A letter to my student teacher

The other day at school, another teacher and I were talking about how little it takes to make us happy nowadays, about how we settle for very, very tiny victories to maintain some level of sanity.

I said, “If I ran into College Me-you know, the Me who wanted to change the world and thought teaching was the way to do it?-College Me would be so disappointed.”

And here you are, College You, ready to start your student teaching in the Milwaukee Public Schools. I don’t want to give you the wrong idea about the job, don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of rewarding and fulfilling things to keep you going as an MPS teacher. But there are some things you should know.

So in the spirit of commencement addresses and half-time pep talks and best-man toasts, here’s some basic stuff I think you need to know if you want MPS to be your home.

First, remember that, ultimately, you’re here to serve the needs of your students. It often feels as though you’re the skeleton from the “anatomy” entry in the encyclopedia-you know, the part that allows you to turn the clear acetate pages of more and more layers onto the opaque skeleton until you can’t see the bones anymore.

Everyone has a demand to layer onto you: principals, superintendents, curriculum specialists, parents, state tests, fellow teachers, a looming special education lawsuit, the taxpaying public. It’s like some kind of Wonderland onion that grows as you peel it, and your day can be pretty quickly filled dealing with all of that other stuff. Don’t let it-that’s the thing that has done the most to wear away what’s left of College Me.

Second, MPS students are often pretty angry-at their parents, at the rules, at you, at themselves, at the world. It seldom manifests itself obviously, though you will see fights and passive-aggression and some pretty clever attempts to wriggle out of doing the work you ask them to do. Instead, it mostly means that one of the most important things you can do for students is to be kind, to be patient. College Me didn’t care much for patience; he wanted everything right now, but students need their own schedule.

Students will want to be your friend, but that’s not your role. I have often said MPS teachers need to be activists for social justice, with a passion for things like closing the achievement gap and opening up opportunities traditionally denied to the urban poor. That means you can be-must be-your students’ ally and advocate and therapist and mentor. Students will have scores of good friends during their lifetimes, but they will only have one freshman English teacher. Make the most of that.

Finally, remember that whatever happens around you in this city and this district doesn’t change the fact that your students need a good teacher. Indeed, school, for all the upheaval and tension and debate we adults can’t help but stress over, is often the most stable part of a Milwaukee child’s life.

A few months ago I was asked to appear on a panel about MPS for Channel 10’s Fourth Street Forum program. During Q&A with the audience, a young man stood up and said, “For a long time I’ve been planning to become a teacher, most likely in MPS, but I’m afraid, to be honest. It’s a big mess and I don’t know if I want to even touch it.” That’s understandable.

Yet despite the continued avalanche of bad news for or about MPS-from threatened takeovers and looming bankruptcy to Detroit-level test scores-here you are. That already tells me something. You want to change the world, and I look forward to helping you start on this small corner of it.

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

MPS and the Case of the Missing Neighborhood Student

If I told you that the Neighborhood Student was in Area 51 with Elvis and Bigfoot, would you believe me?

It’s about as plausible a location as any other. In fact, it is much, much easier to say where the Neighborhood Student is not: Milwaukee’s high schools. Its middle schools-the few remaining, anyway-don’t house the Neighborhood Student either.

The Neighborhood Student must be the most important student in the Milwaukee Public Schools, as it has driven district policy for more than a decade. It’s easy to see why; the Neighborhood Student is cheaper to educate, supposedly comes with greater parent involvement, and can more easily engage in the kinds of things that make school a good life experience-sports, clubs, walking in snow uphill both ways.  »Read more

On the verge of closing, Fritsche stuffed full

Two months into what was to be a two-year process of merging Fritsche Middle School with its near neighbor Bay View High School, Fritsche is feeling something it hasn’t felt in some time-and may never feel again after this year: full.

A primary factor motivating the merger, recommended by the Bay View Community Schools Task Force and approved by the Milwaukee Board of School Directors one year ago, was declining enrollment at the middle school despite Fritsche’s storied reputation as one of the district’s best 6-8 programs.

If the board approves-they are expected to vote at the end of this month-it will mean bringing the middle school grades into Bay View High School next year instead of in 2011.  »Read more

Lower price, higher stakes, better testing

In August, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction announced it will abandon the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE) in favor of new tests yet to be developed.

This is great news. I have never believed that a single test tells all that much about a student, that student’s teacher, or even that student’s school. This is particularly true when the stakes riding on the test are low for those taking it. The 10th graders I teach see no connection between the WKCE and their own lives, and for good reason. The only people judged by students’ scores are their teachers; the only thing students get from the test is a day without regular classes.

DPI expects that the new tests will be expensive to develop, noting in its announcement that a new system will cost “significantly more” than the $10 million it spent in 2008-09. I suggest we can save some money, get the information we’re looking for, and give students a stake by being smart with high school assessments.  »Read more

New school, new name: Bay View Middle and High School

A September 15 joint session of Bay View High School’s and Fritsche Middle School’s Governance Councils recommended that when the two schools merge into one 6-12 program housed in the current high school building, that program be called Bay View Middle and High School.

At the meeting, nearly 20 speakers, including 10 BVHS alumni, teachers, neighbors, and Fritsche Middle School’s student council vice president, all favored keeping the name of the community, either Bay View or South Shore, in the name.

Speakers associated with both schools said it was important to include all students, those in the middle grades as well as the high school grades, in the name of the new program.

An informal show of hands among all present, prompted by a Bay View alumna’s question, suggested broad support for the name Bay View Middle and High School, and the schools’ governance councils later voted to submit that name to the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, which has the final say on the new school’s name.

Three questions for the new superintendent

I have often said the only constant in MPS is change; that’s a bit of a simplification. One of the things you might expect to change a lot, based on past experience and what goes on in urban districts around the country, has actually remained constant: current Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is in his eighth and final year in that position.

Now, who gets to choose his successor, that’s the up-in-the-air part. The current elected school board, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the governor, State Superintendent Tony Evers, the Sorting Hat from Hogwarts-all seem like reasonable guesses at this point.

It probably won’t be me. However, that isn’t stopping me from wanting to ask questions of potential candidates.

1. Why Milwaukee? Our last two superintendents have been promoted from within, both principals of successful district schools. Indications are that the search for a new one will be national, with the hopes of landing a game-changer or a rainmaker or some other optimistic cliché for the job. This is no small thing. MPS faces some significant challenges over the next few years: state sanctions, embarrassing test scores, the nation’s largest achievement gap between white and minority students, a looming financial crisis of unprecedented size, disengaged parents, rampant poverty.  »Read more

Inside merging schools, uncertainty, division, and worry

This time last year, the big news was the Bay View Neighborhood Schools Task Force, and its plans for changing the school I was about to start teaching in: They proposed a three-year plan to merge Bay View High School, my new home, with Fritsche Middle School.

Not to get too cliché here, but as with anything, the devil is in the details. When the Milwaukee Board of School Directors approved the merger last fall, it didn’t provide any details, and that has bedeviled many of us in the affected schools over the past year.

Which is not to say we didn’t start out optimistic. As soon as the merger was approved, the schools’ staff sprang into action. Teachers from both schools established committees to plan for the merger, focusing on everything from recruiting to curriculum. The schools’ Governance Councils started meeting jointly. The two schools even shared a single holiday party in December.  »Read more

Greening MPS, literally

As an English teacher, I cringe to think that the perfectly good adjective green has become a verb.

And greening has become a trend. Everywhere you look, someone is selling you something more environmentally friendly or less energy dependent than it used to be.

The Milwaukee Public Schools, too, are greening, both in the metaphorical sense-with energy audits and new conservation measures-and in the literal sense.

If you’ve been past Humboldt Park School recently, you know what I’m talking about. The school replaced about a third of its playground blacktop with grass and more than two dozen trees.  »Read more

Vouchers: The “half-the-price” myth

A state-mandated study released in March confirmed, for the second year in a row, that schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program-known as the voucher program-did not perform better than Milwaukee Public Schools. This killed of one of the myths underlying the program, which is that voucher schools offer consistently higher achievement.

That led some longtime voucher supporters, such as former MPS Superintendent Howard Fuller, to call for increased transparency, greater accountability, and tougher requirements for voucher schools.

But some voucher supporters simply switched myths; now they say voucher schools do the same job as MPS, but for half the price. They base this on MPS’s per-pupil spending (about $13,000), roughly twice what the state sends to voucher schools (about $6,500).

That per-pupil figure results when you take MPS’s total budget and divide it by the number of students. Since a significant portion of the MPS budget goes to state- or federally-mandated bureaucracy, legacy costs for retirees, providing community services like playgrounds and safe places for kids to be after school, that simple calculation is misleading (most voucher schools do not incur those costs). A different state-mandated study, a financial audit of MPS released in April, noted that only 58 percent of funds were “instructional spending,” which is a number much closer to the size of a voucher. If MPS could report a per-school budget, we might get a more accurate picture of what it costs an MPS school to educate an MPS child.

Fortunately, earlier this year the district did just that, producing a detailed breakdown of the per-school cost to educate a child in MPS. For the 2007-08 school year, a choice voucher was worth $6,501. That same year, the base per-student disbursement-what MPS paid schools to teach a student enrolled there-for high schools was $6,474, almost exactly the same. Other grade levels are not significantly different: $6,710 for middle schools, $6,220 for K-8s, and $6,245 for elementary schools. In other words, MPS spends about what voucher schools do to educate an average child.

On top of that base per-student disbursement, MPS schools incur added costs from things like transportation, building maintenance, and the big one, special education. That leaves totals ranging from a high of $25,700 per student at Marshall High School to a low of $6,539 per student at the Milwaukee School of Languages. With costs that varied and complex, it is misleading at best to suggest that voucher schools do what they do at half the price, especially since many of those schools offer few or no special education services, rely on parents or MPS for transportation, and use buildings owned and maintained by other organizations.

One of the city’s best-known voucher advocates, Brother Bob Smith of the Messmer family of schools, offered a possible reason voucher schools might appear to get better results at lower costs. He told the audience at a conservative get-together two years ago that his students have to “make the right decisions, or make them somewhere else.”

Voucher schools do, indeed, sacrifice all or a portion of the voucher funds for kicking out a disruptive or unmotivated student, but it’s a luxury MPS does not have. So long as MPS educates every child who walks in the door, and is required to follow rules that voucher schools don’t, it will remain a myth that voucher schools can educate a child for half the price.

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

Consider Milwaukee ‘plans’ when voting April 7

On Feb. 17, fewer than 5 percent of Milwaukeeans voted in the primary election for state superintendent. Because the two remaining candidates are heavily promoting their plans to improve the fortunes, literal and academic, of MPS, we have an interest in turning out for the general election April 7.

I have written before that to really fix MPS, we need to fix the endemic problems of the city first-so I doubt that either candidate, Deputy State Superintendent Tony Evers or “parental activist” Rose Fernandez, can provide a magic bullet. But the style and scope of their plans says a lot about both what they think of Milwaukee and how they will run the Department of Public Instruction.  »Read more

Change the only constant

Within a few months, nearly everyone with direct or indirect supervisory responsibility over the Milwaukee Public Schools will be new to the job.

As I write this, Arne Duncan, superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, is being grilled by Congress as he hopes to become President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education. Wisconsin’s state superintendent, Elizabeth Burmaster, is retiring from that position, meaning a new Department of Public Instruction chief will be elected this spring.

More directly, three out of the four seats up for election on the Milwaukee Board of School Directors will have no incumbent on the ballot; Directors Danny Goldberg and Jennifer Morales opted not to run for re-election and Director Charlene Hardin failed to gather enough signatures to qualify-though she is mounting a quixotic write-in campaign.  »Read more

Reform ideas missing the mark

A column I’ve wanted to write for a long time includes a whiny paragraph that goes something like this:

Look, Milwaukee has done everything you wanted us to do to our schools: We have tried small schools, big schools, K-5s, 6-8s, K-8s, 6-12s, K-12s, phonics, whole language, arts immersion, arts-on-alternate-Tuesdays, charter schools, voucher schools, bilingual schools, language immersion schools, no foreign language at all, year-round schools, block schedules, traditional schedules, centralized planning, decentralized planning, recentralized planning, schools focused on math or science or water or business, neighborhood schools, city-wide schools, teacher-led schools, multiplexes, outposts, IB, AP, LEAP, PLTW, FTF, ROTC-what more can you possibly want us to do?

“What more” is not an idle question, given the perpetual parade of MPS reform efforts. I dread what will be coming this month, as the new state Legislature revs up to meddle and the results of audits by the mayor and the district are released. The parade will continue.

One reform idea, offered by state Senator Ted Kanavas (R-Brookfield), is to divide and conquer, breaking the school system into eight small districts in the name of “accountability” and “flexibility.” “Flexibility” is one thing MPS does not lack-consider the list above and tell me we’re not willing to try new things.

In his op-eds and press releases, Kanavas never explains why size affects accountability, except to note the startling fact MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos probably doesn’t know the names of all 200-some principals in the district. How that correlates to student achievement is never quite explained.

Milwaukee Alderman Bob Donovan offered a seven-page reform plan last fall, including appointing a “Chancellor of Education,” who would coordinate all the schools in the city-MPS, private schools, and schools chartered outside of MPS. He and Ted Kanavas should talk, as I think they might have a lively conversation about whether this chancellor could possibly hold all those schools accountable.

Then there’s the City Hall takeover, putting Mayor Tom Barrett and the Milwaukee Common Council in charge of the schools. While the mayor and Common Council may not be any better or worse at running things than Andrekopoulos and the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, the odds that giving them a second large organization to oversee will improve either seem slim to me.

The trouble with all of these is that they miss a fundamental point: The problems of the Milwaukee Public Schools are largely not school problems, but Milwaukee problems. It is in the schools where those problems become manifest.

Schools with high concentrations of poor students perform badly, across the board, 40 years of research has shown. The effects of poverty-from household instability to hunger to poor health care-affect my students’ ability to learn much more than whether the superintendent knows my principal’s name.

Every legislator, alderman, or armchair superintendent interested in seeing improvements in MPS should be interested in improvements to Milwaukee first. Find ways to lift our students out of poverty, and you have found ways to lift our test scores.

We have already pumped a virtual arsenal of silver bullets into MPS, and none has hit the mark. It’s time to start looking outside the schools for the next reform target.

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

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