City candidates and Bay View High School

If the yard signs are any indication, my neighbors are already picking sides in this spring’s hottest election contest, the one for the 14th aldermanic district. Two-term incumbent Tony Zielinski squares off against well-organized newcomer Jan Pierce on April 3.

Despite the heat, the two have been perfectly amicable when I’ve seen them in the same room together, which has happened twice: Both have attended meetings organized by Parents for Bay View Schools, a group of neighborhood parents looking to make, in particular, Bay View Middle and High School (BVMHS) an attractive option for their children.

As a teacher at the school and a member of the group, their presence and participation encouraged me.

In a later interview, challenger Pierce pointed right to BVMHS as “the elephant in the living room” of Bay View. “Something has to be done with neighborhood buy-in,” he went on. “That school is such a crucial piece of the community, and the alderman can use his bully pulpit to give parents a sense of support.”

There is value in a strong neighborhood high school, Pierce said. “We don’t want to see Bay View people leave the area because of Bay View High School.”

Right now, Pierce said, BVMHS is getting a lot of attention from MPS Superintendent Gregory Thornton, in part because Parents for Bay View Schools is driving it. “Thornton will stay focused as long as the squeaky wheel is squeaky.” Pierce pledged to keep that wheel squeaking both publicly and “through back-channel diplomacy.”

“The alderman working with parents makes a difference,” he said. “Everyone here has a shared self-interest, and the alderman should be building community and consensus on based on that.”

Incumbent Zielinski went further. “We need both problem solving and community building. What I’m about is solving problems,” he said in a separate interview. What’s the problem?

“The problem is that systemically, the system doesn’t support teachers,” Zielinski said. He wants to “empower teachers to remove habitually disruptive students from class.”

Without those students, he said, teachers can focus on the kids who are there and want to learn. The others will be moved to an alternative setting, where he suggested family preservation and support specialists—counselors trained to work with troubled families—can “get at the root problems and get students the help they need.” In other words, everybody benefits.

Zielinski would like to see BVMHS as a pilot for his disruptive-students plan. The alderman thinks that might help attract neighborhood parents and students back to the school.

“If we don’t take control of classrooms, nothing else can change,” he explained.

Is it possible to vote for both? No question changing the classroom climate is important, and no question rallying the community to agitate for its school is key. Let’s hope whoever comes out on top stays true to that promise.

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

To teach or not to teach

Two years ago in this space, I wrote a column I remain quite proud of—a letter to the student teacher I hosted that semester in my classroom.

I was also very proud of that student teacher, one of the best young teachers I’d ever met, with a sense of humor and a sense of purpose on top of a tremendous base of knowledge. I was very excited for him and his future students at the end of our time together.

He now makes his living tending bar.

This fact, among many, many others, has led me to reconsider that letter from two years ago. In it, I thought I offered sound advice for slogging through the unpleasant morass that is teaching in the Milwaukee Public Schools: be patient, be the students’ ally, be the good teacher they need in their lives—plus, don’t let the bureaucrats grind you down.

Not that any of that is bad advice. To be sure, when a new student teacher arrives in my class later this month, I will repeat it and repeat it and repeat it like a mantra.

What I am reconsidering about that first letter, though, is the imagined conversation between the Me of Today and College Me, the one just starting his own student teaching—whether the Me of Today shouldn’t have just screamed, “Run away!”

This question about whether to teach is not unique to me. Both the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators have noted the significant spike in retirements among teachers in 2011. A quick googling finds that enrollment this year in schools of education is down from Long Island to Los Angeles. More teachers are getting out, and fewer teachers are getting in.

Bill Henk, dean of Marquette University’s School of Education and a former teacher, blogged last October to try to explain why enrollment was down in his program. After 1,300 words chronicling reasons not to teach, he wrote, “There is no question that the work would be significantly more of a struggle in every respect than what I experienced in the classroom. Times have definitely changed, and I can’t say for the better.”

Like Henk, it would take me a lot of words to list the changes I’ve seen since I started: the way that teachers are beat down from outside the school walls by politicians, by media, by budgets, by semi-literate internet commenters; the way that teachers are beat down from within the school walls, by “data,” by strict curriculum and pacing guides, by a school board that slashes pay, by students who just don’t want to learn. This is not what College Me expected life as a teacher to be like.

Last month, I got new glasses, and the young woman helping me at the counter saw on my form I had written teacher as my profession. “I’m going to UWM next fall,” she said. “I want to be an English teacher so bad.” She was so excited.

“How is it being a teacher?” she asked. “Do you like it?” I hesitated.

Right then was probably the closest I would ever come to seeing College Me at a moment when one word of warning would really make a difference. Teach, or not?

“Yeah,” I finally said. “It’s worth it for the kids.”

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

A teacher’s holiday wish, a 21st-century web presence

I still remember the awesome day when my classroom computer was upgraded to Windows XP and 512 megabytes of RAM—probably because it just happened in February 2010.

I use this computer every day, and its top-of-the-2003-line specs feel symptomatic of the Milwaukee Public School’s outdated approach to technology.

Our frustrating student information system has changed little since its 1999 roll-out. Now the whole system is being scrapped by its corporate parent and MPS faces no choice but to adapt to the 21st century.

There are two reasons MPS lagged behind the times. The first is that if some technology was working, even if not well, there’s been no time, staff, or money to improve it. The second is a generational gap between institutional leadership and, well, the rest of the plugged-in world.

When a marketing “think tank” brought parents and community members together last spring to figure out what MPS could do better, the district’s poor web presence was a big topic of discussion.

No wonder. For the last 15 years, MPS’s 184 schools have had to develop their own websites. You can imagine the patchwork result—lots of schools have no site at all, and lots more sit un-updated for months or years. Though my school’s site gets updated, its most advanced feature is the animated GIF. Welcome to 1995.

So MPS hired Amy Kant, a web designer who spent the better part of the last decade making Milwaukee’s Fox6Now.com one of the state’s strongest online news sites. As the district’s sole web communication specialist, Kant is starting small with a handful of elementary schools, setting them up with attractive, user-friendly home pages powered by WordPress.

Kant’s sites look great. They started going live in November, and soon weather alerts will be text-messaged to parents who sign up for them.

Texting alerts is a far cry from the current method of getting the word out about school closings, announcements, or attendance updates—the auto-dialer. “When parents see it’s the MPS auto-dialer calling, they don’t answer,” said Bay View’s Meagan Holman, the youngest member of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors. “It’s outdated technology.”

There are other signs promising change. MPS has seen tremendous administrative turnover lately, with many internet-generation educators now in leadership posts. “A lot of the newer, younger principals get that you need a good website,” Kant told me.

Though the superintendent himself blogs and spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin is a Twitter fiend, central office doesn’t always get new media or the value of a better web presence.

Take, for example, the looming monstrosity that is the MPS Portal. No one likes it. It’s hard to use. But it’s still the only way students have to see grades, access their email, or get important district information. It’s even a hindrance to Kant, who has to create a new static HTML square of “news” every day to sit atop the Portal’s front page.

There’s now a process in motion to develop a mobile version of the Portal for next school year, which (fingers crossed) could lead to a revamp of the whole thing.

MPS is also set to be one of the first adopters of the statewide Student Information System, which the Department of Public Instruction hopes will be ready next fall.

Like other changes coming, this new system has to be an improvement over what we have now—a web presence stuck in the past.

Bullock is an English teacher at Bay View High School. Reach him at mpshallmonitor@gmail.com.

Last days for Dover Street School?

Next month, a fancy consulting firm will deliver a master facilities plan recommendation to the Milwaukee Board of School Directors.

If it feels like you’ve seen this movie before, you have. It’s been barely a decade since the Neighborhood Schools Initiative that, for all its fanfare, amounted to very little. It’s been barely half a decade since the consultant-led “right-sizing” that mostly just made people angry.

This time the movie may have a different ending, as this new look at facilities is mandated by the Wisconsin Legislature. Plus, current MPS Superintendent Gregory Thornton is not one to shy away from tough positions likely to stir controversy.

This process is not abstract for Bay View residents, who have seen their neighborhood schools configured, reconfigured, threatened with shutdown, and plain up-and-moved repeatedly over the last few years.

For example, sitting empty right now is a century-old gem, the Dover Street School building, which may well be in its last days.

Like other older schools in the city, Dover is not what you’d build today, with its third-floor gym and a wee cafeteria designed for neighborhood children who walked home for lunch. But it’s a solid space that, for the last 120 years, Milwaukee has been able to fill with children.

I think it could still be filled. Imagine, for example, using that space to expand what may be Bay View’s most popular—and successful—program, Fernwood Montessori. Every last Fernwood eighth grader in 2010 was proficient or advanced in reading, something few schools in Milwaukee get to say.

Because Fernwood doesn’t enroll many new students in upper grades, if we want to see that eighth-grade success writ larger, Fernwood would need to more than double its size in the younger grades.

It probably could—it’s popular enough to have a waiting list and has great PR and the most involved parents in the community—but not within its current space. So why not let Fernwood flow over to Dover?

The district is thinking bigger and longer-term than any one building or neighborhood, using the new facilities plan to set a broader “standard of care”: What is the minimum promise of available space and programs to every child in every corner of the city? Montessori may expand, at-large MPS Director Terry Falk tells me, but not necessarily where it already exists.

Dover’s status is but one data point among many considered by the consultants. The average Milwaukee school is 70 years old, with nearly a third built before 1920, including Dover in 1889. To bring all those old schools up to date, MPS must spend more than a billion dollars.

Surprisingly, the consultants say not one single building would be cheaper to replace than to repair. But Thornton is reticent to update buildings like Dover that would still look and feel old afterwards. He told a September meeting of the board, “Time just brings about wear.

“We have a billion dollars of work to do,” he said, “and if we did the work, we probably couldn’t tell.”

Speaking at that meeting about Garfield Elementary, a currently-empty school with a footprint similar to Dover’s but on the north side, Thornton said Garfield has “no, no remote chance of being a facility that could meet the needs of children at the present time.”

An MPS spokesman said the district has no plans for Dover at this time. In an interview, Falk added, “The superintendent is not inclined to put money into a building like Dover.”

Instead, the administration is talking about building “big boxes” whose insides can be filled in and then ripped out every 10 years as educational trends and needs change.

I am hardly a traditionalist when it comes to what schooling—or schools—should look like, but a district that values empty boxes over iconic schoolhouses like Dover just depresses me. Particularly when there are viable, quality programs that could use Dover’s space well.

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

I can’t say I blame my fellow teachers

Last November, 85 percent of voting Milwaukee Public Schools teachers said yes to nearly $100 million in concessions, including pay freezes and significant changes to our health insurance, through the 2011-13 school years.

The goal was two-fold. One was to prevent a repeat of 2010’s budget mess and layoff madness, when principals had to make tough decisions about who and how many staff members to let go and nearly 500 teachers got pink slips. (Most of those were back in classrooms last fall.) Both the district and the teachers felt the new contract left the district in good shape, with words like “historic” and “monumental” dotting press releases from both sides.

I try to keep this column pretty apolitical, but there’s just no getting around this fact: Republicans in Madison pulled a bait-and-switch.

Two, and there’s no reason not to be honest about this, was to secure items teachers thought were important against a new, public school-unfriendly regime in Madison. Candidate Scott Walker had a list of things he wanted to do to reform schools, including changing teacher evaluation and seniority rights. MPS teachers preserved the present system for those things and more.

In other words, the district got money-saving concessions and teachers protected some valuable rights. Even in the face of Republican challenges to education, things would be okay.

Except, of course, they weren’t.

If you’ve been remotely awake the past eight months, you know what went down. Republicans attacked public schools with far more vigor than their 2010 campaign promised. Leave aside what was done to collective bargaining—that’s a whole other column—the 2011-13 budget cut nearly $2 billion from schools.

For MPS, that meant nearly $200 million less over two years. Suddenly MPS went from being in reasonable financial shape for the first time in years to being deep in the hole, again. So principals made tough decisions, again, and more than 300 teachers—most of whom aren’t coming back this time—got pink-slipped, again.

MPS asked the union to give up a little more, concessions that could have saved 200 or so elementary-level teachers. The union, in a much closer vote (52%-48%), said no.

I voted yes. A yes vote, I argued, would have left the union in a much better position politically. See, we could say, we were willing to bend where the Legislature and governor were not!

Beyond that, both the superintendent (on his blog) and the board (in a statement included in their budget vote) had been pretty clear that they blamed the state, not teachers. There was no sense in our treating the administration as the bad guy.

I try to keep this column pretty apolitical, but there’s just no getting around this fact: Republicans in Madison pulled a bait-and-switch. None of them promised the kind of bone-deep cuts to schools they ultimately approved, nor was there any hint at the kind of anti-union measures they would push through.

Hence the stark difference in vote results between November’s contract ratification and July’s refusal to make more concessions. We teachers simply don’t know what’s coming next, or how much worse it can get before it gets better again. If it gets better again—we can’t even trust that will happen.

So I’m disappointed at the results, and I think we blew the chance to be the bigger person. But I can’t say I blame my colleagues. Given the parlous state of Wisconsin politics, holding on to one sure thing, like our contract, makes sense.

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

Pitches

Thanks for taking this meeting. I’m pretty excited about these ideas for new TV shows.

My first idea is America’s Next Great Teacher. Think Top Chef or American Idol, but about teachers. We get a bunch of young, hip teach-testants and drop them into an urban public school.

Every episode they have to do one of the tasks real teachers do all the time, such as grading 140 essays in a weekend or wrangling 32 kindergartners through the alphabet. The competition would be fierce.

And then they’ll be judged by a panel of experts—a state representative, a CEO, and a talk-radio host. Every week one of them gets voted off, and at the end, the winner gets tenure.

No? Well, what if we do it Real World-style, and make them all share a house? You’ll get great footage of them fighting over the coffeemaker at 4am!

This one, then, Law and Order: MPS. It’s based on where I worked before I quit to come out here and make it big in TV.

So every week it’s a different incident at school, but the same cast of teachers, assistant principals, and school safety aides have to sort out the drama that overwhelms a lot of the kids and keeps them from learning. Everything from rascals who want to run the halls all day to neighborhood or Facebook conflicts that spill over into school fights.

For ratings sweeps periods, you can do some “very special episodes” about the really serious ramifications of teaching in a high-poverty, high-crime district. Things like student homelessness or random gun violence in the community, things I used to see more often than I—

Okay, okay, you’re right. It is a downer. Maybe people don’t want to think about that.

How about a draft? The NFL and NBA get days and days of great TV ratings from their drafts, right? So we get all the big school districts together in one room, with the top college teaching prospects in the other.

We can watch while the schools talk about what positions they need to fill, how high their offers should be, who to trade for better picks. And Mel Kiper—can you get him?—he can review the teachers, their stats, even video from their student teaching.

What? Oh, come on, I think people do want to see that. Isn’t teaching at least as important as—

Got it, you don’t have to tell me twice. What about Lost? Could we do a sequel? I’m thinking a series of episodes about teaching days lost to standardized testing. Since the tests are the only important part of a student experience, there has to be an interest in watching students take them. Surefire winner, I say.

Or, make it another reality show that follows the temps hired to score essay tests and decide students’ fates for $8 an hour. At the very least, the test companies like NCS Pearson and CTB/McGraw-Hill could underwrite these with some of their massive profits.

Fine, fine, just one more. I call it Duncan, D.O.E. It’s like House, M.D., see, where the real hard work of education in a school is done by a staff that is too small, too inexperienced, and too busy and poorly paid to lead any kind of meaningful personal life. They bust their behinds for an hour to make some small dent in a never-ending cascade of symptoms.

In the end, though, the high-paid boss sweeps in and claims credit for an impossible miracle boost in the test scores. And the credits roll. Emmys are sure to abound.

Okay, well, you have my number. I’ll be waiting for that call!

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

 

MPS schools devastated by misguided reforms

Every teacher at Milwaukee’s ALAS, Northwest, Pulaski, and Washington high schools last month received a stunning piece of news: They had all been excessed.

Excessing is not usually a surprising thing. It happens when a school has more teachers than it can afford; those excess teachers—usually the least-senior ones—get removed from the school and placed, probably, in another district school. Everyone in the district has had it happen to them or someone they know.

But what happened at those three schools is new. Never before in MPS has an entire school’s worth of teachers been told their positions for next year were uncertain.

A study of nearly three decades of various “reconstitutions” like the turnaround model found that there was no research to show improved test scores and noted reasons to avoid the model.

It’s happening for a new reason, too. It isn’t because schools can’t afford those teachers, but because a “turnaround” model of reform is being applied to those three schools, meaning a new principal and a mostly new staff. (Teachers can apply and interview for their old positions, but schools cannot hire more than half of them back.)

This is not necessarily what the Milwaukee Public Schools would choose to do with its low-performing schools. Instead, this turnaround model is one of four reform models the state and federal governments are demanding of MPS in exchange for grant funds under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, popularly known as the stimulus bill.

In all, 21 MPS high schools have been identified over the last two years as being among the worst-performing schools in the state.

The focus on high school and the application of reform models such as the “turnaround” and “restart” (which reopens a school under the control of a charter operator) or even outright closure (four of those schools have been closed, so far) reflect just how misguided the U.S. Department of Education is in its focus.

All of MPS’s data show that the real place to focus efforts is on lower grades. For example, the 2009 NAEP results—the National Assessment of Educational Progress is often called the nation’s report card—found that 61 percent of Milwaukee’s fourth-grade students read “below basic,” meaning they were reading below grade level. Math results from the same year show 41 percent of fourth graders below basic.

Waiting until high school to try “reform” for these students is far too late.

Moreover, there is little evidence that anything like a “turnaround” works. The model is based on what U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan did in Chicago as that district’s chief. But scores for turnaround schools which he calls successful, such as Chicago’s William T. Sherman Elementary, remain below city and state average five years later.

An Education and the Public Interest Center study of nearly three decades of various “reconstitutions” like the turnaround model found that there was no research to show improved test scores and noted reasons to avoid the model.

“Replacing all or most of a school staff,” wrote researcher William J. Mathis, “is chaotic and disruptive […I]nstitutional history is lost and basic operational systems are disrupted.” Test scores immediately after such disruptions often fall further. Mathis went on to note that teachers and communities affected by this kind of mass removal end up “stigmatized and demoralized.”

Which may be the point. There is not space here to catalog the additional ways, aside from these “reforms,” that teachers have become public enemy number one in the last year. Whether it’s blaming them for low test scores or their pension plans for the current economic slump, teachers seem to be fair game.

In this climate, mass firing or excessing of teachers—what might otherwise be seen as a radical and devastating act—passes with barely notice. Hail, “reform.”

CORRECTION: The print version of this column incorrectly identified Hamilton as one of the “turnaround” schools. Instead of “turnaround,” Hamilton will be subject to a different model of reform.

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

In defense of seniority

If you were expecting firebombs this month—believe me, I have reasons to throw them—you’ll be disappointed. Fights will be fought and cuts will be devastating, and all that will be documented in the Compass and elsewhere.

Instead, seniority!

The exclamation point is only slightly sarcastic; when the Milwaukee Public Schools sends out layoff notices in the next few weeks, I fully expect a rerun of last year’s ugly battle over who gets laid off and why.

As it turns out, last year’s layoffs were mostly rescinded. Specialists, like art and music teachers, were not so lucky as to be called back, but most others were.

But those same folk expect pink slips to head their way again. MPS had already announced plans to lay off more than 100 teachers before Governor Scott Walker’s budget left the district $74 million behind where it thought it would be. That’s another 750 teachers, if all the cuts come as layoffs.

MPS had already announced plans to lay off more than 100 teachers before Governor Scott Walker’s budget left the district $74 million behind where it thought it would be. That’s another 750 teachers, if all the cuts come as layoffs.

Here’s how it will get ugly: Why, someone will ask, are the young and energetic and hip teachers laid off and not the old and lazy and ineffective teachers? Why can’t we look at quality instead of seniority?

MPS had already announced plans to lay off more than 100 teachers before Governor Scott Walker’s budget left the district $74 million behind where it thought it would be. That’s another 750 teachers, if all the cuts come as layoffs.

As I noted recently, determining the quality of teachers in MPS is not easy. With every individual principal responsible for evaluation, there is no sure way to know whether the best-rated teacher in school A is really better than the worst-rated teacher at school B.

There’s a process in place to identify and shoo out any old teachers found to be lazy and ineffective, though again its use varies widely by principal. If more principals were serious about it, many of those young teachers might be a little safer right now.

But there are reasons to recommend an objective last-in, first-out layoff policy. Notably, there is overwhelming research showing that teachers get better the longer they teach. Though improvement levels off between five and 10 years into the job, statistically a veteran is more likely to be an effective teacher than a rookie.

Moreover, younger teachers tend to lay themselves off. Neither MPS nor MTEA, the teachers union, could provide me with Milwaukee-specific figures, but nationally up to 46 percent of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years. That number is higher in urban districts like Milwaukee.

If I’m running MPS, I want to hold on to those teachers who’ve shown a commitment to stick it out in the toughest district in the state. As much as the young and energetic and hip teachers are young and energetic and hip, they’re also a coin toss, as likely to move on before the next round of layoffs as hang around.

Given the Recent Unpleasantness, the whom-do-we-lay-off argument may be on its last legs, as protecting senior teachers from layoffs used to be bargained collectively. Older teachers are more expensive to employ; MPS pays for years of experience, for example, and we fogies are more likely to need medical care. The contract stops administrators from targeting experienced teachers in spite of that cost.

However, recruiting, hiring, mentoring, and training new teachers is not free, either. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future estimates that the annual cost of teacher turnover nationally is more than $7 billion.

Undoubtedly there will be some great teachers lost when the dust settles on the new MPS budget. The fault, though, lies not with seniority or collective bargaining or old, lazy teachers. Ultimately, we need new, different, fairer ways to provide and fund a quality education, ways to keep both youthful energy and experience in our schools.

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

In defense of seniority

If you were expecting firebombs this month—believe me, I have reasons to throw them—you’ll be disappointed. Fights will be fought and cuts will be devastating, and all that will be documented in the Compass and elsewhere.

Instead, seniority!

The exclamation point is only slightly sarcastic; when the Milwaukee Public Schools sends out layoff notices in the next few weeks, I fully expect a rerun of last year’s ugly battle over who gets laid off and why.

As it turns out, last year’s layoffs were mostly rescinded. Specialists, like art and music teachers, were not so lucky as to be called back, but most others were.

But those same folk expect pink slips to head their way again. MPS had already announced plans to lay off more than 100 teachers before Governor Scott Walker’s budget left the district $74 million behind where it thought it would be. That’s another 750 teachers, if all the cuts come as layoffs.

MPS had already announced plans to lay off more than 100 teachers before Governor Scott Walker’s budget left the district $74 million behind where it thought it would be. That’s another 750 teachers, if all the cuts come as layoffs.

Here’s how it will get ugly: Why, someone will ask, are the young and energetic and hip teachers laid off and not the old and lazy and ineffective teachers? Why can’t we look at quality instead of seniority?

MPS had already announced plans to lay off more than 100 teachers before Governor Scott Walker’s budget left the district $74 million behind where it thought it would be. That’s another 750 teachers, if all the cuts come as layoffs.

As I noted recently, determining the quality of teachers in MPS is not easy. With every individual principal responsible for evaluation, there is no sure way to know whether the best-rated teacher in school A is really better than the worst-rated teacher at school B.

There’s a process in place to identify and shoo out any old teachers found to be lazy and ineffective, though again its use varies widely by principal. If more principals were serious about it, many of those young teachers might be a little safer right now.

But there are reasons to recommend an objective last-in, first-out layoff policy. Notably, there is overwhelming research showing that teachers get better the longer they teach. Though improvement levels off between five and 10 years into the job, statistically a veteran is more likely to be an effective teacher than a rookie.

Moreover, younger teachers tend to lay themselves off. Neither MPS nor MTEA, the teachers union, could provide me with Milwaukee-specific figures, but nationally up to 46 percent of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years. That number is higher in urban districts like Milwaukee.

If I’m running MPS, I want to hold on to those teachers who’ve shown a commitment to stick it out in the toughest district in the state. As much as the young and energetic and hip teachers are young and energetic and hip, they’re also a coin toss, as likely to move on before the next round of layoffs as hang around.

Given the Recent Unpleasantness, the whom-do-we-lay-off argument may be on its last legs, as protecting senior teachers from layoffs used to be bargained collectively. Older teachers are more expensive to employ; MPS pays for years of experience, for example, and we fogies are more likely to need medical care. The contract stops administrators from targeting experienced teachers in spite of that cost.

However, recruiting, hiring, mentoring, and training new teachers is not free, either. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future estimates that the annual cost of teacher turnover nationally is more than $7 billion.

Undoubtedly there will be some great teachers lost when the dust settles on the new MPS budget. The fault, though, lies not with seniority or collective bargaining or old, lazy teachers. Ultimately, we need new, different, fairer ways to provide and fund a quality education, ways to keep both youthful energy and experience in our schools.

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

Hotspotting could work for MPS

Every couple of months, it seems, Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn is on my TV telling me how much crime is down in the city. And he’s right; FBI statistics show that violent crime incidents were 12.5-percent lower in 2010 than in 2009, continuing a recent trend.

Credit for this is due, of course, to the efforts of the officers on the ground. But they have to share that credit with crime-mapping software, which allows decision-makers to identify crime hot spots and target the worst areas of the city effectively.

In Camden, N.J., according to a story in a January issue of the New Yorker, one enterprising doctor, Jeffrey Brenner, has taken hospital utilization data and other information to map medical hot spots in his city. By working with multiple agencies, he’s been able to identify the worst city blocks and reduce public-health costs through proactive treatment and other interventions.

I would send an army of social workers, employment counselors, doctors, adult literacy specialists, tutors, and even carpenters and bricklayers into the city’s hot spots.

For years, I have occasionally said or written that if I were king of the Milwaukee Public Schools, I would do something similar: combine crime, medical, court, social worker, housing, and—critically—school data sources to find the hot spots in Milwaukee. With some targets identified, I would send an army of social workers, employment counselors, doctors, adult literacy specialists, tutors, and even carpenters and bricklayers into the toughest city blocks to figure out what can be done to improve the lives of these families, so their children can be more successful in school.

I didn’t know when I first hatched the idea that it has a name. But now, thanks to people like Flynn and Brenner, I know this is called “hotspotting.” And I firmly believe that, with adequate funding, the right attitude, and safeguards for privacy and confidentiality, this intense intervention could be a tremendous boon to MPS and the city as a whole.

So I was heartened to see that MPS is pursuing “a common database for city families,” as MPS Superintendent Gregory Thornton put it in a recent op-ed, trying to get the city, county, courts, and schools all sharing information about our children and the world they live in.

“When families are caught up in a swirl of threatening issues,” he explained, “we do not get the best out of them or their kids.”

I have never had a student walk into my classroom with an untreated gunshot wound, as happened last month at Bradley Tech High School. But daily, I do see students who are hungry, homeless, abused, paroled, addicted, depressed, exhausted, pregnant, or worse. Many of them throw themselves wholeheartedly into their educations anyway, and succeed. Many of them don’t.

And by the time they are supposed to see me in high school, many Milwaukee children have already been consumed in the hot spots—dropped out, adjudicated, dead.

It’s time to come together as a community and put out those fires.

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

What not to do with excess MPS buildings

In January, Milwaukee Common Council President Willie Hines and north shore state Senator Alberta Darling proposed that Milwaukee Public Schools surrender control over selling its excess facilities. Because MPS doesn’t own its buildings (the city does, though MPS pays for upkeep and improvements), in a way their idea makes sense.

However, the Hines-Darling proposal came right after an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed not merely that MPS has a lot of empty buildings—this is hardly a secret—but rather that MPS was refusing to sell or lease the buildings to private schools or non-MPS charter schools.

In other words, Hines and Darling were spurred to action not by any drag these properties place on MPS and taxpayers, but by the challenge the district’s policies create for its competitors. In a news conference, Hines and Darling explicitly called for these empty buildings, about a dozen of them, to be sold or leased to high-performing non-MPS schools.

In reality, maintaining these properties is hardly a drag; the estimated $1 million cost is less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the MPS budget. The bigger drag is not selling them. Sales proceeds could provide for maintenance of in-use properties, payments to MPS pension funds, textbook or technology purchases, or other one-time expenses.

To be clear, I support the sale of these excess buildings. MPS doesn’t need them, doesn’t need the hassle of keeping them up, and could use the cash that a sale would bring. But I fully support the Milwaukee Board of School Directors in its policies about whom to sell the buildings to.

Not selling to competitors is a no-brainer. We have been told for 20 years that “competition” and “the marketplace” would help solve Milwaukee’s education woes, and we’ve seen the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program and charter schools proliferate around town. If officials from the government stepped in to the private sector and demanded that a business sell facilities to a competitor, there’d be outrage—particularly if those officials seemed to have a bias toward the competitor.

Senator Darling, as a state assemblywoman, voted repeatedly in favor of vouchers, though she joined the Assembly one month too late to vote on the bill that created the program. She has also proposed expanding vouchers to include schools outside of Milwaukee but in her district. Alderman Hines signed a letter last month urging new Governor Scott Walker to expand the voucher program, and his brother runs a school chartered though the city of Milwaukee that competes with MPS for students and taxpayer funds.

Beyond not wanting to help competitors, the board makes its first priority to sell excess properties to a private-sector buyer, not someone else in the public or nonprofit sector. That’s so that the properties are added to the tax rolls and do not remain tax-exempt.

According to city of Milwaukee archives, the number of tax-exempt properties in Milwaukee has increased more than 30 percent since 1985. Over the same time, residential taxpayers in Wisconsin went from paying less than 60 percent of all collected property taxes to nearly 75 percent, according to figures from the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Homeowners are feeling the squeeze of a shrinking commercial tax base.

Converting empty school buildings to neighborhood-appropriate commercial or entertainment centers can be win-win. Not only would MPS unload its empty buildings, but neighborhoods would also get some new development and the city’s commercial property tax base would expand, at least a little.

MPS could even make these sales at below market value, if necessary, to get the ball rolling. What they should not do is bend to the will of the Hines-Darling faction and surrender these properties in ways that only hurt taxpayers.

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

The next generation of school reform

School “reform” talk isn’t all bad. In fact, there’s one effort at reform that is bold and worth supporting, with the potential to remake “school” in a way that best meets students’ needs. It’s called the Partnership for Next Generation Learning, or PNxGL. PNxGL is a project of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), funded by the Stupski Foundation.

This nationwide nonprofit council believes that among the most significant factors behind the failures, real and perceived, of American public schools is that “school” as we know it is no longer the right vehicle for preparing students for adult life. Though most American students survive our system of “school” just fine, they do so despite that system being outdated and largely unconnected to what life looks like after graduation.

CCSSO Executive Director Gene Wilhoit put it this way: American schools were designed when knowledge was a scarce commodity. Today, American kids have all the knowledge in the world on the smart phones in their pockets.

So PNxGL is about starting over from the ground up with a new concept of “school.” Wisconsin competed for, and won, an opportunity to start innovation labs—networks of schools and districts finding new ways to use personnel, space, time, and other resources more effectively with today’s students. Ours is one of six PNxGL partner states so far. In September, more than 200 people representing 32 districts across southeast Wisconsin gathered in Milwaukee to kick off the project locally.

Those on board include the state teachers union and Wisconsin’s DPI, principals and teachers, and everyone in between. In an interview, Bruce Connolly, director of the Center for Education Innovation and Regional Economic Development and a key organizer of PNxGL in Wisconsin, emphasized the joint nature of this reform effort and the evolving partnerships.

“Wisconsin is in a good situation now,” Scott Jones, special assistant to the state superintendent, told me. “Districts are already excited and ready to go” with pilot projects, he said.

What those pilot projects ultimately will look like is in the process of being determined, but here’s what I’m hoping to see:

New student roles: Not every student has to be learning the same thing on the same day at the same rate as his or her peers. When the rest of a child’s world, from DVRs and video games to Facebook and many of the 21st-century economy’s jobs, is “on demand,” school should be, too. Trust—but guide!—students to create the best plan and pace to demonstrate mastery.

New teacher roles: Like students, teachers come equipped with different strengths. Expecting us all to do the same thing on the same day wastes potential. Teachers who are masters of content can deliver content; teachers who find ways to reach the toughest students can be coaches and advisors; teachers who know how to assess and create curriculum to meet student needs can be assessing students and assisting their colleagues in teaching them.

The community as a classroom: What better way to know that students are career-ready than to immerse students in careers? Students can see that yes, they will use this stuff in real life—if they see it used in real life. Credit toward graduation should be available for students who can demonstrate mastery in real-world work situations. “School” must be more than a building.

A redefinition of “graduation” itself: Students going to college need to be competent in subjects their colleges expect them to know, and employers expect minimum proficiencies, too. But who says that should always take 12 years, 180 days a year, six hours a day? For all the talk of standards, we still graduate students almost exclusively based on time spent, not mastery shown, and we stigmatize students (and punish their schools) who, for whatever reason, deviate from that rigid plan.

The pilot projects in Wisconsin and the other states, whatever their scope and shape, will be studied by the national council, and, if successful, become models for a complete rethinking of “school.” This may worry the Waiting for Superman crowd that thinks reform is beating down teachers and wearing out students with drills and tests. But I far prefer this idea of bringing everyone to the table and putting the distinct needs of today’s students first.

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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