PolitiFact sorts only some of the “truth” on voucher schools, leaves out key objections to program’s expansion
79 MPS students earn national German language awards
Private school voucher expansion: A growing taxpayer-funded entitlement
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: A Failure
Infinite Campus likely to be Wisconsin statewide school information system (Updated)
To sum up where we are: On Tuesday, I examined a large sample of students from the Milwaukee Public Schools, comparing achievement between students who had been in a school for a full year prior to the test (Full Academic Year, or FAY) and students who spent part or all of the prior year in [...]
Yesterday, I broke down the numbers: Milwaukee Public Schools students who change schools within a year before they take the state’s standardized test (WKCE) perform worse on the test than students who don’t. Today I want to game out some of the practical implications of that. If we know that there’s a group of MPS [...]
Wisconsin’s state achievement test, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE), is given every November to public school students in grades 3-8 and 10. At the high school where I teach, in early fall we English teachers were emailed a list of selected 10th-grade students. These are your FAY students, we were told. These are [...]
ARRGG!! OMG… what have we done?? Well, I am planning to send my baby off to college in a few weeks and while surfing around the web today (do we still say that?) I came across the TIME Magazine list of the state colleges with the highest tuition increases. Lo and behold, there was my [...]
For talk radio hosts, news usually happens in some sort of cycle. There’s the 24/7 news cycle, in which news breaks depending on the time zone in which the developments are taking place. There’s the political cycle, which takes into account the four-year presidential cycle and specific elected offices and referendums in local elections. Then [...]
Last week’s release of US Census Bureau data about school finances lead to giant-font headlines all over the state about the spending of the Milwaukee Public Schools. The Census Bureau took a look at the fifty largest school systems in the country and ranked them by per-pupil total spending (in the 2009-2010 school year), and [...]
I have been quiet the past few weeks but not for a lack of things to say but only because so many of my fellow bloggers beat me to the punch week after week. Today I will out myself in a way that I believe only one other blogger listed here could and I am [...]
Some years, Summerfest seems to take my summer concert requests and deliver them to Milwaukee, and some years it doesn’t. This year it doesn’t. But that’s OK. I know that Summerfest wasn’t scheduled exactly for me, and over 11 days, there are plenty of picks I can wholeheartedly recommend. Here they are. Wednesday, June 27 [...]
When I hear Gov. Scott Walker’s claims of savings for school districts thanks to Wisconsin Act 10, two adages come to mind. One is that if something sounds to good to be true, it probably is, and the second is that if one plus one equals anything but two chances are its wrong. He is [...]
Folks are usually looking for bright spots in our public schools and a late-addition item on the agenda of this Thursday’s Committee of Student Achievement and School Innovation meeting is just the kind of good news we love on the last day of school at MPS. It’s no secret that the public Montessori programs in [...]
It’s really quite simple. If Wisconsin’s public schools have the resources to give all children the opportunities they need to learn, the majority of students will succeed in school. Most will get good, family-supporting jobs, the economy will hum and the impact on society will be positive. On the other hand, if we don’t provide [...]
By Zach Komes On May 4, I, along with nearly 400 fellow students, graduated from Rufus King High School. The event was spectacular; cheering families, teachers, and community members proudly boasted their pride in our students. We live in a society that values college education and, these days, the question that’s asked after high school [...]
(NEWS RELEASE) Better-than-expected health care savings from contracts agreed to in 2010 are expected to translate into fewer position cuts in the proposed 2012-13 Milwaukee Public Schools budget. Approximately $10 million in savings identified from the 2011-12 school year are expected to result in budget adjustments that include the opportunity to restore as many as [...]
MPS’ chief academic officer, Heidi Ramirez, who came to Milwaukee with superintendent Gregory Thornton when he arrived in 2010, has resigned. Ramirez said she will continue in her position through mid-July to help ease the transition. MPS spokesperson Roseann St. Aubin said the district intends to replace Ramirez (the CAO position was unfilled for a [...]
Three new principals – leaders for Milwaukee Public Schools’ Elm Creative Arts School, Fairview School and Silver Spring School – have been approved by the Milwaukee Board of School Directors. “These are exactly the caliber of people our students need to lead achievement,” Superintendent Gregory Thornton said. Mateba Harris is now set to lead Elm [...]
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