A Deeper Dive Into MMSD’s Operations Referendum

The Madison school district has two referendum questions on the November ballot.  The first is an operations referendum that seeks the voters’ approval for the school district to exceed the state-imposed revenue limits by a total of $33 million over the next four years.  The second is a facilities referendum that seeks approval to spend up to $317 million on upgrading the district’s four main high schools, building a new elementary school in the Rimrock Road area, and providing a permanent home to the alternative Capital High.

The discussion about the operations referendum has focused on the need for additional spending authority so that, in the district’s words, it can “support current staffing levels and continue the district’s equity investments in line with the Strategic Framework goals and outcomes for all students.”

While that is true enough, the rationale the district offers does not go far toward explaining the particular interplay of budgetary factors that have compelled the district to take its case to the voters.  The following paragraphs dig a little deeper into the operations referendum numbers.  (The facilities referendum deserves our support as well, but it isn’t addressed here.)

It All Starts With Revenue Limits

An operations referendum seeks voter approval for a school district to exceed the state-imposed revenue limits that put a cap on overall school district expenditures.   Each school district has its own revenue limit, which is expressed in terms of spending per student.  Currently, MMSD’s revenue limit is about $12,750 per student.

Why I Am Voting for Kaleem Caire, Ali Muldrow, and Ananda Mirilli

At a March 20 meeting of Downtown Rotary, Madison school superintendent Jen Cheatham told a powerful story about her journey toward leading for equity.  She also made some news by observing that the upcoming school board election “will demonstrate the extent to which our community wants to follow through on” a commitment to better serving black students.

What’s up with that?  I haven’t talked to Jen about it but it’s pretty clear to me.

There are three School Board candidates who share Jen’s view – and mine – that improving academic outcomes for our students of color is by far the school district’s highest priority because it is clearly our biggest shortcoming.  They are Kaleem Caire, Ali Muldrow and Ananda Mirilli.  They are all smart, capable candidates with whom I don’t always agree, though we’re definitely on the same page on this issue. They are also the three candidates of color, and that matters, but it is their shared values and commitment to collaboration that would make them particularly welcome additions to the Board.

Their opponents look at things differently. David Blaska, who is running against Muldrow, doesn’t really know much about the schools.  He just knows that a healthy dose of old-school discipline would be good for what ails us.  Blaska seems to perceive no significant difference between the experiences of whites and African-Americans in Madison and believe that everything would be okay if we just abandon “identity politics” and all agree to act white.  I disagree with his views, as, I suspect, will most of the voters.

TJ Mertz, who is running against Mirilli, would be appalled to be lumped into the same category as Blaska, but that’s kind of where he is.  Those who vote for Blaska are also likely to vote for him.

It may be that I am selling short the nuances of TJ’s views, but I find him emblematic of a certain kind of self-satisfied Madison liberal.  These are the kind who so reflexively identify themselves as being on the right side of social justice issues that they haven’t bothered to engage in the difficult soul-searching and critical self-examination of racism and our complicity in it that many of us white Madisonians have been prompted to undertake.

TJ simply doesn’t seem to prioritize in the same way as me what the school district needs to do to help students of color and particularly African-American students succeed in school. To me, a passage in TJ’s answers to an MTI questionnaire kind of gives away the game. In response to a question about the achievement gap, he writes that he “prefer[s] ‘Gaps,’ plural, because the differences in challenges and outcomes are related to, race, language, gender and gender identities, economics, parental education, and more.”

If you believe that gaps in achievement attributable to differences in the education levels of students’ parents excite the same level of concern as the disparities between white and African-American students, then you lack the sense of urgency about addressing the racial achievement gap that I and many others feel.

Consistent with his more laid-back attitude toward the school district’s racial challenges, TJ advocates policies that proceed from the premise that the school district is basically doing okay, we just need to make things easier for our teachers.  And so his primary policy prescriptions are reducing class sizes (though Madison already has more teachers and staff per student than comparable districts in the state) and providing teachers with more autonomy in their classrooms.

TJ can also be counted on to be critical of just about any new initiative proposed to address the district’s challenges.  As a result, he effectively functions as a fierce champion of the status quo.  Which, again, may be defensible if you start from the premise that everything’s basically hunky-dory.

Partly as a result of this approach, he and Jen Cheatham are just not on the same wavelength.  During the four years that I served with TJ, other Board members and I would meet one-on-one with Jen monthly to get a preview of upcoming meeting agendas, talk over issues, and raise concerns.  Well, all of us except TJ.  He refused to meet with Jen.

During the current campaign, he has consistently soft-pedaled the extent to which he is hostile to the superintendent, though he has allowed that he believes the Board hasn’t “exercised our authority sufficiently” over her.  It is no wonder that some of the harshest critics of the superintendent have gathered themselves around TJ’s campaign.

I believe that the ways in which TJ’s hostility to the superintendent and her staff have been manifest in his Board performance have been damaging to the work of the school district.  So, to my mind, it’s pretty simple.  If you like the job Jen Cheatham is doing and would like to support her approach, then you should vote for Ananda Mirilli rather than TJ Mertz.

The remaining candidate is Cristiana Carusi, who is running against Kaleem Caire.  Over the years, I have frequently disagreed with Cris’ approach to the issues, which usually seems to be indistinguishable from TJ’s.   But my support for Kaleem is much more attributable to my positive feelings toward him and the important role he can fulfill on the Board than negative feelings about Cris.

We have had our differences over the years, but I have come to like and greatly respect Kaleem.  With his decision not to seek partisan endorsements, Kaleem could be a unifying force on the Board, with credibility among those city residents who view themselves as out-of-step with the dominant Madison liberalism.  That would be a good thing.

There is a lot at stake in the School Board elections.  I believe the school district will be best equipped to address our most daunting challenges if we have a superintendent and School Board working together as a cohesive team with a shared vision.  That’s why I am voting for Kaleem Caire, Ali Muldrow and Ananda Mirilli.  You should too.

Explainer: Student Achievement in Madison

Here is a red-hot take.  I am going to say something positive about David Blaska’s run for school board.  I appreciate that he seems to be the only School Board candidate bringing up and asking questions about measurable student achievement in MMSD.

On his website, Blaska includes among his criticisms of the school district that over the last five years, MMSD’s score on the report card prepared by the Department of Public Instruction has gone down, as has the “achievement” component of DPI’s report card formula.  He also points out that “the racial achievement gap persists,” again as measured by DPI-administered tests.

As George W. Bush famously said, “Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?”  To his credit, Blaska has asked the question.  Let’s try to answer it.  To do so, we have to look at the results of standardized tests.  But we should address some preliminaries before we dig in.

First, standardized tests have limited utility.  It would be a mistake to assign too much significance to their results.  There is much more that goes into the educational effort than can be measured on multiple-choice answer sheets or computer screens.

We tend to overvalue standardized test results because they are quantifiable and provide a basis for comparison.  But judging and ranking schools by the results of standardized test results is like judging and ranking basketball teams on the basis of the average height of their players.  Sure, it’s both quantifiable and relevant, but there is so much more that goes into success on the basketball court, as in the classroom.

So, why am I bothering to write this?  Because a school district cannot simply ignore the standardized tests and report cards that the state has identified as means of accountability for school districts. The results are out there; school districts have to deal with them.  Families moving to the Madison area and researching schools will certainly check them out.  If you go to the Waunakee school district web site, the first thing you see is something about the school district report cards.  (Understandably, since Waunakee, with the highest percentage of white students in the Madison area, perhaps not coincidentally also scored the highest on the report cards as well.  But read all the way to the end of this post for some interesting context.)  

Explainer: Are Isthmus Montessori Academy and One City Schools a Financial Drain on the Madison School District?

The nomination papers are in and the races are set for Madison School Board spring elections.   Three seats are up for grabs and ten (!) candidates signed up.  There will be primaries for all three seats and probably some pretty freewheeling pre-primary candidate forums.

We can look forward to a lot of discussion of our Madison schools, it you’re into that sort of thing. To help get you ready, here’s some background information on one of the issues that will undoubtedly come up.

That issue is the impact of what are called 2x charter schools.  These are public charter schools in Madison that have been authorized, not by the Madison school district, but by the Office of Educational Opportunity, a 2015 creation of the Republican legislature that is located within the office of UW System President Ray Cross. (“2x,” by the way, is a shorthand reference to the provision of Wisconsin law (section 118.40(2x)) that authorizes these independent charter schools.)

There are two 2x charter schools in Madison: Isthmus Montessori Academy and One City Schools.

One of the candidates for the School Board’s Seat 3 is Kaleem Caire, who is the founder and president of One City.  One of the candidates for Seat 4 is Ali Muldrow, whose daughters attend Isthmus Montessori.

Other candidates oppose the independent charter schools. TJ Mertz, the incumbent candidate for Seat 5, has criticized all recent charter school proposals.  He was one of four Board members who ultimately blocked Isthmus Montessori’s multiyear effort to become part of MMSD.  Though I can’t provide a link, I recall that during this year’s budget deliberations Board members bemoaned that the 2x charters were a multimillion-dollar drain on the school district’s finances.

It turns out that this isn’t true.  Explaining why gets a bit complicated, but here goes. 

The Diversity Dividend

[Note: This post combines three previous blog posts.]

One thing I have learned during my nine years on the Madison School Board is that white families’ attitudes toward race strongly shape their orientations toward our public schools.

The promise of our public schools has always encompassed an egalitarian ideal that our communities would be strengthened as students from all walks of life learn with and from each other. In 1857, D.Y. Kilgore, the first superintendent of Madison schools, approvingly quoted a Massachusetts educator’s description of public schools as “common in the best sense of the word, common to all classes, nurseries for a truly republican feeling, public sanctuaries where the children of the commonwealth fraternally meet and where the spirit of caste and of party can find no admittance.”

Those words were written about a century before Brown v. Board of Education, at a time when the “public sanctuaries” Kilgore celebrated were not equally accessible to students of color.   It has proven a tougher sell to promote and celebrate students of all races coming together for learning, in resistance to the social currents that tend to pull white families into their own enclaves and that have fed a national trend toward more segregated classrooms.

Advocates for public schools in diverse communities like Madison are called upon to make the case that white students benefit from attending school with students of color, just as students of color benefit from sharing classrooms with white students. Fortunately, this turns out to be true.

The point has won recognition at the college and university level, primarily as a result of legal battles over admission policies. Last summer, in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the United States Supreme Court affirmed previous rulings and held that colleges have a compelling interest in promoting the racial diversity of their student bodies.  The first part of this post draws from the many briefs submitted in the Fisher case to describe the dividends that students can also derive from attending diverse schools at the K-12 level.

Despite the Supreme Court’s endorsement of diversity in college classrooms, the Court has become hostile to race-conscious strategies to address school segregation at the K-12 level. This turnabout from the Court’s earlier support of desegregation efforts has contributed to the growing homogeneity of classrooms throughout the country, a development explored in the second part of this post.

Our state policymakers are indifferent to benefits of diversity in K-12 schools.  What’s worse, the usual tools employed to assess the relative quality of K-12 schools in a predominantly white state like Wisconsin have the perverse effect of penalizing diversity.

This ill-serves our Madison public schools.  In typical quality comparisons, our schools suffer in comparison to our Dane County neighbors because our classrooms display a level of racial diversity that pays dividends for our students in critical but less quantifiable skills and aptitudes, but not for our schools in standardized test score averages.  The third part of this post examines these issues.

Our evaluations and assessment tools should be better aligned with our national priorities. There is a relatively simple way of measuring the degree of diversity in schools and school districts – a Diversity Index – that I describe and calculate for a number of Wisconsin school districts in the fourth part of this post. The post concludes with the recommendation that this type of measure be incorporated into the state’s school report cards and other assessments of school quality.

The Diversity Dividend in K-12 Schools: Part 3, Let’s Keep Score

The first part of this post drew from amicus briefs filed with the Supreme Court to explain how truly diverse classrooms benefit students’ academic achievement, interpersonal skills, workplace preparation, and civic engagement.

The second part of the post looked at the national trend toward increasing segregation in our K-12 schools. The post explored how that trend was reinforced by misguided methods of rating schools that end up placing more value on high percentages of white students in the rated schools than on how much students are learning.

This final part of the post offers the following modest corrective to the tendency to undervalue diversity in school ratings. Along with its 100-point-scale “Report Card” score for Wisconsin school districts that it prepares each year, the Department of Public Instruction should also prepare a Diversity Index calculated on a similar 100-point scale.

Before delving into the Diversity Index, several points are worth noting. First, the negative diversity effect on school comparisons discussed in the second part of this post derives less from racism than from the unavoidable tendency to base comparisons on whatever it is that can be measured and quantified. Standardized test results provide the handiest and easiest basis for school comparisons and so it is inevitable that they will be used that way.

Second, standardized tests are not inherently bad. The basic skills they measure are critically important to school success. Year-to-year comparisons of test results can provide valuable insights for teachers and schools. So can school-to-school comparisons, so long as the schools are otherwise comparable.

Third, as noted in the second part of this post, on an aggregate basis, students of color tend to score lower than white students on standardized tests. An exploration of the reasons for this – and there are many – is well beyond the scope of this post. This aggregate effect says next to nothing about the skills and potential of individual students, but its impact must be acknowledged in order to unpack the misleading tendencies of school rating systems that are primarily based on an undifferentiated analysis of standardized test scores.

Fourth, the impressive data marshaled in the many Fisher amicus briefs leave no doubt about the non-quantifiable benefits of diverse classrooms. More encompassing and accurate methods of school evaluation and comparison should take diversity data into account. The goal should be to make smart use of that information to supplement quantitative methods of comparing schools in order to provide a more comprehensive assessment of school quality.

Fifth, we do not have ready means to measure the growth in interpersonal skills, workplace preparation and civic engagement that we know exposure to more diverse learning environments provides to students. In recognition of this gap, it makes sense to rely on diversity data itself as a proxy for the beneficial outcomes that diverse classrooms engender.

Finally – and here comes the partial remedy – it is not hard to develop a metric that represents the level of diversity in schools and school districts.

In antitrust law, the relative concentration of any particular market for products or services is measured by what’s called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, or HHI. The index is calculated by determining the market percentage shares of the participants in the market, squaring those percentages, and adding up the total. So, for example, if a market is entirely monopolized by one firm, its HHI would be 10,000. If the market features two firms, each with a 50% share, the HHI would be 5000. If there are six market participants with shares of 40, 20, 15, 10, 10 and 5, the HHI for the market is 2450.

A similar calculation can be applied to measure the diversity of any school district or school. DPI measures race or ethnicity in five principal categories: Asian, Black, Hispanic, White, and Two or More Races. An HHI figure can be calculated by adding up the squares of the percentages of a school districts’ students that fall into each category. (DPI also includes American Indian and Pacific Isle in its race/ethnicity categories, but the percentages are so small that they can be disregarded for these purposes.) The lower the HHI, the greater the school’s diversity.

In the interest of consistency, it makes sense to convert HHI figures for school or school district diversity to the same kind of 0 to 100 score that is used in DPI’s school report cards. We can call it a Diversity Index. A Diversity Index can be calculated, first, by subtracting a school diversity HHI from 10,000 and, second, dividing the result by 100. The highest possible score under this formula is 80, since the lowest possible school diversity HHI is 2000 (the result when exactly 20% of a school’s students fall into each of the five primary DPI racial/ethnic categories). The results can be grossed up to the traditional 0-to-100 scale by multiplying by 1.25 the figure derived by subtracting the HHI number from 10,000 before dividing by 100.

Here are Diversity Index scores for large urban school districts in Wisconsin – based on DPI data for the 2015-16 school year, calculated as described above, and arranged from highest to lowest:

 

Here are Diversity Index scores for the principal school districts in Dane County, again from highest to lowest.

I have not calculated the Diversity Index for each school district in Wisconsin, so I cannot say for sure that Madison is the most diverse school district in the state. But it does seem likely.

Students in diverse classrooms develop skills and traits that serve them and us well, though in ways that elude measurement through standardized tests. The Diversity Index provides clear, meaningful and helpful information about the degree of diversity in Wisconsin’s school districts.

DPI should include Diversity Index scores with its school and school district report cards. Inclusion of the Index in the report cards will not remedy the report cards’ shortcomings. But it will help to put them in context in a way that will make the report cards more informative for those interested in accurate and comprehensive comparisons of school quality.

Issuing Diversity Index scores for Wisconsin school districts will also send the message that genuine classroom diversity is beneficial and undervalued, indicate that the relative degree of diversity in our schools is important enough to measure, and a represent a step toward acknowledging the broader public purpose of our public schools.

Fact-Checking School Board Campaign Claims About the Isthmus Montessori Academy Charter School Proposal.

In the heat of the current School Board campaigns, there has been a lot of misinformation about the School Board’s 6-1 vote in January to approve the application of the Isthmus Montessori Academy (IMA) to become a charter school within the Madison school district.

Below are ten points of clarification about the IMA proposal — mostly facts but with some opinions mixed in.

This explanation is prompted in part by the following statement attributed to the Kate Toews for School Board campaign:

IMA (Isthmus Montessori Academy) is an existing private school and the district recommended against taking it on as a charter at every single opportunity because it doesn’t meet academic, demographic, or budget standards. The current district estimates show that $375,000 will be cost reduced from Lakeview, Gompers, Emerson, Mendota, Hawthorne, and Sandburg when it opens. Turning private schools into public ones is not innovation, and is not what charters were intended to be.

The Diversity Dividend in K-12 Schools: Part 2, Drifting Toward Homogeneity.

The first part of this post drew from the many amicus briefs submitted in connection with Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that reaffirmed colleges’ compelling interest in promoting the racial diversity of their student bodies. As the amicus briefs explain, truly diverse classrooms benefit students’ academic achievement, social and interpersonal skills, workplace preparation, and civic engagement.

This second part of the post looks at the forces pushing in the other direction.  The U.S. Supreme Court’s about-face on the constitutionality of race-conscious approaches to promoting integration has removed the principal counterweight to the centrifugal forces that push white families toward predominantly white schools. Even as courts, scholars, colleges of all stripes, and Fortune 500 companies have been celebrating the many benefits of diverse classrooms, the trend in K-12 education is clearly towards more segregation. This trend is misleadingly reinforced by school rating systems that systematically undervalue the benefits students derive from truly diverse classrooms and systematically overrate predominantly white schools.

The Flow and Ebb of the Supreme Court’s Concern with Segregated Schools.

In Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court emphasized that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments,” as it famously rejected the doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson and ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” In a follow-up decision, the court ordered states to desegregate their schools “with all deliberate speed.”

Subsequent desegregation efforts focused more on “deliberate” than “speed.” It was not until the Civil Rights Act in 1964 authorized Department of Justice lawyers to sue segregated school districts that appreciable progress began to be made. The Supreme Court’s high water mark in promoting desegregation came in a 1970 decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, where it unanimously upheld busing as a permissible means to promote school integration.

The Diversity Dividend in K-12 Schools, Part 1

Last summer, in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the United States Supreme Court affirmed previous rulings and held that colleges have a compelling interest in promoting the racial diversity of their student bodies.  The Court made clear that we have a federal policy in favor of diverse schools.  The policy gains added significance against the backdrop of the national trend toward more segregated classrooms.  This first part of a 3-part post describes the dividends that benefit students who attend diverse K-12 schools.

Despite the Supreme Court’s pronouncement and the persuasive weight of the scholarship on which it is based, our state policymakers are indifferent to benefits of diversity in K-12 schools.  What’s worse, the usual tools employed to assess the relative quality of K-12 schools in a predominantly white state like Wisconsin have the perverse effect of penalizing diversity.

This ill-serves our Madison public schools.  In typical quality comparisons, our schools suffer in comparison to our Dane County neighbors because our classrooms display a level of racial diversity that pays dividends for our students in critical but non-quantifiable skills and aptitudes, but not for our schools in standardized test score averages.  The second part of this post explores these issues.

Our evaluations and assessment tools should be better aligned with our national priorities. There is a relatively simple way of measuring the degree of diversity in schools and school districts – a Diversity Index – that I describe and calculate for a number of Wisconsin school districts in the third part of this post. This type of measure should be incorporated into the state’s school report cards and other assessments of school quality.

The Likely Impact of the IMA Charter School Proposal on MMSD Equalization Aid

On January 30, the Madison School Board will consider a proposal from Isthmus Montessori Academy (IMA) to establish a new charter school within the Madison school district. As the name suggests, the school would offer a Montessori curriculum.

A key question is what would be the financial impact of the new charter on the school district. For several reasons, this is very hard to project.

The financial analysis that the MMSD administration prepared for the School Board’s benefit looks at whether the addition of the school would generate sufficient new revenue authority to cover its net costs to the school district. In other words, would we be able to raise property taxes enough to cover the cost? The answer: not for the first couple of years. This is because revenue limits are based on the number of students in a school district, and new students are phased in over three years for revenue limit purposes.

While this analysis is helpful, I think it may be more useful to look at the likely impact of a new charter school on the equalization aid we receive from the state. Will the additional costs of the new school be offset at all by an increase in equalization aid? If so, by how much?

It is hard to make projections of future equalization aid. The equalization aid formula is based on six variables. Three are calculated by the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) on the basis of statewide factors as well as on the total amount available in equalization aid in a given year. The other three factors are specific to the school district: the total number of students (calculated per DPI rules), the total amount of property value in the school district, and the total amount of school district expenditures (again calculated per DPI rules). (I wrote an explanation of the equalization aid formula a few years ago that you can find here.)