MPS/DPI spat is not just about money—it’s about major classroom changes

It’s been hard to miss the news: Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction is on the verge of taking $175 million from the Milwaukee Public Schools, which has led to some acrimony in the press of late.

See, when a district fails to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” on state test scores and other benchmarks, as MPS has failed to do for the last three years, DPI is required by federal law to give MPS a corrective action plan, a list of fixes. Kind of like how the city may come by your house and present you with a list of repairs that will bring you up to code.

MPS has also failed to keep up with many of the critical fixes.

So comes the threat that DPI might withhold Title I federal funds—the only real remedy DPI is permitted to exercise under state law.

Which is huge: A $175 million cut is about one-sixth of MPS’s budget for the 2009-10 school year. It is the cost of educating 12,000 MPS students. It is greater than the base allocated budgets of all the Bay View-area schools combined. It would pay the annual salary of half the district’s teachers.

So what is MPS holding out on? What is worth $175 million for MPS to fight?

In short, nothing more than a near-complete remaking of the way MPS does business.

It may not look like it from the outside, but following the corrective action plan means a much different engine under MPS’s hood, a serious set of changes in the way schools and classroom teachers do their thing.

Take reading, for example. One thing that makes MPS unique is the diverse tapestry that is its elementary schools—including dozens of different approaches to literacy instruction. This gives savvy parents the opportunity to select a program that’s a good fit for their children.

However, MPS has a 15 percent student mobility rate according to this year’s district report card, meaning thousands of students the city over are bouncing around between these different methods of literacy instruction one or more times during the school year. DPI feels—and I can’t say I completely disagree—that if the district whittled down to just two or three different literacy programs, the consistency would benefit those mobile students.

Despite a $200,000 grant from DPI to work with the Council of the Great City Schools to develop a new literacy plan, MPS has missed those benchmarks in the corrective action plan.

Perhaps the biggest DPI—demanded changes spring from a special education complaint and class-action lawsuit begun almost a decade ago. MPS and DPI were both named in the complaint, and they were both on the losing end of a 2007 judgment. DPI opted to settle with the plaintiffs in 2008. MPS appealed, and while everyone waits for the next decision, the remedy imposed by the 2007 judgment is on hold.

Yet DPI has written into its corrective action plan many of the terms of the court’s order—at least in part because it has to following its settlement. The district sees this as a subversion of the legal process, and it is refusing to meet DPI’s benchmarks.

DPI wants MPS to start screening, up to three times a year, every student in math and reading starting in kindergarten, as well as in all subjects required for graduation at the high school level. After the screening, MPS would implement interventions on an individual level for any student who needs it. This is a radical—and likely very expensive—change in the way MPS does business.

But DPI sees the change as necessary for all students in a failing district like MPS, regardless of its origin in a special education lawsuit. “These are things that will help the children of Milwaukee, whether they receive or do not receive special education funds,” said John W. Johnson, DPI’s director of Education Information Services. “These are really about building capacity and systems to educate students without referring to special education.”

In a district with an exploding special education population, such measures make sense. But as long as MPS is fighting this lawsuit, it would be suicidal to make the admission, through following DPI’s order, that it is in the wrong.

And so MPS risks $175 million.

Except, maybe not.

DPI’s Johnson is pretty clear that the state doesn’t really want to keep that money away from MPS. “Any way you cut it,” he told me, “we want to make sure that Milwaukee still gets their funds.” He explained that some of the money may be spent in Milwaukee, but directed by DPI into steps that would fulfill the corrective action plan.

“We are not leaving the ground in Milwaukee,” Johnson said, noting that Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s state superintendent, is in Milwaukee several times a month working with MPS.

MPS needs to make a decision, and soon. Will it remake itself to satisfy DPI—and, frankly, make much-needed changes in the process—or will it continue to hold onto a system that has led to years of embarrassing failure?

Jay Bullock is an English teacher at Bay View High School who blogs at folkbum.com. Contact him at mpshallmonitor@gmail.com.