Republicans aren’t typically members of the opposition in school choice debates, but in addition to the usual critics like teachers unions and some Democratic lawmakers, there is a growing group of GOP legislators who also oppose expansion of the state-funded scholarships that allow students to attend whatever school they choose.

Some examples of such opponents can be found in Wisconsin, where some kind of voucher program has been in place for more than 2 decades. At the moment only students from Milwaukee and Racine are qualified to participate, but in the draft for his next state budget Governor Scott Walker has inserted the language that would expand the program to nine further school districts while raising the funding for the program by 9%.

Up to 500 additional children from families making 300% of the poverty level in the affected areas would be able to take part in the first year and up to 1,000 in the second. More than 40,000 students who are not currently eligible would be made so under Walker’s proposal.

Yet Senate President Mike Ellis – who called the schools in one of the newly eligible districts a “sewer” just last year – said that he will be blocking Walker’s plans because they failed to take into account the voices of 8 of the 10 Republicans who have gone on record opposing the voucher expansion.

Their concern? That the plan could be the first phase of a state-wide voucher program which they strongly oppose.

But what would be wrong with that? According to the School Choice Demonstration Project, 94% of students who have received vouchers in Milwaukee graduate from high school, compared to 75% from the Milwaukee public schools. They’re also more likely to go to college.

While Wisconsin schools score better than most, in 2010 the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that Wisconsin’s black fourth grade students had the worst reading scores in the country. By eighth grade, black students did worse on English tests than students for whom English was a second language.

Opposition to the expansion from the teachers unions is to be expected. According to the Wall Street Journal editorial, they’re likely to greet Walker’s proposal with the usual litany of complaints including ones about strip-mining public school budgets in order to line the pockets of private business interests. Such accusations don’t typically come from Republican lawmakers, yet in the case of Wisconsin, they seem to be echoing union complaints word for word.

One reason school reform has been so politically difficult is that too many suburban parents think the problem is confined to inner-city schools when their own schools fail to educate thousands. Republicans too often play to this conceit, especially when it means they can win union support. Mr. Walker has put the GOP on the right side of the reform debate, and his party should get behind him.

The post Some Republicans Oppose Wisconsin Voucher Program Expansion appeared first on Education News.

As part of his effort to improve the quality of education in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker announced that $475.6 million will be invested in the state’s public school system and additional education opportunities for Wisconsin students. The proposals, which are a part of the upcoming budget plan, will focus education reform efforts in the coming year on accountability, student performance and teacher training.

In announcing the education portion of his budget proposal, Walker said that it was about making sure that no matter which part of the state students come from, they all get access to the best academic opportunities Wisconsin has to offer. That means that teachers, schools and districts with proven success records should be rewarded, recognized and given the chance to replicate their results in other parts of the state.

The Governor’s budget will make this significant investment aimed at transforming education to equip our students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.  Initiatives will reward successes and provide incentives to drive achievement and accountability.

The press release accompanying the budget proposal points out that Wisconsin’s education system has some ground to make up, as the latest National Assessment of Education Progress report shows that it ranks 38th in reading and math of the 41 states that have submitted a complete data set. The report covers the years between 1992 and 2011.

Among the programs that will get funding in the coming year are:

Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) Performance Funding: In addition, the budget will phase in performance funding for all of the state aid given to technical colleges.  It will begin at 10 percent in 2014-15 and would eventually total all $88.5 million general aid through performance by 2020.  This would be roughly one-tenth of WTCS school operational budgets.  The funding formula would be developed by WTCS with DOA oversight.  The formula would be required to have a focus on job placement and programs focused in high demand fields.

Educator Effectiveness System:  Provides $13.5 million to implement the system for evaluating all teachers and principals statewide, cover Department of Public Instruction (DPI) implementation, and approximately $80 per teacher to districts to purchase and implement the system.

The plan will also provide funding for a previously announced programs Explore, Plan, ACT, WorkKeys, which will be used to measure high school students’ readiness for college or the workforce in 11th grade.

The plan doesn’t leave out higher education, as it outlines a number of funded initiatives that will benefit the public university system, including $20 million for the Incentive Grant Program which will aim to address employer needs when it comes to providing proper training to ensure a skilled workforce.

The post Walker Announces Education Funding Plan for Wisconsin appeared first on Education News.

According to the results of a Wisconsin Policy Research Institute study, private schools around the state are eager to step into the gap created by the lack of educational opportunities for the disabled. However, they are stymied from doing so by the state funding system that doesn’t provide sufficient funding needed to accommodate their special needs.

Mike Nichols – a WPRI senior fellow – said that he was glad to put to rest the myth that private schools in the state were avoiding enrolling special needs students. He said that the enrollment numbers for such schools were even higher than official estimates, and more students would be welcome if the funding formulas were amended. He added that it is the system that is aligned against providing the best opportunities for special-needs children, not the schools.

Approximately 14% of public school students in Wisconsin have a disability, according to official Department of Public Instruction data. Less than 2% of students in private schools have a disability, in the meantime, according to the same source. An extensive survey of private schools in the state by WPRI, however, determined that the percentage in private schools is actually closer to 6% — although many of those students are not formally recognized as having a disability and receive little or no public help or assistance.

Nichols pointed out that it was the students who were paying the price of this unfair approach by being locked out of academic environments that might do them the most good. He said that by sticking with the formula, the state was sabotaging the children that needed help the most.

According to Nichols, although disabled children who are enrolled in private schools are entitled to funding from several state and federal sources, in reality, such requests are frequently turned down. According to the administrators of 245 private schools polled for the study, even when the money is made available, it doesn’t come close to covering the real expense of educating disabled children.

At the moment, the determination of whether a child is entitled to disability funding is made by local public schools, even when the child is enrolled in a private institution.

In some districts, that works well, the study found. But private school officials indicate that their public school counterparts do not always conduct the “child find” process in a timely manner, and children with disabilities in private schools do not always get the resources that would help them reach their potential. There is at least the appearance of an inherent conflict of interest because resources that go to private school children with disabilities are subtracted from resources otherwise available to the public school districts.

The post Funding Keeps Disabled Kids from Private Schools in Wisconsin appeared first on Education News.

Wisconsin’s Act 10, the controversial law enacted by Governor Scott Walker that severely curtailed the collective bargaining rights of public employees, survived a major test last week when the 3-member Federal Appeals court overturned the lower court ruling and upheld the law in its entirety.

The ruling is a setback for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the Wisconsin State Employees Union and other unions – the groups that brought the original lawsuit. Late last year, a decision by U.S. District Judge William M. Conley largely gave the legislation a pass, barring a number of provisions including the one that prohibited withholding of union dues from paychecks and the requirement that unions re-certify every year.

Walker called the ruling a victory for Wisconsin taxpayers, saying that freeing the state from undue influence by unions allowed the balancing of the budget without mass layoffs, program cuts or tax hikes.

WEAC President Mary Bell expressed disappointment with the decision.

“What is so abundantly clear is that Act 10 was never about addressing the fiscal needs of the state but instead a ploy to eliminate workers’ rights to have a voice through their union – political payback for citizens who didn’t endorse the governor,” Bell said in a statement. ”

This marks a setback, but the fact of the matter is that our members will not give up on their commitment to restoring their rights to negotiate for fair wages and safe working conditions.”

The legislation had a rocky history. It was introduced by Walker shortly after he took office in 2011 and generated protests from public union members unprecedented in scale and duration. In an unsuccessful attempt to halt the law’s passage, several Democratic lawmakers left the state to deny the Legislature the quorum needed to vote on the bill. Although the law ultimately passed, their flight ground legislative business to a halt for nearly 3 weeks.

The law spared state troopers, firefighters and most police officers from many of the changes. Democrats called that political payback for groups that supported Walker in the 2010 governor’s race.

The unions sued in federal court in Madison, arguing the law violated the free-speech and equal-protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution. Conley upheld much of Act 10, but invalidated the provisions on recertification and dues deduction.

Both sides appealed the decision, and on Friday the court said the entire law was constitutional.

Although Governor Walker won this round, it still doesn’t make the future of Act 10 certain. The unions now have the option to request a rehearing in front of the entire Seventh Circuit Court to review to decision, or skip that step and attempt a direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In addition, a number of other cases dealing with Act 10 are now making their way through the court and the panel’s ruling has no bearing on those cases.

The post WI’s Walker Wins Legal Round, Future of Act 10 Still Uncertain appeared first on Education News.

With both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature in the hands of Republicans, Governor Scott Walker is laying bare his education priorities as lawmakers get ready to kick off the next legislative session. According to the Journal Sentinel, this year the focus will be on attracting more teachers to Milwaukee schools by eliminating the district’s residency requirement, instituting bonus pay for schools that show gains under the new state assessment system, and making school vouchers available to families in more cities.

Walker laid out his proposals during a meeting with the JS editors and other reporters at a Milwaukee private school. He spoke at length about the issues facing the state’s education system, specifically mentioning the challenges confronting schools in Wisconsin’s cities.

The move to eliminate the residency requirement currently in place for Milwaukee Public Schools specifically aims to make it easier to draw and retain high quality teachers to the district. He noted that many good teachers leave their jobs and go elsewhere when they themselves become parents and are forced to enroll their kids in underperforming local schools in their neighborhoods.

“If you have someone who’s a great teacher starting out at MPS – and this is not stereotyped, this is often the case – has kids, the kids get school age and they decide they’re going to move to Brown Deer, Wauwatosa or somewhere else; it’s just unfortunate that for that teacher you don’t have an option to try to keep him or her within the Milwaukee Public Schools system. It’s not that they’re saying they don’t want to be there, it’s that it’s based on not just their career but their family.”

Milwaukee’s school board has been unsuccessful in dealing with the problem of residency, as board members could not agree to allow new teachers three years to establish their residency in the city rather than the current period of one year.

Last week, the board couldn’t muster up enough votes to pass the proposal submitted by Superintendent Gregory Thornton. Thornton explained that the residency requirement needed to be loosened because it would allow hiring from a wider pool of candidates at the time when an increasing number of teachers are retiring.

Walker has also signaled that he was interested in expanding the voucher program – currently running only in Milwaukee and Racine – to more cities in the coming years. He said that the choices of cities will be made after a period of study to determine if the quality of schools and community demand makes each city a smart choice.

In recent weeks, Walker has expressed support for tying school performance in some way to a stream of funding. This has made some educators nervous, considering many low-performing schools serve a predominantly impoverished and/or non-English speaking population that sets them up for low scores based on historical demographic trends. That scenario would seem to perennially reward higher performing suburban schools, which serve students from demographic backgrounds that usually correlate with higher test scores.

The post Walker Outlines Wisconsin’s Education Goals for Legislative Session appeared first on Education News.

Cyberbullying isn’t just wrong in Vernon County, Wisconsin. After this week, electronic messages that annoy, offend or ridicule are now criminal. Yesterday, the county voted to approve the anti-cyberbullying ordinance that was approved by the county board of supervisors last month.

The penalty is fairly stiff. If anyone is found guilty of violating the ordinance, they could be fined up to $500 and sentenced to a maximum of 30 days in jail. With this move, Vernon is following the lead of other municipalities around the state that have put a similar rule on the books over the last several years.

According to the Student Press Law Center, the text of the new ordinance doesn’t specifically mention students, but according to the Vernon County Sheriff John Spears, they will be the law’s primary targets. He said making cyberbullying illegal in the county will go a long way to helping curb the practice. He added that it would also provide an effective tool in dealing with bullies.

However, not everyone was as optimistic that the rule would make a difference.

Justin Patchin, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, said that he was contacted by the county before the ordinance was passed to give input on it. Patchin said he’s skeptical of the effectiveness of Vernon County’s law as well as those passed elsewhere.

Patchin said that there do not seem to be any incidents where anyone was charged under the anti-bullying measure, which makes judging their effectiveness a difficult task. He thought, however, that Vernon’s measure and similar ones elsewhere weren’t likely to have much of an impact.

Wisconsin already has an anti-bullying measure on the books, though it doesn’t specifically single out harassment that happens over text messages and social media.

Two other state laws have been used in cases of cyberbullying, Patchin said. A 2010 school safety law requires school districts to draft their own policy involving bullying of any type, and the state’s Unlawful Use of Computerized Communication Systems law can be used in criminal cases of bullying through electronic devices. That law criminalizes only“a pattern of conduct composed of a series of acts over a period of time.”

Patchin explained that laws prohibiting cyberbullying were passed in 16 states, so to fill the gap, a number of smaller municipalities drafted measures prohibiting it on their own. Patchin himself believes that criminalizing this kind of conduct is going too far, and the best approach to stop this kind of harassment is to address it informally and on an individual basis.

The post Wisconsin County Makes Cyberbullying a Crime appeared first on Education News.

Governor Scott Walker wants to make schools that comprise the Wisconsin public university system more accountable. In service of this goal, during a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, he proposed changing the way the higher education in the state is funded. How much money each school receives, he said, should be determined not only by its size but also by how well its students perform and their chances of graduating with a college degree — and doing so on time.

Walker said that his proposal would ensure that state money is spent more wisely, and mainly going to schools that have a proven record of doing right by their students as demonstrated by achievement data and graduation rates.

He said that he understood that his proposal was going against the conventional wisdom that better academic outcomes come from investing an ever larger portion of the budget in the education system. According to Walker, that is not the case; the answer, he says, is to spend the money more efficiently making sure only those institutions who make wise use of funds go on to receive more.

Rolf Wegenke, president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said the governor is currently consulting with the University of Wisconsin system, the Wisconsin Technical College System and WAICU in formulating a proposal for higher education. He said the governor’s announcement of performance funding is currently just a “general concept.”

“Specific details are being developed with the expectation that a proposal will be included in the biennial budget proposal, which the governor will unveil in February 2013,” Wegenke said in an email.

According to Walker, at the moment the public university system in Wisconsin is failing because it is not producing an adequate number of graduates in the professional fields most needed by the state’s economy. Specifically, he refers to a “skills gap” that exists in the fields of health care, information industries and manufacturing. A recent study from The Next Generation Wisconsin showed that in manufacturing alone, 37% of the companies reported that they had trouble recruiting people with the training to take over leadership positions within the company.

In a 2012 report prepared for the governor, Tim Sullivan, a special consultant for business and work force development for the state of Wisconsin, recommended performance-based funding in publicly funded schools and encouraged students to seek admission at WTCS so they might fill vacant jobs in the skills gap.

The students themselves, however, don’t seem to think that “encouraging” them to enter certain professions based on the state’s economic needs would be very productive. Androo Hinkfuss, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that students should instead be encouraged to take up majors that best suited their unique aspirations and skills.

The post Walker Wants to Bring Financial Reform to Wisc. Higher Ed appeared first on Education News.

A law that vested the final decision making authority with Governor Scott Walker on regulations regarding the Wisconsin education system has been partially overturned by a judge because it violated the state Constitution, the Wisconsin State Journal reports. The law, which was passed and signed last year, would have given both Walker and the secretary of the state Department of Administration the power to veto measures proposed by the state agencies — including the one in charge of the education system.

In a ruling last Tuesday, Dane County Circuit Judge Amy Smith invalidated a portion of the law, saying that it violated the Wisconsin Constitution which strictly separates the duties of the state’s chief executive and the state superintendent of public instruction. The other departments covered by the law were exempt from the ruling since the constitution doesn’t explicitly list duties assigned to them.

“Administrative rule-making is an important way in which a superintendent exercises his or her constitutional authority over the supervision of public instruction,” Smith wrote. “Because Act 21 allows the governor to bar the superintendent from proposing rules, or even from beginning the process of rule-making by submitting a scope statement to the Legislature, Act 21 places the governor in a position superior to the superintendent in the supervision of public instruction.”

The lawsuit to invalidate the legislation was filed by Madison Teachers Inc, the Wisconsin Education Association Council and other education groups around the state. Walker, DOA Secretary Mike Huebsch and schools superintendent Tony Evers were listed as defendants. Although Evers was a defendant in the lawsuit, somewhat unusually, he actually submitted a brief supporting the plaintiffs. After the verdict was handed down, Evers expressed satisfaction with Smith’s findings.

The law in question, which was passed after Walker won the gubernatorial election and was signed by him when he took office in 2011, restricted state agencies from drafting new regulations prior to obtaining approval from his office. Those opposed to the law say that it represented a “power grab” by the governor. Education groups specifically argued that the governor and non-elected state officials shouldn’t have more power to decide educational policy than a popularly-elected DPI Superintendent.

Walker’s administration countered the Legislature can adjust the superintendent’s powers and making rules isn’t an essential part of the superintendent’s duty to oversee public education.

But Smith found that rulemaking is the chief way the superintendent controls public instruction. Since the law grants the governor the power to block DPI rules, the language puts the governor in a superior position over the superintendent, amounting to a constitutional violation, she said.

The post Judge Deals Setback to Wisconsin’s Walker on Education appeared first on Education News.

Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker has had a long and hard fight to bring about a new accountability system to the state’s schools, and now, with the release of the first set of school report cards, he gets to see the first returns on his effort. The news brought by the report cards seems to be good — a full three-quarters of the state’s public schools are performing at or above expectations.

Still, there is some alarming information in the data. Just over 17% of Wisconsin’s 2,118 rated schools are either not meeting expectations set out by the state’s accountability system or are meeting only a few of them.

The report cards assign a score on a 100-point scale to every school and then use that score to place each school in one of five performance categories. This first round excludes about 11% of the state’s schools because they are either too new, have too few students or fall in a group that isn’t evaluated under the new system.

In a statement hailing the release, Walker congratulated state Superintendent of Education Tony Evers on finally bringing accountability to Wisconsin’s education system and expressed delight at the fact that a vast majority of districts are performing well.

While a majority of school districts are performing at or exceeding expectations, there are still too many that are failing.  All Wisconsin kids deserve high-quality public education.  Parents, caregivers, and communities need to know how their local schools are performing, so they can make informed decisions about their children’s educations and futures.

Evers said that scores themselves are less important then the data underlying them, because the data can then be used to guide schools in their efforts to improve.

Madison superintendent Jane Belmore said the ratings reflect data the district is already using to improve schools.

“We aren’t going to be satisfied until we have every child achieving,” Belmore said.

Seven Madison schools and five other Dane County schools “significantly exceed expectations,” a designation only 3 percent of schools in the state received.

The scores themselves are derived from various measures including student achievement, test score gains over three years, strides taken in closing achievement gaps and college readiness upon high school graduation. Schools can lose points if an insufficiently high percentage of their students take state-mandated standardized exams, if they have too high a truancy rate or too many of their students drop out before graduation.

The post Wisconsin Releases First Set of School Report Cards appeared first on Education News.

While the experience of the Marathon Valley Academy in the first year of its iPad program has been mostly positive, there were still plenty of headaches — mainly dealing with keeping the devices functioning and up to date. For all their usefulness as a learning tool, the tablets are relatively fragile, and in the rough and tumble environment of a school nearly one in five of them broke during the course of the year.

The constant need for maintenance has even turned some administrators and teachers who initially supported the rollout completely against the device. Jeff Reiche, the principal of Marathon Venture, complained to the Wausau Daily Herald, in Wausau, Wisconsin, that repairing broken iPads sometimes fills up his entire day. Still, you can’t count Reiche as anti-tech quite yet; he stands staunchly behind the device.

English teacher Mia Chmiel and science teacher Tera Fieri are right there with him. They say that the device has helped them better communicate with their students and increase the level of engagement and excitement. However, their experience has taught them that anyone who thinks that the Apple’s popular tablet is some kind of teaching panacea will be severely disappointed.

“But the iPad is a tool, not a teaching strategy,” Fieri said. “The use of technology has to work as part of the teaching strategy.”

This year, more Wausau schools will be getting iPads, including Franklin Elementary School and students in eighth grade at Horace Mann and John Muir middle schools. These three schools will be serving as guinea pigs in the district’s pilot program, the purpose of which is to determine if tablets can improve academic outcomes. More than $850,000 has been spent on equipping 1,000 students with the devices.

Marathon Venture Academy’s experience shows that the devices are a valuable educational tool.

“Without a doubt, students are more engaged,” Reiche said. He said the tablets help keep some students connected to their studies who “ordinarily would have checked out already.”

Marathon began lending iPads to its students the same year that it converted into a charter school with an academic goal of making learning more hands-on. The iPads were purchased thanks to a private grant aimed at getting charters off the ground faster. Of the 135 initially lent out, 25 had to come back to the school for repairs with the vast majority requiring screen replacements — one of the most expensive repair jobs at a cost of $275 per unit.

The Academy requires parents to buy insurance for the iPads through a company called Worth Ave. Group. Parents pay $34 per school year for the insurance, a special group rate. There is a $50 deductible on the policy. If the devices are covered by homeowners insurance, parents have to provide proof.

While Reiche is an iPad booster, spending days dealing with the insurance paperwork is still not something he enjoys. The good news, however, is that at least in one way, students are taking good care of the machines. Not a single one was reported lost or stolen last year.

The post To Succeed, iPad-in-School Programs Need Robust Repair Plans appeared first on Education News.