Here are ten quick thoughts on these preliminary figures.

1.            To make sense of budget gap talk, it’s helpful to understand the assumptions behind the concept.  Budget gaps are traditionally calculated within the context of a school district’s state-imposed revenue limit authority. (For the sake of clarity, it’s helpful to think of revenue limits as spending limits.).  Costs are projected to go up by X millions, the school district is constrained by revenue limits to increase its spending by no more than Y millions, and the difference between X and Y is the measure of the gap that traditionally has to be bridged through painful budget cuts.

2.         Erik Kass, the district’s assistant superintendent for business services, informs me that we preliminarily project the district’s revenue limit increasing about $5.4 million next year. (Since our total tax levy is about $245 million, this represents a 2.2% increase.)  What is described as the $12.4 million budget gap is the amount in excess of this $5.4 million that overall spending is projected to increase next  year over this year, prior to adjustments.  In other words, assuming no budgetary changes, we’d expect the district’s spending to increase $17.8 million next year.   

3.         The budget gap calculation does not take into account the school district’s “underlevy authority,” which is the amount by which our spending this year falls below our state-imposed revenue limit.  Our underlevy authority currently stands at about $10.5 million, which means we could have increased our spending by that amount this year without bumping up against our revenue limit.  The $12.4 million figure also assumes an additional $4 million of underlevy authority (see discussion of 4K below), which brings the total up to $14.5 million.  So, theoretically we could eliminate all of the currently projected budget gap for next year by increasing our property tax levy by $17.8 million and still be within our revenue limit.  Just like the last couple of years, it seems as if our decisions on spending will be driven more by our sense of how much we’re comfortable raising property taxes than dictated by state revenue limits.

4.            The $12.4 million budget gap figure does not take into account the nearly $5 million the district is projected to save as a result of the elimination of the high-cost WPS health insurance option for teachers.  This change is specified in the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the school district and Madison Teachers, Inc., which cannot be amended, and so the change isn’t optional.  These savings will be realized.

5.            The salaries for teachers and most other staff are also frozen next year, as they are this year.  This also has a significant budgetary impact – almost $5 million – that the budget gap calculation does include.

6.            In addition to forcing all teachers who have subscribed to WPS to switch their health care provider and freezing teachers’ wages, the CBA also permits but does not require the district to require teachers to pay up to 10% of the premium for their HMO next year.  (The State Journal article, led astray by confusing information from the school district, is incorrect when it pegs the maximum co-pay percentage at 15% of premiums.)  This would translate into another cut in teacher take-home pay.  I am not in favor of exercising this option next year and I suspect that this view will be shared among School Board members.  (I can see moving toward more of a health care premium co-pay down the road, but only in future years when we’re able to offset that take-back with an increase in salaries.)

7.            One of the most challenging budgetary issues we’ll face is what to do about district employees whose jobs are funded for this year only through federal Jobs Act money.  We authorized these positions with the understanding that we did not have a continuing source of funding for them.  Now, we’ll have to decide which of these positions we’ll want to retain next year and how we’ll pay for them.

Here’s a chart that was prepared in November that identifies these positions:

As the chart indicates, our total expenditures on these positions this year is about $7 million.  Roughly $4 million of this cost is attributable to four-year-old kindergarten teachers and staff, whom we will certainly keep.  I discuss where this $4 million will come from in the next paragraph.  We’ll have to make difficult decisions with respect to the other positions.  The $12.4 million budget gap figure assumes that we’ll continue all of them.  To the extent that we eliminate some number of the positions, the budget gap decreases.  (I’m just describing the trade-off here and not recommending any particular course of action.)

8.            We’ll be welcoming our second class of four-year-old kindergarteners next September.  Our increased enrollment attributable to our 4K students will increase our spending limit next year by an amount that I think is about $4 million.  However, our current funding plan for the program assumes that we’ll use our reserve fund to pay about $4 million of the cost of the program next year – rather than raise the funds through property taxes – as a way of evening out the cost of the introduction of the program before increased state revenues attributable to our increased enrollment catch up with our expenses.   As a result of this approach, the preliminary budget assumes a $4 million reduction in our fund balance and also an increase in our underlevy authority of about $4 million, as I note above.  As the State Journal article points out, though, we’ll lose about $1.3 million in state aid if our total underlevy amount increases next year over the current $10.5 million level.

9.              The budget gap projection does not include any of the new initiatives to address the achievement gap that superintendent Dan Nerad will announce in a couple of weeks.  I assume that he’ll recommend the use of our underlevy amount (i.e., increased property taxes) to pay for at least some of the proposed initiatives.  The budget projection also doesn’t include anything to pay for, e.g., the continued expansion of the popular AVID program to the middle schools or expansion of the pilot program for dealing with middle school students with mental health issues that got underway this year.  I tend to think that the additional $1.3 million in state aid is safe – we’re not going to be increasing our underlevy amount next year.

10.            I very much doubt that we’ll again pass a budget like this year’s that does not include an increase in the tax levy.  For comparison purposes, here are the percentage increases (and one decrease) in our tax levy for the seven years before this one:

2004-05                        3.16%

2005-06                        (-1.03%)

2006-07                        4.41%

2007-08                        5.30%

2008-09                        2.74%

2009-10                        3.50%

2010-11                        4.62%

So, over the seven years prior to this one, the median annual increase in the tax levy was 3.5% and the mean increase was about 3.2%.

Assuming no funding of new programs, we could bridge the currently-projected budget gap for next year by making use of the savings from elimination of the WPS health insurance option and raising our property tax levy by 5.2%, which would leave us with about $7 million in underlevy authority.  Again, I’m not recommending, just describing.  The hard choices will come this spring.

Reports on a massive new study that seem to affirm the use of the technique have recently been splashed across the media and chewed over in the blogosphere.  Further from the limelight, developments in Wisconsin seem to ensure that in the coming years value-added analyses will play an increasingly important role in teacher evaluations across the state.  Assuming the analyses are performed and applied sensibly, this is a positive development for student learning.

The Chetty Study     

Since the first article touting its findings was published on the front page of the January 6 New York Times, a new research study by three economists assessing the value-added contributions of elementary school teachers and their long-term impact on their students’ lives – referred to as the Chetty article after the lead author – has created as much of a stir as could ever be expected for a dense academic study.

And an amazing study it is.  The researchers capitalized on their access to a treasure trove of data – twenty years of information on test scores and classroom and teacher assignments in grades 3 through 8 for more than 2.5 million students attending schools in a large urban school district, as well as federal tax records from 1996 through 2010 that the researchers were able to link to most of the individual students for whom they had test scores.

Using the data, the researchers studied whether value-added measures are fairly attributable to individual teachers.  Their first major conclusion is that value-added measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers’ causal impacts on test scores.  Next, they made use of the tax data to substantiate their second major conclusion that students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to do better in later life.

The researchers summarized the findings supporting their second conclusion this way:

Students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher-ranked colleges, earn higher salaries, live in higher SES neighborhoods, and save more for retirement.  They are also less likely to have children as teenagers.  Teachers have large impacts in all grades from 4 to 8.  On average, a one standard deviation improvement in teacher VA in a single grade raises earnings by about 1% at age 28.  Replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase the present value of students’ lifetime income by more than $250,000 for the average classroom in our sample.  We conclude that good teachers create substantial economic value and that test score impacts are helpful in identifying such teachers.

The study has garnered lots of attention.  See, e.g., here,  here  and here.  I find myself agreeing with a pretty balanced assessment by Matthew DiCarlo in a post on the Shanker Blog, which is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.  Dr. DiCarlo writes:

The fact that teachers matter is not in dispute. The issues have always been how to measure teacher effectiveness at the individual-level and, more importantly, whether and how it can be improved overall.

On the one hand, the connection between value-added and important future outcomes does suggest that there may be more to test-based teacher productivity measures – at least in a low-stakes context – than may have been previously known. In other words, to whatever degree the findings of this paper can be generalized, these test-based measures may in fact be associated with long-term desired outcomes, such as earnings and college attendance. There is some strong, useful signal there.

On the other hand, this report’s findings do not really address important questions about the proper role for these estimates in measuring teacher “quality” at the individual level (as previously discussed here), particularly the critical details (e.g., the type of model used, addressing random error) that many states and districts using these estimates seem to be ignoring. Nor do they assess the appropriate relative role of alternative measures, such as principal observations, which provide important information about teacher effectiveness not captured by growth model estimates.

Most importantly, the results do not really speak directly to how teacher quality is best improved, except insofar as it adds to the body of compelling evidence that teachers are important and that successful methods for improving teacher quality – if and when they are identified and implemented – could yield benefits for a broad range of outcomes over the long-term.

I think it’s fair to note that the authors of the Chetty study probably wouldn’t disagree with this assessment.

Objections to Value-Added Analysis

There seem to be two principal objections to the use of value-added assessments on a conceptual level.  (On a nuts-and-bolts level, there can be plenty of objections of a more technical nature to such variables as the sufficiency of the data used in a value-added analysis and the formulation of the various regression analyses that yield the results of the study.)

The first conceptual objection challenges whether the approach could ever be reliable and meaningful.  The Chetty study seems to go a long way toward demonstrating that, with enough data, value-added analyses can provide a uniquely valuable basis for comparative assessments of the contributions of individual teachers to student learning.

The second objection – and one noted in the Chetty study– is that the reliability of value-added assessments may be compromised if it becomes a significant part of teachers’ evaluations.  Teachers would have an incentive to adjust their approach in a way that placed more emphasis on test preparation for their students and “teaching to the test” could result, which might skew the value added analysis.

The specter of “teaching to the test” is not one that bothers me much.  At least for us in Madison, I don’t find it to be a very compelling criticism or caution regarding the use of value-added analyses.  First, in Madison we won’t have a wholesale shift in emphasis whereby curriculum is narrowed down to only those subjects that are tested on standardized assessments.

Second, our good teachers will not be driven to “teach to the test.”  They won’t have to.  One of the ways in which their skills will be manifested will be their value-added measures.  I do not favor and cannot foresee our adopting any sort of merit pay scheme tied to value added results, so successful teachers won’t have economic incentives to shortchange parts of the curriculum in order to put inordinate emphasis on reading and math.

Finally, it could be that struggling teachers would be more inclined to work hard to bring up their students’ scores on standardized tests if they need to show improvement in their value-added measures in order to hold on to their jobs.  There are a lot worse job-survival strategies that struggling teachers could employ.  Assuming the standardized tests accurately assess students’ knowledge on the topics we want them to understand, “teaching to the test” has never struck me as all that bad a thing for teachers whose students have not heretofore demonstrated sufficient academic growth.

Value-Added in Madison            

For the least several years, the Madison school district has received value-added reports prepared by the Value-Added Research Center, part of the UW Center for Education Research.

Initially, the reports only compared our schools against each other.  This year, for the first time, we received a report that looks at our value-added figures as compared with state averages.  We were told that “MMSD performs well relative to the state– VA for entire district positive on average in 2009-10, with stronger results for reading than for math.”  I don’t have any way to assess the actual significance of the extent to which the Madison value-added figures slightly exceed the state averages.   The entire value-added report we received in September can be found here.

We have not been presented with value added measures for individual teachers.  I assume, without knowing for sure, that we don’t have enough data to derive such figures in a way that would be both reliable and meaningful.  I also suspect that we’re at least several years away from being able to do so.

Statewide Developments:  Value Added as an Alternative to No Child Left Behind 

As I wrote previously, the Obama administration has offered states the opportunity for waivers from the most onerous provisions of No Child Left Behind.  In order to qualify for a waiver, a state must:  (1) adopt college and career readiness standards in reading and math, as Wisconsin has adopted the Common Core standards; (2) establish an accountability system that, inter alia, calls for interventions for the lowest-performing 5% of schools in the state and (3) establish a teacher and principal evaluation system that assesses performance based on student progress over time as well as other measures of professional practice.

According to information from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, the Department of Public Instruction is readying its application for the state’s NCLB waiver in time for the submission deadline of February 21.  DPI expects to have the draft waiver application available for public comment by January 23.  The state Senate and Assembly Education Committees plan to hold a joint informational hearing on the waiver proposal on January 25.

As part of the effort to obtain a NCLB waiver, State Superintendent Tony Evers appointed a Wisconsin Educator Effectiveness Design Team.  The group has proposed a statewide evaluation framework for teachers and principals that is based half on “educator practice” and half on “student outcomes.”

The “educator practice” component of the evaluation is to include multiple observations supplemented by other measures of practice.  To the extent available, student outcomes are to be measured primarily on the basis of individual value-added data on statewide standardized assessments, district-specific standardized assessment results, and collaboratively-established and teacher-developed “Student Learning Objectives.”

If school districts’ analytical capabilities improve to the point where they can assign reliable value-added rankings to their individual teachers, I’d assume parents would clamor for those figures so they could try to funnel their kids to the top-ranked teachers.  In light of this natural tendency, it’s interesting to note that the DPI Design Team “recommends that the laws and regulations of the State of Wisconsin ensure that personally identifiable information in relation to the evaluation system is not subject to public disclosure.  As such, individual evaluation ratings (and subcomponents used to determine ratings) are not subject to open records requests.”

The proposed evaluation system will sort teachers into three categories:  “developing,” “effective,” and “exemplary.”  Teachers judged as “developing” will “undergo an intervention phase.”  If the intervention does not succeed in bumping the teacher up into the “effective” category, then “the district shall move to a removal phase.”

To meet the NCLB waiver requirements, this evaluation system is to be fully implemented by the 2014-15 school year, when this year’s first graders are in fourth grade.

The Coming Tectonic Shift in Teacher Evaluation in Wisconsin

DPI acknowledges that the new teacher evaluation system it is developing will mark a major shift for Wisconsin. If the framework is implemented with fidelity, it certainly will.  There has been and presumably continues to be considerable resistance in the state to a high-stakes teacher evaluation system that takes into account student learning as measured through standardized tests, as value added analyses do.

As part of the effort to qualify for federal Race to the Top funding a couple of years ago, the state took a stab at opening the door to teacher evaluations based in part on student performance.  The effort was less than an unqualified success.

One of the requirements to qualify for Race to the Top funds was that a state could not bar consideration of student achievement as part of the process for evaluating teachers.  This was inconvenient, because Wisconsin had a state law that did just that.

Prompted by the Race to the Top requirements, the legislature acted in 2009 to change this law.  However, while the legislature attempted to comply with the letter of the Race to the Top requirement by eliminating the specific bar on using the results of statewide assessments as part of the evaluation of teacher performance, it flouted the requirement’s spirit by maintaining the bar on relying in any way on those results to discharge a teacher or non-renew his or her contract.

The practical effect of the changes the law wrought was that results of students’ performance on the statewide assessment, whether the WKCE or its successor, were quite unlikely to be used in the evaluation of teacher performance.  A school district wasn’t going to have two separate teacher evaluation processes, one that takes into account student performance but that couldn’t be used for making non-renewal decisions, and a separate process that could be relied on in determining a teacher’s employment future with the district.

Last month, with 2011 Wisconsin Act 105, the legislature changed the law once more, removing the bar on relying on the results of standardized tests to discharge or non-renew a teacher.  Now, the results of standardized tests can be taken into account but cannot be used “as the sole reason” for this type of adverse employment action.  The statute also specifies that school districts may use value-added analyses of scores on standardized tests to evaluate teachers.

The new teacher evaluation system that DPI is developing would also represent a major change for Madison.  The current collective bargaining agreement between the school district and MTI provides that the criteria to be used in measuring a teacher’s performance are limited to “professional knowledge, professional interest, assignments to pupils, instructional preparation, rapport with and control of pupils, techniques of teaching.”

While the DPI Design Team’s first “guiding principle” is that “the ultimate goal of education is student learning,” measures of student learning cannot currently be relied upon to evaluate MMSD teachers.  This seems likely to change.

The bare-bone facts are that, after about 90 public speakers, the Board voted 2-5 to reject the Madison Prep proposal.  I reluctantly voted against the motion because I was unwilling to violate the terms of our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers.

After the motion failed, I moved that the Board approve Madison Prep, but delay its opening until the fall of 2013.  My motion failed for lack of a second.  (And no, I don’t have an explanation for why neither James Howard nor Lucy Mathiak, who voted in favor of the first motion, was willing to second my motion.)

Probably like most who attended Monday night’s meeting, I have thought a lot about it since.  People who know I voted against the proposal have come up to me and congratulated me for what they say was the right decision.  I have felt like shaking them and saying, “No, you don’t understand.  We blew it Monday night, we blew it big time.  I just hope that we only crippled Madison Prep and didn’t kill it.”

I appreciate that that’s an odd and surprising place for me to have ended up.  To echo the Talking Heads, “Well, how did I get here?”  I’ll try to explain.  

Like most white Madisonians, I can’t claim to have much of a clue about the actual lives of African-Americans in our community.  For me, one of the benefits of working on Madison Prep is that it parted the curtains a bit and allowed me glimpses of African-American experiences in Madison.  I’m grateful that the passionate, opinionated and articulate speakers at Monday’s meeting bared a bit of their world for our view.

It struck me when listening to Monday’s speakers and others who have previously addressed the Board that we were visiting another land.

It’s a stressful and dangerous place:

• Where parents with older children mourn their losses and struggle with where the blame should lie for their children falling so far short of their potential.
• Where mothers are frightened to their core about what the future might hold for their young sons.
• Where a grandmother yearns to see her distant grandchildren but still urges her daughter to stay in Houston for her grandchildren’s sake rather than risk bringing them back to Madison.
• Where a wife demands of her husband that they uproot their family and leave Madison for somewhere on the east coast, where their children will have a better shot at success.

People like me don’t want to hear these stories.  They clash with our comfortable images of idyllic Madison.  And so we usually don’t.  And when we hear them in isolation, we tend to resist them, or rationalize them away.  I do, anyway.

People aren’t making this stuff up.  At some point, when you hear the same basic point conveyed over and over in different shapes and forms, you are obligated to hear it, absorb it, and take it into account.

So this is the problem as I have come to understand it.  Many African-Americans who are not newcomers to Madison perceive a pandemic of poisonous social forces pulling their children down, particularly their boys, and, despite best intentions, our Madison public schools have been virtually powerless to stop it.

With Madison Prep, some leaders from the African-American community propose that their community step up and take on part of the responsibility of schooling their children themselves.

Much has been written about Madison Prep, but relatively little about how old-school conservative the plan for the school is. It’s a pull-up-your-pants, take-off-your-hat, sit-yourself-down, and get-to-work sort of approach that someone like me, from outside the African-American community, would completely lack the standing to impose.  There’s to be no-excuse learning, a challenging curriculum, mandatory sports and activities, longer school days and school years, uniforms, single-sex classrooms, parental responsibility and obligations.

There’s that fog of evil out there waiting to envelop Madison’s African-American children, and the design of the school is to erect as many bulwarks as possible to keep that fog at bay.  I almost think that if they could pull it off, the Madison Prep supporters might prefer a boarding school so they could keep an eye on their students 24 hours a day.

Viewed through the lens of the perceived urgent need that called it forth, many of the criticisms of the Madison Prep proposal seem vacuous and condescending.

We couldn’t approve the school because it would be exploitive to allow African-American teachers to work for less than union wages, as if the teachers at Madison Prep would be incapable of making their own choices about where they are willing to work.

We couldn’t approve the school because it would be unfair to hold parents accountable for their level of involvement in the education of their children, as if opponents of the proposal weren’t complaining that the Urban League’s criticisms of the school district unfairly ignore the roles of parents in students’ learning.

We couldn’t approve the school because it would lead to segregation, as if white folks are always complaining that they don’t have enough Blacks around.

Uniforms would be too expensive for the families sought to be served.  The school would have too many administrators.  Classes would be too hard.   The ACLU is frowning.  The school district couldn’t spend money on this because we might need it for, well, I don’t know, for something.   Blah, blah, blah.

After all that, the “couldn’ts” prevailed.  I can’t help feeling that the vote came out the way it did not because of faulty analysis, but because of too much emphasis on analysis.  The proposal certainly raised a host of issues, but too often we viewed those issues as excuses for saying no rather than as challenges to be solved.  More, we saw the notes but missed the music.  We simply weren’t able to appreciate and appropriately value all the emotional capital arrayed in the school’s support.

Lots of members of our African-American community forced us to confront how our schools are failing their children.  They asked – sometimes not so politely – for our approval to try something new that might help, to endorse a proposal that had garnered unprecedented offers of assistance from the community.  We said no.

We should have found a way to make it work. We should have found a way to make it work and we just didn’t.

So, the plan to redirect the wave of support towards opening a smaller-scale, privately-funded Madison Prep next fall seems like a logical next step.  I hope the school succeeds; as should we all.  I wasn’t able to vote in favor of sending public money to the school for the first year, but I’ll donate some of my own now.

The ultimate goal has to be the conversion of the school from private status to an MMSD charter school.  It is conceivable that this could happen for the school year beginning September, 2013, which would be consistent with my un-seconded motion.  Whether that’s in the cards will depend in significant part on the outcome of the School Board elections this April.

The issue is far more complicated than this, however.  There are a number of roadblocks on the path to saying yes.  I discuss these issues below.  Some are more of an obstacle than others.

The biggest challenge is that a vote in favor of Madison Prep as it is currently proposed amounts to a vote to violate our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers.  I see no way around this.  I believe in honoring the terms of our contracts with our employees.  For me, this means that I have to condition my support for Madison Prep on a one-year delay in its opening.

Most other obstacles and risks can be addressed by including reasonable provisions in the charter school contract between the school district and Urban League.

There are some risks that cannot be addressed through contract.  For these, we’ll just have to take a chance.  There’s no getting around the fact that approval of Madison Prep entails a leap of faith.

I’m okay with this uncertainty, and even with the understanding that the Madison Prep experiment may not succeed.  Sometimes the outcome of an endeavor can be less important that the fact that was it was undertaken in the first place.  In this case, I think the School Board should be willing to commit to the plan of action the Urban League has presented, even while acknowledging that it carries a significant risk of failure.

Here is how the rest of this very long post is organized.  The next section provides some background about the Madison Prep proposal and the academic performance of our African-American students that has called it forth.  Next, I list eight issues that the proposal raises and offer my responses.  I finish up with a description of the reasoning process that gets me to as close to yes as possible.

Background

A little over two years ago, President Obama visited Wright Middle School.  The State Journal ran an editorial pegged to the President’s visit that lauded charter schools.

I wrote a letter to the editor in response that was printed on November 5, 2009.

It said in part:

The State Journal’s call for more charter schools in the editorial welcoming the president to Madison was a bit off the mark.

A charter school is not an end in itself – it’s a means to achieve an end. If there are impediments to learning that we’re unable to address, or opportunities for improvement that we’re unable to provide through our neighborhood schools, then a charter could be an effective way to address the issue

For example, I’d be interested in a charter proposal designed to attack our achievement gap by providing a more intense academic focus in a longer school day and longer school year for students who are behind. But if a charter idea lacks that sort of vital justification, then for me there’s insufficient reason to deviate from our traditional neighborhood school approach.

Be careful what you wish for.  Four months later, in March, 2010, Kaleem Caire became Executive Director of the Urban League.  In December, 2010, the Urban League formally submitted to the school district its plan for Madison Prep, which can fairly be described as “a charter proposal designed to attack our achievement gap by providing a more intense academic focus in a longer school day and longer school year for students who are behind.”  On Monday, December 19, after a number of twists and turns, I and my fellow School Board members will decide the fate of Madison Prep.

Madison Prep is designed primarily to address the problem of the underperformance of our African-American students.

As a member of the School Board, I feel it’s my obligation to promote the district’s schools and cast the performance of our students in the best possible light.  I can’t bring myself to do so in this case.

If the question is why the school district should be willing to subcontract out part of its responsibility for educating the district’s students to a group that has never before run a school, part of the answer may be found in the following two tables.

They list on a grade-by-grade basis the percentage of African-American students in the Madison School District whose WKCE reading and math scores fall below the level of proficiency, and also include the comparable figures for all African-American students in the State of Wisconsin.  In these tables, the higher the percentage, the worse the performance.

Percentage of African-American Students Non-Proficient on WKCE

Madison Versus State

These sobering percentages paint a grim picture.  There is a sliver of light in the 10^th grade percentages, where the Madison results are better than the statewide figures, although when the difference is between 58% and 66% you’re just talking about gradations of bad.

Otherwise, it looks like African-American students in Madison do poorly in both absolute and relative terms.  Or, depending on how you look at it, the district is doing an ineffective job of educating its African-American students, both in terms of absolute numbers and relative to the performance of comparable students elsewhere in the state.

We can’t be very encouraged even by our tenth grade results when we turn to look at graduation rates.  According to DPI figures, the percentage of our African-American students who graduate from high school in four years with a regular diploma (not a high school equivalency diploma) is a dismal 48.3%.  The comparable state-wide percentage is 60.5%.

We tend to live our lives inured to the inequities and inequalities that we confront on a daily basis.  But these figures compel a response.  It seems to me that those of us on the School Board, who are ultimately responsible for the operations of the district, must be willing to concede that, for whatever reasons, the school district is failing most of our African-American students.  And we’re failing them even if we lower our expectations to take into account the performance of African-American students elsewhere in Wisconsin.

If we are able to acknowledge this point, then we should be open to serious proposals designed to ameliorate the situation.  There’s no silver bullet that will single-handedly blaze a path to success for our African-American students.  But there are proposals and approaches that might well induce our struggling students to undertake the hard work of improvement.

That brings us to Madison Prep.  The Urban League has proposed a charter middle and high school premised on a culture of high expectations and hard work.  The school would offer an International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum separately to boys and girls.

The proposal has garnered lots of community support, and plenty of opposition as well.  It has also raised a host of issues.  I discuss eight of them in the following sections of this post.

1.   The collective bargaining agreement. 

As I have written before, if the school district authorizes a non-instrumentality charter school to start classes in September 2012, it will thereby countenance an almost certain violation of the terms of the district’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI).

The CBA provides that any teaching duties within the district are only to be performed by members of the MTI bargaining unit.  The employees of a non-instrumentality charter school cannot be employees of the school district and so cannot be members of the MTI bargaining unit.

There’s no real dispute that the School Board cannot approve the Madison Prep proposal without thereby endorsing a violation of the terms of its CBA with MTI.  The Urban League argues that this needn’t be a showstopper, however, for two reasons.

First, the work preservation clause in the CBA that prohibits subcontracting teacher work to nonunion members is said to be preempted by the state statute that authorizes school districts to authorize non-instrumentality charter schools.  Second, Act 65, recently enacted state legislation that empowers a school district and its teacher union to amend their CBA to reduce compensation and fringe benefits without triggering the draconian provisions of Act 10, demonstrates that the school district and MTI could enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) waiving the application to Madison Prep of the work preservation clause in the CBA.

Rather than extending this post even more, I’ll just say that I remain unconvinced by the Urban League’s legal analysis.  Approval of Madison Prep’s proposal is quite likely to violate the CBA.  Under these circumstances, MTI will have virtually no choice but to file a grievance against the school district.  If it declines to do so, it opens itself up to the claim of MTI opponents that it and the district have tacitly entered into an MOU waiving the applicability of the work preservation clause of the CBA to Madison Prep, and that this effectively amends the CBA and so triggers the applicability of Act 10.

If MTI does file a grievance, the arbitrator is likely to find a violation.  This would lead to an order designed to bring the school district into compliance with the work preservation clause.  I can’t predict what the precise contours of such an order would be, but it’s bound to interfere substantially with the Urban League’s plan for the school and frustrate the decision to select non-instrumentality status.

Under the circumstances, the better course is to postpone the opening of Madison Prep for a year, until September 2013.  The school district’s current CBA with MTI expires on June 30, 2013.  If the provisions of Act 10 are not amended or repealed by that time, then the work preservation clause of the CBA will cease to be in effect and a non-instrumentality charter school will not be prohibited at the time Madison Prep opens its doors.  If Act 10 is repealed, then the school district can attempt to negotiate a new CBA with MTI that accommodates the operation of a non-instrumentality Madison Prep.

For these reasons, I am not able to support the current Madison Prep proposal.  However, if the School Board rejects that proposal, I intend to offer a motion that the Board approve Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter school, but conditioned upon a one-year delay in the opening of the school.

2.   The cost of the school.

My initial reservations about Madison Prep centered around its projected cost to the school district.  Back in September, I wrote that it looked as if approval of the school would require slashing millions of dollars from other district schools and programs.  This was a higher price tag than I was willing to pay.

Since then the school has received pledges for private donations – most prominently from Mary Burke.  It has also agreed to focus its recruiting on students from a handful of middle schools, which has the effect of increasing the savings the school district would realize at other middle schools as a result of the enrollment of some of their students at Madison Prep.

Consequently, the school district’s recent administrative analysis of the proposal concludes that Madison Prep would impose the following incremental costs on the school district over the five years of its proposed contract:

I think these costs are manageable.  In fact, as far as the school district’s incremental costs are concerned, Mary Burke is pretty much matching us dollar for dollar.

We can and should increase our tax levy sufficiently to cover these additional costs.  This would ensure that the approval of Madison Prep would not compel us to reduce our expenditures on programs and initiatives at our existing schools.

Roughly speaking, a million dollar increase in school district spending translates to about an $11 increase in the property taxes on a $250,000 home.  So the approval of Madison Prep would cause the annual property taxes on that home to increase by less than $10.  I think the investment is worth it.

3.   The non-instrumentality structure of the school.

After some back and forth, Madison Prep is now proposed to be a non-instrumentality charter school.  This means that, unlike the schools district’s existing charter schools at James C. Wright, Nuestro Mundo and Badger Rock,  the teachers and other staff at Madison Prep would be employees of the Urban League rather than the school district, the district would have less day-to-day oversight over the school’s operations, and the school’s teachers would not be members of MTI.  This is similar to the structure of most charter schools in the country, though not in Wisconsin.

Two principal objections have been raised to Madison Prep’s non-instrumentality status.  In the words of MTI head John Matthews, “it would effectively eliminate supervision and accountability of the school to the Madison School Board regarding the expenditure of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, and . . . it would also violate long-standing terms and conditions of the collective bargaining agreement between the Madison School District and MTI.”

Charter schools are premised upon a trade-off by which the schools are promised autonomy in their day-to-day operations in return for accountability for their results.  The school district would be able to determine what standards of performance students at the school would be required to achieve in order for the school to continue beyond its initial five-year term.

It is hard for the school district and school board to let go and surrender day-to-day control over the education of some of our students.  But we can’t expect improvement if we are unwilling to submit to change, and some change entails giving others a chance.

If we believe in Madison Prep enough to give it a chance, I am all right with giving up the operational control that a non-instrumentality school implies.  But I am concerned about a five-year term for the initial contract for the school.  It is okay to judge Madison Prep on its results, but we don’t need to wait five years to make a judgment as to how it is doing.

The proposal is for the school to offer sixth grade in its first year and to add an additional class each year until a high school senior class is enrolled in the seventh year of operation.  Since it comes first, our focus has been more on the middle school component of the school than the high school component.

As an additional accountability measure, I think we should require a mid-course review in the third year of Madison Prep’s operation, when it will have sixth through eighth grades.  We should identify in advance specific benchmarks the school would be required to meet in order to qualify to expand to ninth grade in its fourth year.

If the school falls short, it could continue as a middle school for its five-year term.  But it would be prohibited from expanding to high school until it had proved that its approach was working.

I think this would be a reasonable way to increase the degree to which the school would be accountable to the school district while respecting the focus on results that is intended to distinguish charter schools from their traditional counterparts.

The second concern raised about Madison Prep’s non-instrumentality status is that its teachers and staff would not be members of the MTI bargaining unit and would not be paid at the levels set out in the CBA.

Madison Prep’s budget calls for paying its teachers about $50,000 in salary and bonuses.  I tried to determine from the CBA how much experience an MMSD teacher would need to qualify for this salary, but I couldn’t figure it out.  Salary levels for MMSD teachers range from $33,575 to $90,579.  MMSD teachers also qualify for more generous benefits than Madison Prep teachers would receive and are not required to work as many hours.

I am not interested in reducing the salaries we pay our teachers.  In fact, I think they are probably underpaid.  But I do not feel compelled to object to any and every proposal for a non-instrumentality charter school on this basis

Here’s how I see it.  Madison Prep will be looking for skilled and inspiring teachers to fill out a staff whose make-up should reflect the diversity of the school.  The school district would also welcome with open arms the kinds of teachers that Madison Prep will want to hire.

So, these teachers will very likely have their pick of going to work for Madison Prep or for the school district.  (A few might already be MMSD teachers.)  They are certainly capable of choosing whether they want to go to work for MMSD, become a member of MTI, and work under the terms of the CBA, or else go to work for Madison Prep, likely be non-unionized (at least at the start), and work longer hours for lower pay.

Why shouldn’t these teachers have the right to that choice?  How paternalistic would it be for us to vote down a non-instrumentality Madison Prep because we’re unwilling to allow a teacher to choose to work for less in what the teacher may view as a more rewarding work environment?  Whose interests are we serving?

4.  The proposed curriculum.

Madison Prep proposes to use an International Baccalaureate curriculum.  I am no expert, but I have reservations about this choice.  TJ Mertz has pointed out a number of reasons to be skeptical about the match between the curriculum and the mission of the school.  Others have noted that throughout the Madison Prep review process there has been relatively little attention devoted to the suitability of its proposed curriculum.

I am not convinced that IB is the best choice for Madison Prep.  This prompts me to consider what would happen if the school opens and in fact IB proves to be a poor match for the capabilities and interests of its students.  Some have speculated that lots of struggling students would wash out of the program, gradually to be replaced by more academically-oriented students, thereby undermining the original mission of the school.

I don’t think so.  My guess is that the school would adapt and change.  The school is far more likely to replace its curriculum for the sake of its students than replace its students for the sake of its curriculum.

So, the IB curriculum is a concern for me.  I don’t think we should include a contractual term requiring that Madison Prep attain certification as an IB school.  I would prefer that the school maintain the flexibility to adopt whatever curriculum changes seem warranted in light of the actual experiences of its students.

5.   The student selection process.

Madison Prep is intended particularly though not exclusively to serve the educational needs of students of color who are not finding success in our existing schools.  In fact, the justification for the school that is most compelling is that it could change the trajectory of these young students’ paths from failure to success.

A complication is that a charter school cannot select its students.  The school is obligated to accept whoever applies.  If more students apply than the school can handle, those to be admitted are chosen on the basis of a lottery.

This raises concerns.  The IB curriculum could be attractive to already-motivated, successful students of all races.  Such students frequently have parents savvy enough to negotiate the charter school application process.  There is a fear that these students could end up squeezing out the students who are most in need of what Madison Prep could offer.

The most cynical view is that these successful students are whom Madison Prep is really most interested in, and its professed concern about struggling students is just a ruse designed to increase the chances of School Board approval.

I have expressed concerns about the likely make-up of the school myself.  I have perceived a potential mismatch between the students the school hopes to serve and the curriculum it seeks to employ and have wondered whether the school could kind of end up being neither fish nor fowl.

My fears on this score have been allayed.  From my conversations with Kaleem Caire and other Madison Prep sponsors, I’ve concluded that their concern is strongly and sincerely focused on those students who could most benefit from the school’s services.

I am reassured by evidence that the school’s sponsors plan to serve students who are not typically tabbed for success.  For example, the school’s business plan notes that “Madison Prep’s Director of Family and Community Engagement will work with local, county and state correctional departments and probation officers to ensure that students whose parents are incarcerated or on probation/parole are able to participate in their child’s education as well.”

I also note the school’s intent to assign homework regularly. The business plan explains, “Because Madison Prep realizes that not all families can assist with homework in the same way, two Madison Prep teachers will be available ‘on call’ for homework questions each weekday evening on a rotating basis and for a period of time on the weekends. Students will be instructed to call the “Teacher on Call” if they encounter a question about homework that they have tried unsuccessfully to answer on their own.”

To me, these two examples are evidence that Madison Prep sincerely intends to enroll the students who could most benefit from its services and that it has thought seriously and creatively about how to meet these students’ distinctive needs.

Still, it makes sense to take reasonable precautions.  I think any charter school contract should obligate Madison Prep to reserve an agreed-upon number of spots at the school for students from families below a threshold income level and/or who are below proficiency levels in reading and math on WKCE scores or other standardized assessments, and establish reasonable benchmarks for the retention of these students.

6.   Single-gender classes.

Madison Prep intends to provide gender-segregated classes to its students.  Or else – and I’m not sure how this is handled organizationally – it should be considered two separate schools, one for boys and one for girls.

This isn’t a big issue for me.  I understand that research has not identified clear benefits for single-gender education.  I assume it can be beneficial for some students but not for others.

I’m willing to defer to the Department of Public Instruction on this one.  DPI has indicated that it will take a close look at the legality of Madison Prep’s single gender approach if and when it reviews the terms of a proposed contract between Madison Prep and the school district.  If DPI finds it to be a problem, I imagine it would somehow order that classes be co-ed.  It seems to me that that’s something to which the school could adapt without major problems, if need be.

7.   Students with Special Needs.

A number of questions have arisen about Madison Prep’s willingness and capability to serve students with special needs.  It seems to me that there are two strands to this argument.

The first addresses the details of the school’s plans for serving special needs students.  The second is a more general point that expansion of charter schools can be bad for students with disabilities because the more students are provided options for different educational approaches, the more the fabric of an inclusive school model is frayed.  This works to the ultimate detriment of students with special needs, who benefit from attending classes with a broad range of students.

It seems to me that the first strand of this point can be addressed fairly easily.  Madison Prep should be required to contract with the school district for special education services.  This was a recommendation in the most recent administrative analysis of the Madison Prep proposal:

“In order to ensure that the District is fulfilling its role as LEA and that related services staff are appropriately licensed, it is recommended that Madison Prep contract with MMSD for case management services, all evaluations, and all services that exceed the capabilities of the Madison Prep special education staff.”

This makes sense to me.

If I understand the second strand of this argument correctly – and I may not – the point cuts against charter schools in general.  Whatever the merits of the argument, my vote will be determined by my view of the specifics of the Madison Prep proposal rather than my views on charter schools in general.

8.   Would success be replicable?

A concern that I and others have raised is that the Madison Prep model differs in so many ways from our existing schools that it might be difficult to identify what factors would be responsible if the school were successful.  This might make it a challenge to figure out what components of the model to try to replicate in our other schools.

First, this would be a great problem to have.

Second, if the school is successful, I think it’s inevitable that its success would be attributable in part to a culture of high expectations, to a belief ingrained in the culture of the school that its students could achieve at levels higher than even they might have imagined.  That’s an attitude that I think we’d all like to see reinforced in all our schools.

Third, if the school is successful, it seems likely that its longer school day and school year would play a significant role in students’ enhanced learning.  It would be useful for the school district to have evidence that longer school hours yield a payoff in increased learning for our struggling students.  This would help us justify the increased expenditures that would be required to lengthen the school day and year at our other schools.  (For our teachers who do not choose to work at Madison Prep, we couldn’t and wouldn’t want to extend their workdays without paying them for it.)

Fourth, to the extent that Madison Prep is successful, parents would demand that its features be incorporated into our other schools.  The pressure to operate our schools more like Madison Prep would likely come from the bottom up, as parents whose children might not have been selected in a Madison Prep lottery may well demand that their fallback schools do things more like Madison Prep.

Conclusion

We have a serious and persistent problem of underperformance of our African-American students.  We have been presented with a charter school proposal designed to attack the problem.  The school is based on inculcating a culture of hard work and high expectation  and has garnered significant community support and generous offers of financial assistance.

On the other hand, unless delayed a year, the establishment of the school will quite likely constitute a violation of our contracts with our teachers.  The school is based on a curricular model that does not have a track record of success with the students the school is intended to serve.  Additionally, its non-instrumentality structure would mark a sharp departure from the school district’s customary level of control even over its existing charter schools and would enable non-union teachers and staff.

In weighing the competing factors at stake, I find it helpful to think about the possible downsides that would attend whatever decision we make.

If we say yes to Madison Prep, what’s the worst that could happen?  Well, the school might not work out the way we hope.  If so, the school district will have invested a total of about $2.7 million over five years in a failed experiment.

What if we say no?  What are the potential downsides that a negative vote could elicit?

We’d never know whether the proposal could work.  We would deny ourselves whatever insights the operation of Madison Prep would generate for the school district.

We’d signal that we’re not confident enough in our own operations to willingly subject our schools to the bracing tonic of some competition.  We’d lose the opportunity to demonstrate to ourselves and our staff that perhaps with a different approach, our students of color could in fact achieve at far higher levels than we may have implicitly come to expect.

More significantly, we would dash the hopes of all those who have committed themselves to the Madison Prep proposal.

This has proven to be the most challenging aspect of the Madison Prep story for me to write about.  Stated simply, I lack the knowledge and cultural competence to appreciate the depths of the frustration and disappointment that our African-American community feels about the school district’s complicity in the shocking prevalence of failure among our African-American students.

We can talk about analytical shortcomings and curricular preferences in the Madison Prep proposal until the cows come home, but for a broad swath of our community, whatever we say amounts to nothing more than lips flapping.  It simply evades the heart of the matter.  Their children are failing and they see no reason for us to turn our backs on a proposal designed to help them succeed.

It can be easy for those of us whose interests are more abstract to overlook or minimize the depths of feeling of those more directly affected by the Madison Prep proposal.  I’m an old white guy and as privileged as they come, but even I cannot fail to be moved to the core when African-American mothers bravely speak to us of their fears for their sons.  There is afoot in our community an inchoate force of evil that somehow captures far too many African-American boys and deposits them in prison by the time they’re young men.  Simply put, these mothers are asking for our help to keep their children safe.  For many, and for complicated reasons, Madison Prep has emerged as an anchorage, as some sort of start, a foothold, a cause for hope.

How do you weigh in the analytical scales the well-founded fears and vulnerable hopes of a mother for her child?  I don’t know, but to the extent I reasonably can, I choose to err on the side of trying to nourish the hope.

And so, finally, I come down on the side of Madison Prep. I cannot support the current Madison Prep proposal because its implementation would clearly violate the terms of the school district’s current collective bargaining agreement.

But if the School Board’s vote on the Madison Prep proposal fails, I intend to offer a motion that we approve Madison Prep but postpone the opening of the school for one year, until September, 2013, after the current CBA expires.

I have a lot to say about the proposal and how I intend to vote.  But first, I’d like to clear through the rhetorical underbrush a bit, and briefly respond to six points that, for reasons I’ll try to explain, won’t affect my decision.  I’ll add a final observation as well.        

1.         If it can’t be for everyone, it shouldn’t be for anyone. 

Here’s a quote from an on-line comment of a Madison Prep opponent responding to one of the several op-ed pieces posted in the Cap Times in recent days:  “There are barriers to students with special education needs, barriers to students with behavioral needs, and barriers to kids who rely on public transportation. These children are simply not the ‘right fit’. It is Madison Prep’s proposal to leave these kids in their neighborhood schools.”

The notion seems to be that Madison Prep may not be welcoming for students from all points along the spectrum of educational needs, even though our neighborhood schools are obligated to serve everyone. 

I think the self-selection process for Madison Prep should be taken into account in assessing how its students perform.  But it does not trouble me that the school is not designed to meet the needs of all our students.  No one need apply to attend and no student will be denied current services or programs if Madison Prep is authorized. 

The critical questions to me are, first, whether the problem the school is targeting is one that, for whatever reason, the school district has been unable or unwilling to address, and, second, whether the charter school’s proposed approach to the problem is promising enough to support.

If the answer to the questions is yes, then of course the target population of students for the school would be defined in terms of the problem sought to be addressed, and that target population would be some subset of our entire student population.  Focus is different from exclusion.   

2.         The either/or fallacy.

This point gets expressed as, “Instead of approving Madison Prep, the school district should [fill in the blank].”  The preferred alternatives extend from additional resources to the needs of preschoolers to expanding the district’s AVID/TOPS program in our middle schools.

Madison Prep is not an either/or proposition.  It is not the case, for example, that either we approve Madison Prep, or we expand the AVID/TOPS program. 

We surely do not have unlimited resources, but we can do both if we decide that both are worth doing.  Subject to our state-imposed spending limit (which is not binding us at the moment), we just have to be willing to pay for both. 

 3.         The appeal of imaginary alternatives

Related to the either/or argument is one that expresses a preference for imaginary alternatives.  This one is stated in terms of “Rather than approve Madison Prep, you should [fill in the blank].”  The alternatives here range from turning an existing middle school into a charter school, to aiming a new charter school at the needs of younger students, to significantly scaling back the Madison Prep proposal and insisting upon a different curriculum or different staffing model or, well, a whole different proposal.

We do not commission charter school applications.  The Urban League didn’t ask us what we wanted to see before it put together the Madison Prep proposal.  If it were up to me, I would have suggested different aspects of the proposal.  But it wasn’t and I didn’t. 

There can be and has been discussion with the Urban League on different components of the proposal, and the Urban League has responded to some of the concerns expressed.  But ultimately we have to make a judgment on the proposal as it is presented, with such modifications as we may approve and the Urban League may accept. 

It is not a requirement for me that the Madison Prep proposal be ideal from my perspective.  The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good. I also bear in mind that if we vote no, a preferred alternative will not immediately spring into existence. 

4.         “Why would you support a segregated school?”

This one make my teeth hurt.  Most often, the point seems not intended to advance the discussion but to end it by detonating a rhetorical landmine. 

As the result of a whole host of complicated factors that I cannot begin to unravel, many of our African-American students are either struggling in school or, worse, have given up the struggle entirely.  The Madison Prep proposal is primarily though not exclusively designed to provide an alternative for those students.  So, if the school is a success, it is likely that its student body will have a darker complexion than most of our other schools.

This is not segregation.  Different programs in our schools serve the needs of different groups of students.  Lots of African-American students at Madison Prep would be no more evidence of “segregation” than lots of white students in an AP physics class at West.  

Instead, both are a reflection of the undeniable fact that we have quite the achievement gap here in Madison, something that Madison Prep is intended to address.  Arguing against Madison Prep on the ground of “segregation” is like arguing against an offer of free haircuts because it discriminates against the bald. 

5.         Madison teachers are already working hard to address the achievement gap. 

While talking about Madison Prep with teachers and administrators I respect, I have frequently heard pained questions about why are the proponents of the charter school attacking us? 

Passionate feelings are on display and overheated rhetoric has come from all directions.  But I don’t view the Madison Prep proposal as an indictment of our administrators, teachers and staff. 

Instead, it’s born of the recognition that, despite the sometimes heroic efforts of our dedicated teachers and staff, our African-American students are, by and large, simply not succeeding in our schools, nor even doing as well as African-American students in other parts of Wisconsin. 

Madison Prep is not an attempt to mimic our traditional approach except with “better” staff.  Instead, it’s an invitation to try something completely different.  Like it or not, that’s kind of the idea of a charter school. 

6.         It’s the first step toward privatizing public education in Madison. 

There is an increasing and unfortunate trend toward the privatization of our public school system.  I think that virtual charter schools run by for-profit operations are currently the most pernicious embodiment of the trend.  I recognize that privatizers could support Madison Prep because they perceive that it advances their agenda. 

But the Urban League is not K12, Inc.  For years, the Urban League has been an important and valued partner with the school district in providing tutors and after school programming for Madison students.  Madison Prep is better seen as an extension of this partnership than as a stalking horse for the evil forces seeking to destroy public education.  (Through hard-earned experience, I have learned that any email on Madison Prep that mentions the Koch Brothers in the first paragraph is not one that will expand my understanding of the issues.) 

One further point.  Opponents of Madison Prep sometimes draw a contrast between what they see as the extra benefits that Madison Prep students stand to gain as compared to the students in our existing Madison schools.  The sometimes implicit question is why should these select few students get a deluxe program while resources are so tight for our remaining students? 

The answer is because a number of generous donors – most notably Mary Burke – have made financial commitments to Madison Prep that would allow it to implement its model without placing an inordinate financial burden on the school district. 

This is a good thing.  The students who would attend Madison Prep are our students, and we want the best for them, as we do for all our students. 

We need to think long and hard before we reject the generosity of our community members who, through the Urban League, are extending unprecedented offers to help subsidize the education of some of our students. 

Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t turn down the gift of a new car because I’d prefer a four-door to a two-door model.  I’d say thank you and figure out a way to make that two-door model work for me.

This weekend the news has been the school district administration’s analysis of the Urban League’s current proposal for a non-instrumentality charter school (i.e., one where the teachers and other school staff would be employees of the Urban League rather than the school district and the school would be free of most administrative oversight from the district).

The analysis recommends that the School Board reject the Madison Prep proposal, for two principal reasons.

The first is that, as a matter of policy, the administration is opposed to non-instrumentality charter schools because of the lack of day-to-day oversight of their operations.  The second reason is that there does not seem to be a way the school district could enter into a contract for a non-instrumentality charter school without running afoul of our collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI).

While this negative conclusion has appropriately drawn the headlines, the analysis also addressed and allayed some other concerns that have been expressed about the Madison Prep proposal.  For example, the analysis finds that the proposed temporary location of the school at the former Mount Olive church would, with some renovations, be adequate for the first three years of the school’s operations.

There have been a number of concerns expressed about Madison Prep’s plans and capacity for dealing with the needs of students with disabilities.  The administrative analysis recommends that, if the school is authorized, Madison Prep contract with the school district for case management services, evaluations, and services that exceed the capabilities of the charter school’s special education staff.  This seems like a sensible and workable approach to the issue.

No How, No Way to Non-Instrumentality?     

But what about the analysis’s two big objections?  The first is to the non-instrumentality approach.  According to the analysis, “the non-instrumentality charter school model goes beyond freedom and flexibility to a level of separateness that the Administration cannot support.”

I appreciate having the benefit of the administration’s helpful analysis.  However, whether the school district should be willing to consider authorizing a non-instrumentality charter school seems to me to be a policy matter that’s up to individual School Board members to decide.  This is an area where I think we owe less deference to the administration’s views than is appropriate with respect to operational issues.

My view for some time has been that I would not oppose the Madison Prep proposal simply because it called for a non-instrumentality charter school.  Back in February, during the time I was up for re-election, I wrote in response to an MTI candidate questionnaire, “I’m open to considering the Madison Prep proposal.  I won’t oppose it simply because the proposal is for a non-instrumentality school.”

Among other issues with a non-instrumentality proposal, it would be a challenge to identify and impose reasonable and adequate accountability measures.  But I don’t think we should automatically turn our backs on a charter school model that is specifically authorized by state statute and that is widespread in other states.

A Non-Instrumentality Still Can’t Be Reconciled with our CBA.

The administration’s second objection to the Madison Prep proposal is a real one, and one that I have been concerned about for some time and have written about before here and here.

The school district has a collective bargaining agreement with MTI that extends until June 30, 2013.  The CBA has a work preservation clause that mandates that all teachers employed by the school district must be members of MTI’s bargaining unit.  As far as the school district and MTI are concerned, a Madison Prep teacher would be a “teacher” within the meaning of the CBA, whether the school is an instrumentality or non-instrumentality. If Madison Prep does hire teachers who are not MTI members, and does not recognize MTI as the bargaining representative for its teachers, then it certainly seems like this would put the school district in violation of its CBA with MTI.

Here’s an email that I sent to Kaleem Caire on November 18 that describes the issue:

Kaleem –

It would be helpful to have your thoughts on how the school district could authorize Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter without thereby violating the terms of the district’s collective bargaining agreement with MTI.  Specifically, The school district’s CBA with MTI includes an agreement “that instructional duties where the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction requires that such be performed by a certificated teacher, shall be performed only by ‘teachers.’”  For purposes of the CBA, “the term ‘teacher’ refers to anyone in the collective bargaining unit.”  Hence, it appears that all teachers in MMSD schools – including non-instrumentality charter schools — must be members of the MTI bargaining unit.

Can you shed any light on this issue for us from your perspective?  Thanks.

I received a response to my email Friday night.  You can find it here.  In a nutshell, the response makes two points.

The first is a fairly half-hearted argument that the state statute authorizing school districts to enter into contracts for non-instrumentality charter schools trumps or pre-empts any language in collective bargaining agreements that restricts school districts along these lines.

I say the argument is half-hearted because no authority is cited in support and it just isn’t much of an argument.  School districts aren’t required to authorize non-instrumentality charter schools, and so there is no conflict with state statutes for a school district to, in effect, agree that it would not do so.  Without that kind of a direct conflict, there is no basis for arguing that the CBA language is somehow pre-empted.

The second point the letter advances is that a way out of the dilemma may be provided by recently-enacted state legislation, known as Act 65.  This bill allows a school district and  union to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) “that reduces the cost of compensation or fringe benefits in the collective bargaining agreement” without thereby triggering the draconian provisions of Act 10, the anti-collective-bargaining legislation that provides that any amendments to CBAs are effectively their death knell.

The letter states in relevant part:

The Urban League believes that Act 65 gives the Board and MTI the opportunity to make changes that will facilitate cost reductions, based in compensation and fringe benefits, to help Madison Prep move forward.  And, the law allows the parties to do so in a way that does not adversely impact the teachers represented by MTI or the union security provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

For example, the parties could agree to reduce the staffing costs of Madison Prep.  The parties could also agree that a longer school day would not have to cost more.  And, the parties could agree that the work preservation clause referenced in the first part of this letter does not apply where the School Board has determined a charter school will be a non-instrumentality of the District, a move that would also most certainly reduce costs.  These changes would not be forced upon any existing MTI represented teacher as teachers would apply for vacancies in the school.

I’m afraid I don’t find this argument persuasive.  The type of MOU authorized by Act 65 reduces the cost of compensation or fringe benefits specified in the CBA to be paid to bargaining unit members. This may have been applicable if the Urban League were still pursuing an instrumentality approach, whereby Madison Prep teachers would be members of the MTI collective bargaining unit.

The legislation does not seem to have any bearing on provisions in a CBA that address issues other than compensation or fringe benefits, such as the type of work preservation agreement that is the stumbling block here.  Since teachers at a non-instrumentality Madison Prep would not be members of the MTI bargaining unit, the CBA has nothing to say about their compensation or fringe benefits.

In short, the legislation does not authorize changes to a CBA that may have some indirect effect on a school district’s costs – such as an agreement “that the work preservation clause . . . does not apply where the School Board has determined a charter school will be a non-instrumentality of the District,” even if that would “most certainly reduce costs.”  Instead, the law is clear that the authorized changes must reduce the cost of compensation or fringe benefits paid to members of the collective bargaining unit.

Don’t Blame MTI.

I’m not a big fan of the work preservation clause in the CBA, but I am a fan of our respecting the terms of the contracts we enter into.  MTI has bargained for the work preservation clause and is entitled to its protections for as long as the CBA remains in effect in its current form.

It is frustrating that that we seem to be at a place where this provision prevents the school board from authorizing a non-instrumentality charter school, no matter how beneficial it might seem for our students.  But I think it’s important to recognize that MTI is not at fault here.  It’s unfair to blame the union for either the inclusion of this clause in the CBA in the first place (the School Board had to agree to it, after all) or for declining to consider changes in the CBA at this point, when any change would be a poison pill that would destroy the agreement (other than changes that reduce compensation or fringe benefits in the way that is authorized by Act 65).

It also seems appropriate to note here that I thought the Urban League and MTI tried in good faith to figure out a way for the Madison Prep proposal to proceed as an instrumentality of the school district.  For various reasons, that just didn’t work.  But the course of negotiations proceeded in a way that was inconsistent with the notions that the Urban League was just trying to bust the union or that the union was just trying to kill the charter school proposal.

What’s the Least-Worst Option for Madison Prep Supporters at this Point?

So, what comes next?  From the perspective of the CBA, the best approach has always been to wait a year.  If Madison Prep were to enroll its first class in the fall of 2013, then either the CBA work preservation clause would no longer be operative (if the provisions of Act 10 remain in effect) or else the school district and MTI could address the issue in a new CBA (if the provisions of Act 10 are repealed prior to that date).

I understand that Madison Prep supporters do not want to wait another year.  That type of delay would be a problem with the Urban League’s planning grant with DPI, which is premised upon a charter school opening its doors in the fall of 2012.

I suppose that if sufficient School Board votes could be mustered for the Madison Prep proposal today – which is very far from a sure thing – there may also be uncertainty created by School Board elections in the spring. It is conceivable that new board members could be elected who have different views on the issue and who might try to put a kibosh on the proposal before the school started operations in 2013.

But given the CBA complications, I don’t see how the school board can authorize a non-instrumentality Madison Prep to open its doors next fall, and I say that as one who has come to be sympathetic to the proposal.

Perhaps supporters could coalesce around a second-best approach whereby the school plans could proceed except that the first class of sixth-grade students would spend their school days in their home MMSD middle schools and gather at the Madison Prep site after school for tutorial/enrichment classes and athletics and co-curricular activities.  The school sponsors could continue to stress high academic expectations, mentoring and community support, and parental engagement for their first class of students, even if they would not be able to attend classes at Madison Prep until seventh grade.

A Denouement on the 19^th?

As this suggestion indicates, there’s no elegant solution to the issues that continue to surround the Madison Prep proposal, despite the Urban League’s efforts to adapt and respond to community concerns.  It’s a complicated situation and a challenging one for us School Board members, who are each trying to sort through all the cross-currents and think through in our own way what’s best for the district and our students. We’ll reach some sort of a resolution at our School Board meeting on the 19^th, but I won’t be surprised if – one way or another – the Madison Prep saga doesn’t end there.

There’s a millstone around Leopold’s neck, however, and it’s called No Child Left Behind. According to that much-maligned federal law, Leopold is a “School Identified for Improvement” (SIFI).

What gives?  If so many signs point toward Leopold succeeding, why do the feds consider that it is falling short?

The short answer is that the idiosyncrasies of the federal law combine with Madison’s serious achievement gap problem in a way that is particularly unfortunate for Leopold. For a longer answer, read on.

What’s the Deal with No Child Left Behind?

The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, signed by President Bush in January, 2002, is built on the fantasy that all students in the United States will be proficient in grade-level math and reading by 2014.

The law obligates states to test students annually in reading and math.  Test results must be publicly reported for all students in the aggregate as well as for specific subgroups of low-income students, students with disabilities, English language learners, and major racial and ethnic groups.

Each year, all students and subgroups are expected to make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) toward the 2014 goal of across-the-board proficiency.  The legislation authorized each state to define the annual steps that would constitute annual yearly progress for their students.

Some states followed the logical path of defining equal annual increases that would take them from whatever proficiency level they were at to 100% proficiency by 2014.  Other states, including Wisconsin, decided to game the system a bit.  They established relatively small required increases in the early years of the legislation and much larger required increases closer to 2014.  Here’s how the required proficiency levels increase in Wisconsin:

(Source: New American Foundation)

Wisconsin school districts are currently living with the consequences of the sharply increasing required levels of proficiency for this and the next couple of years.

How Did Leopold End Up a SIFI School?

For NCLB purposes, Leopold, like all Wisconsin schools, was assessed on 22 different measures of 2010-2011 student performance.  Seven pertain to test participation and don’t seem all that meaningful, but Leopold passed them all.  The school also met the objective for attendance.

In math, Leopold met the standard for all students, as well as all six of the subgroups measured.  (For some groups, the school’s performance feel below the standard, but not so far below that it fell outside of the margin of error, and so this is not considered a failure.)

In reading, the school met the objective for all students, and for five of the six subgroups (again, sometimes with the benefit of the margin of error).  It was only the performance of African-American students in reading that failed to meet the NCLB standard.  But this was enough to keep the school from making Adequate Yearly Progress for purposes of NCLB.

Why Did the NCLB Hammer Fall on Leopold?

There is no sugar-coating the fact that we have a serious achievement gap problem in Madison.   We are not seeing the level of performance from our African-American students that we should expect.  The District has a number of initiatives underway that are intended to improve the situation in a variety of ways.

But, for comparison purposes, it is worth noting that African-American students at Leopold did slightly better in reading than African-American students in the District as a whole.  Also, the district has collected three years of “value-added” data that measure individual students’ gains on the WKCE from year to year.  According to these figures, African-American students at Leopold show a greater year-to-year increase in their WKCE scores in both reading and math than African-American students in the District as a whole.

So while the achievement gap is a very serious District issue, it is not a Leopold-specific problem.  Why then is Leopold singled out for NCLB ignominy on the basis of the reading scores of its African-American students?

One reason has to do with Leopold’s size.  Schools are expected to achieve a defined proficiency threshold for purposes of NCLB.  They will be considered to have fallen short if their score is below the threshold by more than the margin of error calculated for the group of students whose performance is being measured.  The smaller the group of students, the larger the margin of error, and vice-versa.

Leopold is our biggest elementary school, and so the performances of its student groups are assigned the smallest margins of error for NCLB purposes.  As a consequence, Leopold had a higher proficiency level for its African-American students than some of our other, smaller schools, but, unlike Leopold, those schools escaped falling short of the NCLB threshold because their margin of error was larger.

It is also the case that Leopold is paying a cost today for its falling short of the NCLB threshold in prior years.  The level of sanctions to which a school is subject increases for each year it remains on the SIFI list.  Leopold is now at Level Two for NCLB sanctions, and will be looking at enhanced sanctions if it is unable to work itself off the list this year.

Is There Any Way Out?

Unfortunately, as far as NCLB is concerned it hardly matters what Leopold does this year to address the reading skills of its African-American students.  Once a school has been identified for improvement under NCLB, there is virtually no way to get off the list at this point.

Last year, the proficiency target in reading for all students and subgroups was 80.5% while the proficiency level for Leopold’s African-American students in reading was 71%.  This number is calculated by adding together (a) the percentage of students who tested in the proficient and advanced range and (b) half the percentage of students who test in the basic range.  No credit is given for students who test in the minimal range, which is the lowest of the four.

For reading, the cut-off this year increases to 87%.  It goes to 93.5% in 2012-2013 and then tops off at 100% in 2013-2014.  So the students and staff at Leopold could do an amazing job this year and take their African-American students from where they were last year in reading fully half the way to total proficiency and it still wouldn’t be enough to meet this year’s sharply-increased AYP proficiency standard.

What Does NCLB Have in Store for Leopold?

If Leopold is deemed to fall short again this year, the next level of sanction under NCLB will kick in.  This level calls for “corrective action” at the school, which must include at least one of the following: “replace relevant school staff, institute new curricular program, decrease school-level management, appoint an outside expert to advise the school on its progress, extend the school year or school day, or restructure the internal organization of the school.”

Already, NCLB requires the district to allow Leopold students to transfer to other elementary schools – Stephens and Olson – and provide transportation to those schools for the transferring students.

One of the oddities of NCLB is that the law’s “remedies” are provided for all students at the school, even if the NCLB sanctions are triggered by the low scores of only one subgroup of students.  For example, the proficiency levels for white students at Leopold last year were 94% in reading and 91% in math, comfortably above the NCLB minimums.  And yet NCLB treats Leopold as if it is failing its white students, by authorizing them as well as all other students at the school to attend Stephens or Olson instead.

Can’t Anyone Fix This Mess?

If no changes are made to NCLB, then every school in the country will be considered to be failing when the 100% proficiency requirement is reached in 2014.  It’s unfortunate but no surprise that Congress has been unable to agree on corrective measures to avoid this legislative train wreck.

Stepping into the breach, the federal Department of Education announced this summer that it would absolve states from NCLB sanctions if they adopt specified reforms.  According to a DOE press release , states can seek waivers from NCLB sanctions if they submit “locally-designed plans to implement college and career ready standards; develop rigorous accountability systems that include a focus on low-performing schools and schools with persistent achievement gaps; and create better systems for developing, supporting and evaluating principals and teachers.”

In September, State Superintendent of Schools Tony Evers issued a press release expressing appreciation for the administration’s initiative and suggesting that Wisconsin would seek a waiver.  It is not among the eleven states that met the first deadline for doing so, however.

Where Does This Leave Leopold? 

Leopold will have to work hard to continue on its upward learning arc, paying particular attention to improving the reading proficiency of its African-American students.  But at this point in NCLB’s history, significant improvements in student learning – even objectively amazing improvements – won’t be enough for Leopold to avoid further federal sanctions.  From a Leopold-centric perspective, we’ll have to hope that Wisconsin is willing to pay whatever ransom Arne Duncan exacts to free the state’s schools from NCLB’s increasingly unrealistic demands.

I’m glad to see to see that we’re taking some proactive steps to dispel misperceptions about Leopold, which comes in for undeserved criticism in some quarters.  By objective measures, the school is doing a good job.

Unfortunately, and for complicated reasons, the school is being victimized by its status as a “School Identified for Improvement” under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law.  I’ll have a companion post that explains how the knots into which Leopold is tied by this designation says more about shortcomings in the law than in the school.  Here, I’ll focus on features of Leopold that should be of interest to potential Fitchburg home buyers, and so to real estate agents as well.

Comments on the article on the State Journal website document the fact that some real estate agents haven’t exactly gone out of their way to praise Leopold’s accomplishments to potential home-buyers in Fitchburg.  If they’re not, they’re disserving their clients.

Here’s some information for the Realtors® to use.  But first, they should go visit Leopold for themselves.  Principal John Burkholder will be happy to give them a tour.

I had a chance to stop by a month or so ago, and came away impressed.  It’s a big school but it’s not overcrowded these days and it has the sense of order and buzz of activity that you’d expect at a well-functioning elementary school.

Folks looking for a house in Fitchburg who are working with Realtors® are almost certainly not low-income.  If they are concerned about how their children would do at Leopold, then they should look at how well Leopold does educating non-low-income students.

The only available source of comparative data is WKCE scores.  I think the measure that should be of primary interest to home buyers is the percentage of non-low-income students at the school who score at the “Advanced” level on the WKCE.  “Advanced” is the highest of the four WKCE categories.  Typically, however, more than half of our non-low-income students test out at that level, so for these purposes I think it provides the most useful basis for comparison.

I looked at the most recent test-score data on a school-wide basis.  (These figures as well as all kinds of data are available on the DPI website.)  I compared the percentage of Leopold non-low-income students who scored at the Advanced level in the five WKCE subject areas against four other groups of elementary school students:  (1) those attending Stoner Prairie, which is the elementary school in the Verona school district that students living in some areas of Fitchburg attend rather than Leopold;  (2) those in the Madison school district as a whole; (3) those in the Verona school district as a whole, and (5) the state-wide average for elementary school students.

Here are the results:

PERCENTAGE OF NON-LOW-INCOME STUDENTS SCORING “ADVANCED’” ON NOVEMBER 2010 WKCE

To see the same data displayed as a chart, click here.

What does this tell us?  Leopold students outscored their Stoner Prairie neighbors in four of the five subjects (though not by much).  The Stoner Prairie students did quite well in Language Arts, and the students at both Leopold and Stoner Prairie have room for improvement in Science.  The Leopold students scored comfortably above the Madison average, the Verona average, and the statewide average in Reading, Language Arts, Math and Social Studies.  (And I can’t resist noting that the Madison average was higher than the Verona average across the board.)

So, on the whole and at least to the extent that WKCE scores are a guide, Leopold is doing a fine job of educating non-low-income students.  There is no reason for house-hunting parents to think that they would be compromising their students’ learning by enrolling them at Leopold.

In addition, Leopold has a diverse student body.  About three percent of the students are of Asian origin and there are a handful of Native American students as well.  The remainder of the student body is comprised of roughly equal percentages of African-American, Hispanic and white students.

While views certainly differ on this point, I believe it is indisputable that students benefit in real, important, but non-quantifiable ways by attending school with classmates of different races and cultures.  Other things equal, it’s simply a richer learning environment and one that better prepares students to succeed in our twenty-first century world.

Finally, Leopold offers the option of dual-language immersion classes. Beginning in kindergarten, English-speaking students can start learning Spanish as their Spanish-speaking classmates start learning English.  If they stick with it, the native English speakers will become highly proficient in Spanish.  An outside expert  from the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics who evaluated Madison’s dual language programs offerings concluded that they could develop into “one of the great programs in the country.” And there’s no extra charge!

There’s a lot to like about Leopold.  With strong school leadership and a skilled and motivated staff, there is no question that the school is on the upswing.  Well-informed real estate agents would do their home-shopping clients a favor by filling them in on the advantages that the school offers for parents interested in a stimulating and successful learning environment in a diverse setting.  And if the Realtors® want to know how to respond to questions about the unfortunate NCLB designation for Leopold, they should read my next post.

The two most significant, interrelated issues at the moment are the cost of the proposal and whether Madison Prep would operate as an instrumentality or non-instrumentality school.

I’ll try to describe where I think matters stand as of today on these issues.  However, there is a risk of losing sight of the forest for the trees in these discussions.  The bedrock issue that is sometimes obscured is whether students in the Madison school district would be better off, and their overall academic achievement would be enhanced, if some of them had the opportunity to attend Madison Prep.

The cost issue is certainly relevant to this.  As we’re painfully aware, we don’t have unlimited funds to spend on our schools.  The state puts a cap on our expenditures.  If Madison Prep would end up soaking up the district’s limited funds to such an extent that we would be obligated to cut back on the opportunities we provide to our other students, then that would have a clear impact on the overall cost-benefit analysis of the proposal. 

I don’t think the instrumentality-non-instrumentality issue needs to have much bearing on the ultimate issue of whether Madison Prep would be good for our students, though others disagree vigorously on this point.

First, then, to the cost of the proposal. The relevant inquiry for me is what net impact approval of the proposal would have on the school district’s overall expenditures.   This depends on the difference between the amount the school district would save as result of some of our students attending Madison Prep rather than other district schools, and the amount of expenditures the district would incur for Madison Prep.

As to the savings, the district has calculated estimates of those figures, on the assumption that 70% of Madison Prep students would otherwise be attending Sennett, Wright, Jefferson, Toki or Cherokee Middle Schools.  Here are the projections of how much on a per-student basis the school district would save:

(These figures can be found on page 55 of the November 12 MMSD Administrative Analysis of the Madison Prep proposal.)

The second part of this calculation is the per-student amount the school district would spend on Madison Prep.  This is where things get a bit complicated.

The Urban League submitted a business plan at the end of October.  The budget included in the plan assumed that Madison Prep would receive the following per-student payments from the school district:

These two sets of numbers allow us to calculate an estimate of the net cost to the school district of Madison Prep under these assumptions:

2012-13:  ($9,247 – $8,796) x 120 students = $54,120

2013-14:  ($9,636 – $7,776) x 240 students = $446,400

2014-15:  ($9,612 – $7,460) x 360 students = $774,720

2015-16:  ($9,600 – $8,713) x 480 students = $425,760

2016-17:  ($9,625 – $8,334) x 600 students = $774,600

From a school district budget perspective, these figures look manageable.  The Administrative Analysis contains a recommendation making the same point I have been advancing for a while – if the school district ends up approving Madison Prep, we should pay for the school by making use of our taxing under-levy authority.  In simple terms, we should raise the money by increasing the property tax levy rather than by taking resources away from our existing schools.

The property tax impact would not be significant.  As a rule of thumb, an increase in school district spending of $1 million leads to a property tax increase of about $11 on a $250,000 house.  So, if the these dollar figures are roughly accurate, authorizing Madison Prep would mean that by the fifth year of the school’s operations, property taxes on a $250,000 home would be about $8 higher than they would otherwise be.

The Administrative Analysis explains that these dollar figures are not reliable if Madison Prep is to function as an instrumentality of the school district, which is the Urban League’s current intention.  With instrumentality status, all staff at the school would be employees of the school district, rather than the Urban League.  The staff would also be members of the various bargaining units that represent school district employees.  Their compensation would be determined on the basis of the terms included in the current collective bargaining agreements (CBAs).

This has the effect of significantly increasing the school’s operating costs beyond what the Urban League had projected for purposes of its late-October budget.  The terms of the teacher collective bargaining agreement were not negotiated with an instructional model like that proposed for Madison Prep in mind.

For example, if teachers will be required to work a longer school day, they must be paid for those extra hours in the manner that the CBA provides.  The Administrative Analysis of the Madison Prep budget plugged in the additional staffing costs attributable to the terms of the relevant CBAs and changed a few other assumptions as well to conform to district budgeting conventions.  The upshot is that the budgeted annual cost of a teacher, including salary and benefits, shot up from about $60,000 to a bit more than $100,000.

The per-student expenditures for the school go up significantly under this analysis.  The net cost to the school district would now look like this:

2012-13:  ($17,093 – $8,796) x 120 students = $995,640

2013-14:  ($15,254 – $7,776) x 240 students = $1,794,720

2014-15:  ($15,849 – $7,460) x 360 students = $3,020,040

2015-16:  ($15,430 – $8,713) x 480 students = $3,224,160

2016-17:  ($15,133 – $8,334) x 600 students = $4,079,400

The Administrative Analysis concludes that, calculated on the basis of these “instrumentality” assumptions, the cost of Madison Prep to the school district is too high.  Interestingly, the Analysis recommends that a fair per-student amount for the District to make available to Madison Prep would equal our per-student spending limit under the state-imposed revenue cap.  That amount is projected to be $10,588.54 for 2012-2013, and the Analysis assumes a $200/year increase for the following four years.

The implication is that if Madison Prep were able to deliver a budget comparable to the one included in its late-October business plan, the cost to the school district would be within the range that the Administrative Analysis recommends.

Having the benefit of the administration’s analysis of the budgetary impacts of operating as an instrumentality, the Urban League is now considering whether it might want to switch back to the non-instrumentality approach.  I understand that a decision is expected this week.

The issue seems to come down to whether the Urban League considers the budgetary and other impacts of operating under the current CBAs to put too serious a crimp in their plans for the school.  Remember that under Act 10, the terms of the CBAs cannot be modified to take into account the unique aspects of the Madison Prep proposal.

A decision to revert to the original non-instrumentality approach would have a positive effect on Madison Prep’s budget.  There would be other complications, however.

The school district’s CBA with MTI includes an agreement “that instructional duties where the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction requires that such be performed by a certificated teacher, shall be performed only by ‘teachers.’”  For purposes of the CBA, “the term ‘teacher’ refers to anyone in the collective bargaining unit.”  Hence, all teachers in MMSD schools must be members of the MTI bargaining unit.

Madison Prep may be proposed to be a non-instrumentality charter school.  But as far as the school district and MTI are concerned, a Madison Prep teacher would be a “teacher” within the meaning of the CBA.

If Madison Prep does hire teachers who are not MTI members, and does not recognize MTI as the bargaining representative for its teachers, then it certainly seems like the school district could be in violation of the CBA.

I had thought that one way around this would be for teachers at a non-instrumentality Madison Prep to be members of the MTI bargaining unit and for the Urban League and MTI to negotiate a separate collective bargaining agreement for these teachers.  Since the Urban League is not a municipal employer, the provisions of Act 10 would not apply to the labor relationship or the collective bargaining agreement.

My understanding is that the Urban League has indicated that it would be open to exploring this approach.  However, MTI has responded that, for reasons unknown to me, the union  may only represent public employees, and that the teachers at a non-instrumentality charter school operated by the Urban League would not be considered public employees.  So MTI apparently maintains that those teachers cannot be members of the MTI bargaining unit – as our CBA seems to require – even if everyone wanted them to be.

So, that’s a complication, and one that doesn’t seem to have an easy or obvious solution.

The other legal complication at this point is whether Madison Prep’s single-gender classrooms are permissible under state and federal law.  Federal regulations seem to require, for example, that if a school provides single-sex classrooms, it must make comparable instruction in a coeducation setting available as an option.

In the first instance, this single-gender set of issues has to be worked through with the Department of Public Instruction, which is holding on to half of the planning grant funds the department awarded the Urban League because of its questions on this aspect of the Madison Prep proposal.

We’ll see what developments the next few weeks bring.  If the Urban League does decide to revert to a non-instrumentality approach, the Administrative Analysis of the proposal will require some substantial revisions.

I think we should probably schedule another public hearing, particularly if the final proposal is for a non-instrumentality,  so that community members have an opportunity to express their views on the actual Madison Prep proposal that the School Board will consider.

The date of the Board’s vote may slip a week or so beyond November 28.  We’ll need to take the time necessary to work through the remaining issues in the hope that our decision can be driven by what’s best for the districts’ students rather than dictated by legal roadblocks.

There are a gazillion ways that this general school aid total could be divvied up among the school districts.  The approach that the state has somehow settled upon turns out to be stunningly complicated.

What follows is my attempt to make the general school aid formula a bit more comprehensible.  I’ll try to explain the key components of the formula and plug in the appropriate numbers to show how each component applies to Madison this year.

Reading the relevant state statutes to gain a working knowledge of the formula is a task that is simply beyond human comprehension.  I have relied heavily for what follows on a Legislative Fiscal Bureau informational paper on State Aid to School Districts that can be found by clicking on the appropriate listing here.  

The Only Three Numbers that Matter      

The first step in our task is to identify the school-district-specific figures that are used in the formula.  The first is the number of students in the district.  For Madison, the number for 2011-2012 is 25,714.  The second is the total annual expenditures of the school district, as defined for these purposes.  For Madison, this figure is just under $284 million.  The third is the total property value within the school district.  The figure for Madison is a bit over $22 billion.

Next, we use these numbers to calculate the school district’s annual expenditures per student ($11,041 for Madison) and the property value in the district per student ($869,006 for Madison).  All else flows from these three numbers: Madison’s student count, its annual per-student expenditures, and its per-student property value.

The Three Components of the Formula

Once we have these figures, we can start applying the formula.  The starting point is the expenditures-per-student figure of $11,041.  There are three different steps to the state aid calculation and each is applicable to a different portion of this amount.

The first calculation determines what is called primary aid.  It is applied to the first $1,000 of per-student expenditures.  The secondary aid calculation is applied to that portion of per-student expenditures that is greater than $1,000 and less than a second figure that turns out to be quite important in how all the money ends up being distributed.  That second figure is equal to 90% of the prior year’s average total per-student expenditures for all the school districts in the state.  For 2011-2012, this figure is $9,496.  Secondary aid is therefore calculated on $8,496 of Madison’s per-student expenditures ($9,496 – $1,000).  The tertiary aid calculation is applied to whatever portion of annual per-student expenditures may be left over.  For Madison, that figure is $1,545 ($11,041 – $9,496).

Okay, take a deep breath.  Now we’re on to the calculation of primary, secondary, and tertiary aid.  For reasons I’ll explain, we’ll consider primary aid first and then tertiary aid, leaving secondary aid for last.

Primary Aid

As these things go, the calculation of a school district’s primary aid is relatively straightforward.  First, we multiply the student enrollment count by $1,000.  For Madison, that gets us to $25,714,000.  Next, we calculate a percentage of that figure, which gives us the primary aid total.

The percentage is based on the school district’s property value per student.  We have already determined that for Madison this number is $869,006.  Next, we compare that figure to $1,930,000.  (Don’t ask me how the $1,930,000 figure was selected.  It is specified in state law and remains constant from year to year.)

It turns out that $869,006 is 45.03% of $1,930,000.  We subtract 45.03% from 100% and get 54.97%.  This is the percentage of the primary aid total that Madison receives.  (The percentage is subtracted from 100% to reflect the fact that state aid goes down as a school district’s property values go up.)  The primary aid to which Madison is entitled is therefore 54.97% of $25,714,000, or $14,135,833.

This primary amount is guaranteed, no matter what happens with the secondary and tertiary aid calculations.

Madison’s Primary Aid Amount:  $14,135,833.

Tertiary Aid

On to the calculation of tertiary aid, which is a weird beast.  It rewards about half the school districts in the state and penalizes the other half.

Which half a school district falls into depends upon whether its property value per student is greater or less than the state average of $564,023.  If the amount is less, congratulations go out to the school district, because every additional dollar that school district spends will be matched by some amount of state aid.

Condolences are in order for school districts with per-student property values greater than the state average.  Every dollar these districts spend annually in excess of $9,496 per student (there’s that number again — 90% of the average district’s per-student expenditures) will result in a reduction in state aid.

It will come as no surprise to learn that Madison falls into the condolences category.  Madison’s per-pupil property value of $869,006 is 54.07 % greater than the state average of $564,023.

This means that, for state aid purposes, Madison pays a tax of 54.07% on each dollar it spends on schools in excess of $9,496 per student.  Since Madison spends $11,041, this works out to $1,545 per student that is subject to penalty.  Multiply this amount by our 25,714 students, take 54.07 % of that, and – voila! – Madison’s state aid is slashed by $21,485,465.

Let’s go over that again.  Because Madison is a relatively property-rich district, its level of expenditures on schools results in a reduction in state aid of more than $21 million.  If Madison had less per student in property value than the state average, the same level of spending would have resulted in additional state aid.

Madison’s Tertiary Aid Amount:  -$21,485,464

Secondary Aid                      

The final component of the formula is secondary aid.  We consider it last because there is no overriding principle to its calculation – it is simply a figure designed to ensure that everything comes out right in the end.

Secondary aid is calculated as a percentage of the per-student amount that a school district spends in excess of $1,000, up to a cap of that $9,496 figure that marks the boundary between secondary and tertiary aid.  Since Madison spends in excess of the secondary aid cutoff, the secondary aid percentage is applied to $8,496 times the district’s 25,714 students, or $218,466,144.

The percentage is again calculated by comparing Madison’s property value per student of $869,006 to another per-student property value figure.  The rub here is that this second figure is derived by the Department of Public Instruction to ensure that the formula distributes all the state aid that the legislature has included in the budget, but no more.  So there is some complicated formula that someone at DPI runs to calculate what per-student property value figure will yield percentages that result in a total amount in secondary aid that, when added to the primary aid total and the net tertiary aid total, distributes all the state aid that the legislature has made available.

For 2011-2012, the computer tasked with this assignment ultimately spit out a figure of $968,337.  Madison’s per-student property value of $869,006 is 89.74% of $968,337.  This means that the percentage of Madison’s secondary aid total that it can recover in state aid is 10.26% (100% – 89.74%).  Madison’s secondary aid is therefore 10.26% of $218,466,144, or $22,410,072.

Madison’s Secondary Aid Amount:  $22,410,072

The Grand Total

Finally, we must subtract Madison’s negative tertiary aid of $21,485,464 from the sum of its primary aid of $14,135,833 and its secondary aid of $22,410,072.  This yields a total amount in general state aid for the district of $15,060,441, or a fairly miserly $586 per student.

For 2010-2011, Madison received almost $50 million in general state aid.  Fortunately, the aid formula places a floor on the amount of state aid a district can receive – the statutory minimum is 85% of the last year’s total.  For 2011-2012 only, the legislature raised the floor to 90% of the last year’s total.

For complicated reasons, Madison’s general school aid is actually cut about 13% this year, to about $43.3 million.  While this is less than last year, it is also almost $29 million more than would be justified by the straight application of the state aid formula.  (This is actually misleading, because the secondary aid percentage – the sole purpose of which is to lead to the distribution of all the allocated state aid – is lower than it would have been, had the 90% minimum rule not been in effect.  So, without the 90% guarantee Madison would have qualified for some amount of state aid greater than $15 million and less than $43 million, but likely much closer to the lower figure.)

So there you have it — the formula for distributing general state aid among the state’s 424 school districts, in all its majesty.  My next blog post will offer some thoughts on the formula and suggestions for how it might be improved, in addition to the obvious one of blowing it up and starting over.