepped down, that feeling of progress persisted, albeit less intensely, because many of his reforms continued. (No, the initiatives were not Fuller's exclusively; it's just that he came to personify them.) Hence, the present effort to undo Fuller's reforms is alarming; it tends to douse hopes that the school system will ever turn itself around. School Board member Leon Todd, the chief engineer of this counterrevolution, says he wants to return to the days of Superintendent Lee McMurrin. This nostalgia is misplaced; that era is simply no more. McMurrin, who was superintendent from 1975 to 1987, faced the challenge of implementing a court order to desegregate the Milwaukee Public Schools -- an issue now moot since whites form only a small minority of students. Instead of mixing the races, the chief demand today is improving student achievement. What's more, McMurrin's emphasis would be troubling now. He catered to middle-class students; he gave them specialty schools. In contrast, Fuller rightly focused on improving education for students left behind by McMurrin's policies. Indeed, MPS will turn itself around only to the extent that it starts meeting the needs of many more destitute students than it now does. The schools already tend to do OK with middle-class students. The challenge is to reach students mired in or near poverty; they tend to be the ones dropping out. The attempt to retreat to the 1970s is disturbing also because McMurrin tended to gloss over MPS problems -- a habit present Superintendent Alan Brown may have already picked up. In contrast, Fuller owned up to the problems and sought passionately to reverse them. He pushed reforms to infuse accountability into a system in which bad things happened, but nobody suffered consequences. Fuller sought to raise the standards; he threw general math out the window and required all students to take algebra. He decentralized, pushing power down to the school level, on the theory that site-based management is one ingredient of a successful school. He sought to equalize uneven financing among MPS schools, so that the district wouldn't contribute to the creation of have-not schools. He implemented a novel school-to-work concept, designed to clarify the relevancy and urgency of academic learning to students. All these reforms met fierce resistance at every turn. They were never implemented to the extent that Fuller sought. Still, they generated a sense of momentum -- a sense that current school leaders seem intent on dashing. Send an e-mail to the editor: jsedit:onwis.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Morning Mail Letter to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editors Re: Educational reforms and racism 4/1/98 Milwaukee has been two cities for some time now, one white and one black. It is now called the most racist city in the nation. Unfortunately, the school reform movement is intensifying this racial divide, bringing to the city a desperate cultural bias and intensifying racism within public and private school education. At a time when the business community throughout the nation needs competent and productive workers of all colors graduating from the public schools, the educational reform movement has brought failure and disorder to the academic lives of public school students. Whole language reading reforms have increased the reading readiness gap between what a child actually knows when poverty class children of color leave home and the rigorous phonemic requirements of the primary grade classrooms making it unlikely that students will master each grade level language requirements successfully, nineth grade algebra requirements have worked to increase the dropout rate of students who can't read the algebra test by log jamming students at the nineth grade guaranteeing an eternal life of failure, and ever more rigorous graduation standards have further frustrated MPS graduation rates by denying diplomas to children who have had good attendance and successfully completed the necessary course work but can't master the rigorous exit graduation exams. Reform initiatives are adding to white and black middle class flight from the major cities of the U.S. Academics and cultural literacy is being thrown out in favor of multicultural cult standards within public education. Instead, cultural bias is becoming mostly a knowledge gap between public school education standards and the informal home environment of poverty class children of color. Today, MPS is manufacturing failure and manufacturing illiteracy with its arbitrary curriculum content. The statement or reform initiative that we must raise the academic standard or raise the academic bar because too many students are passing the exams is a racist statement and leads to institutional racist practices of denying poverty class children of color a diploma. The statemaent that too many students are passing the graduation standards is the same as saying that more students, read more black students, must fail these standardized test year after year or the test is no good. The reform movement has guaranteed the media has a golden opportunity to have a field day attacking public education over more failure and more failure of black children as a result of that same reform movement with its laundry list of failed reform initiatives. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tests [reform] gauge mastery of long passages Third-graders' exams are becoming more difficult, experts say By Alan J. Borsuk >From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel December 29, 1997 Which of these lists of words would most likely be found in a story about painting a picture? A. paper, brush, wet B. pillow, blanket, soft C. bowl, soup, hot Which job were people more likely to have in the past? A. barrel maker B. computer expert C. astronaut Those are both sample questions from the reading test given to 56,487 third-graders in Wisconsin public schools last spring. The questions give a flavor of what kind of comprehension was required to do well. The test involved three fairly long reading selections, one a story about a barrel maker who did kind things for his friends, one on facts about monkeys and one humorous fantasy about a flying cow. Students had to answer multiple-choice questions about the content of each piece. To meet the state performance standard, a student had to get at least 40 out of 60 questions correct; 32 to 39 correct answers was considered inconclusive in assessing the student's reading comprehension, and 31 or fewer was below standard. There were 148 schools in the state with 10 or more third-graders where every student who took the test met the state standard. (About 10% of all third-graders were excluded from taking the test because they had special educational needs or limited proficiency in English.) And there were 20 schools where fewer than 50% of students met the standard. A non-expert's impression after reading the full test: It's demanding, and it's stiffer than you might expect. The questions aren't where-is-your-nose simple things. Jacqueline Karbon, reading education consultant for the state Department of Instruction, said she wasn't surprised to hear that impression. "I would challenge anyone to take a look and see what Wisconsin expects from its third-graders," she said. She said Wisconsin is a high literacy state with strong reading education programs in general. Mary Jett-Simpson, a reading education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said the test given in spring 1997 was tougher than in previous years. "People were complaining that too many kids were passing it . . . so the bar has risen," she said. Educators say that it will at least appear to get tougher again in coming rounds, in line with new federal requirements. Scores will be broken down under different labels relating to a child's proficiency, and officials expect the results to look worse, even if kids aren't actually reading any worse. This spring's third-grade reading test will again involve three reading passages. Karbon said this time, unlike last, students will be asked to write a short answer to one question. The rest of the test will be multiple-choice answers. Some Milwaukee educators expressed concern that the tests, including last spring's, are not geared toward urban students who don't have as intellectually rich a background as many suburban students. Referring to his third-grade students last spring, Matthew Freiberg, a third-grade teacher at Phillis Wheatley Elementary, said, "I don't think they understood the concept of barrel making at all." Officials say they have worked hard to try to avoid any cultural biases. -- Alan J. Borsuk Send an e-mail to the editor: jsedit:onwis.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leon Todd MPS Board of School Directors 3447 N 47th St Milwaukee, WI 53216-3334 Ph: 414-444-9490 FAX:414-444-3997