Study finds no evidence that mayoral control leads to academic improvement

Chicago, the home school district of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is frequently sighted by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett as evidence that mayoral run school systems improve student achievement.

The civic arm of the Commercial Club of Chicago, one of the oldest organizations representing the business, professional, educational and cultural leaders of the Chicago region, has issued a scathing critique ,"Still Left Behind 2009", that challenges Barrett's position.

The study, which characterizes Chicago high school student achievement as "abysmal," supports an earlier analysis published in the Harvard Educational Review entitled "Mayoral Takeovers, Recipe for Progress or Peril" that concludes: "the record suggests that the long term benefits of takeovers are more elusive especially in regard to student achievement."

The Harvard analysis reinforces the Commercial Club's review of academic achievement in the Chicago public schools: ...Chicago is hardly an advertisement of mayoral takeovers. In 2005, for instance, only 42.5% of students in grades three through eight scored at or above national norms on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills reading test- a gain of only ten percentage points since the Mayor took over the system."

Here are some of the Commercial Club's key findings.

Most of Chicago’s students drop out or fail. The vast majority of Chicago’s elementary and high schools do not prepare their students for success in college and beyond.

There is a general perception that Chicago’s public schools have been gradually improving over time. However, recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS elementary students who meet standards on State assessments appear to be due to changes in the tests made by the Illinois State Board of Education, rather than real improvements in student learning.

At the elementary level, State assessment standards have been so weakened that most
of the 8th graders who “meet” these standards have little chance to succeed in high school or to be ready for college. While there has been modest improvement in real student learning in Chicago’s elementary schools, these gains dissipate in high school.

The performance of Chicago’s high schools is abysmal – with about half the students dropping out of the non-selective-enrollment schools, and more than 70% of 11th grade students failing to meet State standards. The trend has remained essentially flat over the past several years. The relatively high-performing students are concentrated in a few magnet/selective enrollment high schools. In the regular neighborhood high schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are prepared to succeed in college.

The full Comercial Club report is linked here.

MPS takeover will not improve student achievement

By Charlie Dee and Michael Rosen

The proposal to dissolve the Milwaukee Public School Board and replace it with Mayoral control will not lead to improved student achievement because it does not correctly identify the problems facing MPS nor does it offer any educational solutions to those problems.

There are numerous reasons to oppose this, some that are very obvious.

• Citizens of Milwaukee just voted for a board with three new members, and that board selected a new Board Chair, Michael Bonds. This board should be given a chance to make necessary reforms in MPS.
• The proposal is not an educational plan. Takeover proponents have not proposed even one idea as to what they would do differently to improve the schools. They have ONLY proposed that the Mayor be allowed to take over the governance of them.
• Milwaukee's Mayor Tom Barrett has no qualifications, expertise or experience that would indicate a capacity to increase student achievement in Milwaukee.

The mayor has cited only two specific reasons for why he should be in charge of MPS: gaining increased federal dollars and the closing the “racial achievement gap” in Milwaukee.

He and the supporters of this take-over claim that the Obama administration will only consider Milwaukee for Race to the Top money if the mayor is in charge of the public schools. But Congresswoman Gwen Moore has put to rest that argument by revealing that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan specifically told her that mayoral control is in no way a precondition to receiving federal money.

Milwaukee certainly has a racial achievement gap in education. But it also has a racial income gap, racial unemployment gap, racial teen pregnancy gap, racial neighborhood crime gap, and racial home lending gap. Yet Mayor Barrett has done little to solve those in his five years in office. Why would anyone think he can turn the education gap around with no plan but much power?

Then, on September 4, the mayor offered his first analysis of the racial gap in education in his “Barrett Report,” and, incredibly enough, Barrett blamed the gap on too many students going to the Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC)! Barrett claimed as evidence of the “the Black-White workforce gap” and “the lack of workforce skills” the fact that twice as many MPS grads go “to MATC as compared to UW-Milwaukee.”

It is reprehensible that Mayor Barrett would so demean MATC and our students. At MATC, we close the workforce gap; we don’t increase it. This shows conclusively that Barrett shouldn’t be trusted to solve this gap by taking over MPS because he doesn’t have a clue about what the causes are.

Just as disturbing are the political forces that are pushing this change in governance for MPS. Put simply, they are enemies of public education that have lost the control they once had over the MPS. They now view a change in governance as the best way to get back in power.

Foremost among those pushing governance changes are the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MJ-S) editorial board and Tim Sheehy, President of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce (MMAC). In the shadows lurks the right wing Bradley Foundation and its various tentacles, the Wisconsin Public Research Institute and Wisconsin Interest Magazine.

The Journal-Sentinel (MJ-S), Bradley Foundation and the MMAC have been major champions of the school voucher movement for twenty years, a movement that has drained many millions of dollars from the MPS without producing the promised educational improvements in its own schools or gains in MPS that were supposed to result from the “free market competition” of voucher schools.

The MJ-S, Bradley Foundation and Sheehy have either endorsed or financed pro-privatization candidates for the school board. For much of the past 16 years, their candidates had a majority on the MPS Board. They are the ones who hired the current MPS Superintendant, William Adrekopolous, and labeled any board member who tried to hold Adrekopolous accountable “as anti-reform.” They also promoted the hugely expensive Neighborhood Schools Initiative that has been a failure by every measure.

So the forces most vigorously pushing this governance change have a miserable but expensive track record when it comes to educational reform.

But they have very clear political agendas. Put simply, they don’t like the majority of the members of the Milwaukee School Board democratically elected by the citizens of Milwaukee. Keep in mind, the MJ-S and the MMAC made no critique of MPS governance when the candidates they endorsed, selected or funded were the elected majority of the MPS Board. When Bruce Thompson, Ken Johnson, Joe Danneker and Jeff Spence held the board chair, the MJ-S and the MMAC thought the governance system was working just fine.

So it is clear that their support for a governance change is not a principled stand – one predicated on a genuine researched-based belief that governance changes would result in delivering more effective education. Rather, it is a stand of sheer political opportunism: they haven’t been able to get their candidates elected democratically, so they want to change the rules of the game.

Further evidence of this opportunism is the fact that three of these forces, the MJ-S, Sheehy and the Bradley Foundation through its propaganda organ, Wisconsin Interest, joined by a cadre of Republican legislators, have called for a change in governance for MATC. Only in this case, they want to move from a board appointed by elected officials to a board elected by the public. Obviously, this is exactly the opposite from the change they want for MPS.

The only consistency in their position on elected versus appointed boards at MPS and MATC is that Sheehy and the MMAC, with editorial and reportorial support from the MJ-S, have tried and failed to get people hand-picked by Sheehy appointed to the MATC Board. Right on cue, Wisconsin Interest just published an attack on the appointed MATC Board, and Republican Senator Alberta Darling introduced a bill to change MATC governance. Their hope is that elections will provide them the opportunity to gain control of MATC just as they want to move away from elections in order to control the MPS Board.

Governance changes will not improve academic performance or close the racial achievement gap. Nor will politically motivated sound bites.

If the Mayor and Governor are sincere about their desire to improve the academic performance of Milwaukee children they should abandon their ill conceived governance proposal and focus on helping our beleaguered school system get the resources it needs to meet the challenges of educating a largely economically and educationally disadvantaged student body.

If we want to improve student achievement we need to empower students, parents and teachers, not disenfranchise them.

Charlie Dee is a professor of history and English at Milwaukee Area Technical College and the Executive Vice President of AFT Local 212

Michael Rosen is a professor of economics at MATC and the President of AFT Local 212

Mayor endorses downtown location for UWM engineering campus

Has Milwaukee's Mayor Barrett decided that downtown Milwaukee is a better location for UWM's new engineering campus than the County Research Park in Wauwatosa?

It appears that might be the case.

In a December 18th article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Larry Standler reported that the Mayor's stimulus proposal included: "$15 million to help the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee develop its new School of Freshwater Science and downtown engineering campus."

According to one City Hall insider, the Mayor has concluded that the new campus should be built in downtown Milwaukee.

Whether this is a bargaining chip aimed at getting the County to reduce its price or a recognition that a downtown location maximizes the investments economic development potential in a more student friendly location, it is welcome news.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has editorialized several times in favor of the County Research Park in Wauwatosa and buried the story when the Milwaukee Common Council endorsed a downtown location.

The paper claims there is a fire wall between the editorial page and the newsroom. If so, one would think that the Mayor's change of heart on the engineering campus's location would be worthy of coverage.