Great Schools? Great Ad
Milwaukee’s Charlie Sykes (props to Milwaukee), has the school choice TV ad currently running in an unknown number of WI media markets -- sure beats the bejesus out of those say-nothing, self-serving, inane Great Schools ads WEAC airs with great repetition.
The ad is a base-clearing shot over the deep center field fence.
School choice is one of those 80-20 issues that both motivates the GOP base and plays well with moderate suburban voters.
And it’s those suburban voters that an incumbent Democrat governor so desperately needs; what with being stuck in the mid 40s on reelect after defeating an accidental governor with about the same percentage.
The Doyle team misses policy dude Kirk Brown, a former partner of Paul Maslin, Howard Dean’s pollster.
How brilliant was it to place your campaign pollster on the inside, sitting at your side, whispering public opinion numbers with each zig-zag that the Republican legislature sent over? Very. And he is clearly missed.
WEAC is sure to respond to this school choice shot, but Team Doyle seems to be struggling; which may be why he skipped-out to Ireland.
4 Comments:
I live in the Milwaukee's Sherman Park neighborhood and spend a lot of time doing volunteer work at the choice school my church operates. My son will go to school there when he turns five. The choice program is one of the best things that's happened to Milwaukee in the past ten years.
I've contacted Governor Doyle's office and members of his staff about the cap several times and I believe them when they say that they truly want to lift the cap, but want to make sure that there's adequate accountability from choice schools (Does anyone really believe that any yahoo should be able to open a school in a vacant storefront and collect $6,300 per kid no questions asked?) and make sure that the Milwaukee Public Schools don't get shortchanged in the process (We couldn't teach 35 first graders in one class to read at my choice school, why would we expect MPS to be able to do it?).
I pray every day that the Republicans and Democrats will be able to find a way to compromise on the choice cap. The families in my neighborhood need it desperately.
In the meantime, I hope that Brian and Charlie are very comfortable sitting back gleefully in their comfortable upper middle class neighborhoods admiring how they've been able to use poor kids from Milwaukee to put Governor Doyle in political box.
You should be proud!
sherman: lets start with accountability in the MPS, all right? I'm not going to try to repeat my entire comment from the Above the Belt blog, and I'm not aware of how to link from one to the other. But go there please. And while there note that interloper I think had a comment remarkably like yours - the same "I volunteer in the Choice Schools, but I'd like to sacrifice Choice on the altar of state accountability" line.
My short take on this is: name an MPS school that's shut down in the past 30 years due to the decline - it is now in the 30% range - in minority student graduation. And you want to transfer this vaunted accountability onto Choice schools?
Haven't Choice schools - in the few short years of the program's existence - in fact gone under when they've non-performed?
And parents after all have the power to CHOOSE to pull their kids from the non-performers, as you will apparently CHOOSE to send your kid to a school you approve of next year.
Remarkably enough, kids in Choice schools have parents who are involved in their kid's education , and Choice gives them a power they would not have with the lame and incompetent Leviathan that is MPS. This, I argue, gives low income families of Choice children more hope, more sense of a future, than families in MPS.
And Choice Schools do have testing, lots of it, just not Jim Doyle's and DPI/WEAC's. Doyle is using accountability as a thin veil to justify withholding his support and to kill Choice.
For the teachers.
Liberals, real liberals, ought to be ashamed.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The MPS graduation rate in 2004-05 was 64%, not 30%.
Get it right, getitright.
QUOTE: "Haven't Choice schools - in the few short years of the program's existence - in fact gone under when they've non-performed?"
Answer: We don't know because there's no yardstick to measure their academic performance. Schools publicize data that look good and suppress data that look bad. Just like that proposed longitudinal study that would allow choice schools to self-select in & out.
QUOTE: "Choice gives them a power they would not have with the lame and incompetent Leviathan that is MPS."
Even if the choice program didn't exist, there would still be lots of choices open to MPS pupils, including open enrollment, the Chapter 200 program, MPS charter schools, non-instrumentality charter schools, and publicly-funded virtual schools. So it's not like every student's hands are tied just because they attend MPS. And, some MPS schools, like some choice schools, do a good job educating students.
GetItRight:
I am a Milwaukee Public Schools teacher, and a vehement opponent of the voucher plan. I'd like to take up your challenge.
In the mid-90s (before I started teaching), several schools--including the high school where I currently teach--were shut down, reconstituted with new administrators, some new teachers, and some new students due to performance problems. In the ten years since my school went through that, we have more than doubled our graduation rate and significantly reduced both our drop out rate and our truancy rate.
In the past several years, three high schools were selected for phasing out due to performance data. Within another few years, North Division, Marshall, and Washington high schools will be no more. Pulaski, my own school, and most of the other comprehensive high schools will also be radically different, depending on whether we get the Gates money to pay for the redesigns.
You ask, "Haven't Choice schools - in the few short years of the program's existence - in fact gone under when they've non-performed?" The answer is, generally, no. A 2003 study by the non-partisan public policy institute showed that one school up to that point had closed because parents abandoned it. Further, the same study showed that much of the performance data gathered by choice schools never made it into the hands of parents. A grand total of two schools have been closed by the DPI for not meeting the barest minimum definition of "school."
The state puts MPS's African-American graduation rate at over 50% for the last couple of years.
I also ask why you think parents in MPS--with more than 200 public (including charter) programs available--can't CHOOSE from among the public schools, where there is demonstrable accountability and vast amounts of data available to parents and the public.
Doyle is not trying to kill choice, but to offer more to the 96,000 MPS students who will not be in a voucher school next year. The Republicans, who were falling all over themselves to starve these same public school students' classrooms with their state budget, are showing their true colors. The multi-million dollar pro-voucher movement doesn't just give to them out of the goodness of its heart.
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