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)
Back when I used to blog about politics, I was a constant critic of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s PolitiFact operation. Or, as I called it, Politi”Fact,” with the emphasis on the sarcasm quotes. Why? Because PolitiFact Wisconsin, as the local franchise is known, tries to set itself up as a neutral arbiter, and so it [...]
It’s budget season in Wisconsin, which means two things: One, the histrionics are dialed up to 11 (j’accuse, you say, and you’re right); and two, everyone I know and care about in education in Wisconsin is furious. Two years ago, Governor Scott Walker’s first biennial budget was devastating to schools. In it, the revenue cap [...]
In an offer
We all had a good laugh last week when Wisconsin State Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) put out a press release asking, exasperatedly, “Why Must We Still Hear About Kwanzaa?” I am not sure exactly how it is that Grothman finds Kwanzaa to be such an unbearable burden that he has to drag himself to [...]
Hi, kids. Remember me? Yeah, yeah, long time no blog–in no small part because of what’s been going on at My School. After a few years of slow but steady but slow progress,
A few months back, I had a small tête-à-tête with an op-ed columnist in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who’d written mean things about the school where I teach. I fired back, because I am just that loose a cannon. But here’s the thing: What got me most upset* about the op-ed was the way the [...]
If you ask a question like that, the answer is almost always, “Yes, of course.” (A more cynical me might have written, “This is the Milwaukee Public Schools we’re talking about, so of course the answer is yes.” However, I don’t think MPS is doing much differently than other districts in this regard, so I’m [...]
This got some notice in the media a few months ago when it was first
Yeah, I think I made up that word, disserves. But I mean it; this new plan to use NAEP cut scores to grade schools and students on our state test would be a tremendous disservice. As many of you may know, Wisconsin was granted its waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind law a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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