For all the endless discussion about low student achievement in Milwaukee, not much attention has been paid to a key contributor to poor scores: student mobility. When students move from one school to another midyear, they often fall behind because their old school may have been studying entirely different material, leaving the transfer student at sea.
Typically, Milwaukee Public Schools has more mobility than any other system in the state. Back in 1996, a study done for PAVE, the group that supports Catholic and other private urban schools in Milwaukee, found just 6 percent of PAVE students transferred in midyear, compared to an incredible 30 percent of MPS students.
Today the rate is even higher: In the 2008-’09 year, the most recent for which data was available, statistics from MPS show 32 percent of its students moved during the school year. Much of this is due to socioeconomic factors: 85 percent of MPS students are eligible for free lunch and, by definition, from impoverished families, which are likely to change residences more frequently. Many of these students also have unstable family environments: “They may go from living with a cousin to living with a grandparent to a friend’s house,” notes Roseann St. Aubin, MPS director of communications.
The team of researchers overseen by the University of Arkansas who are studying school choice in Milwaukee recently did a report on student mobility in Milwaukee. It found a higher rate of school-switching by MPS students than by students at voucher schools. And when broken down by race, black students accounted for by far the most school-switching, compared to white and Hispanic students. This was arguably to be expected because the highest percentage of students are African-American; nonetheless, it suggests that school-switching in this city has the most impact on black students, who also tend to score the lowest on achievement tests.
“African-American students are more likely to leave a school for another option,” both in public and voucher schools, the study noted. School-switchers “always have lower average scores” than other students, the study found, which might also explain why they might want to switch though the study cautioned that it lacked the evidence to make any definitive conclusion at this time.
The high mobility of urban students raises a question whether schools in Milwaukee should begin to have a more standard curriculum from school to school. In MPS elementary schools, there may be as many as 20 different approaches to reading, St. Aubin estimates. The state Department of Public Instruction is pressuring MPS to start standardizing its curriculum, and MPS officials are committed to incorporating this rather major change in the coming school year.
Voucher schools are another matter entirely. When students from these schools transfer to MPS (and about 18 percent do in an average year, the recent University of Arkansas study found) “we can’t really tell where they’ve been curriculum-wise and what they’ve been learning,” St. Aubin notes. This is an argument for consistent curriculum between all schools funded by public dollars – MPS, choice and charter – St. Aubin says.
That, however, represents a major change in the Milwaukee approach. Ever since the school desegregation of the 1970s, magnet schools and wildly diverse curriculums were used to attract a racially diverse student body. The advent of charter and choice schools – whose appeal is sometimes based on their unique approach to education – added all the more to this alphabet soup of school curriculums. It also added more ways for students to switch schools, often going back and forth between public and voucher schools.
Having more curriculum choices can sometimes help meet the particular needs of a student. But it can also mean big gaps in learning when students transfer schools. Given how often students switch schools in Milwaukee, that is not a small problem. It may, in fact, be a recipe for academic disaster.
Medical College Ignores Central City
When asked to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Medical College of Wisconsin, its new president and chief executive officer, John R. Raymond, recently noted an “opportunity for improvement” to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “There’s an opportunity to address the needs of the medically underserved in Milwaukee.”
“Opportunity” is one way to put it. Another is to say MCW has done far too little to provide care to the most medically needy residents – those in the central city.
This is not the first time this issue has been raised. In a feature story on the rise of the medical college by this magazine in May 2008, MCW professor of pediatrics Earnestine Willis criticized the school for doing too little to serve low-income Milwaukeeans: “We have to be realistic about this and say, ‘Are we readily accessible for everyday citizens?’ I would say we have a ways to go.”
The regional medical center that surrounds MCW on the county grounds led to the death of a huge infrastructure of hospitals in the central city beginning in the 1970s, making medical care less accessible to poor people. MCW has made some occasional efforts to connect to city health clinics, but there is still an “opportunity” to do much, much more.
Such outreach, by the way, could also help MCW gain more state funding and lead to lower health care costs for Milwaukee. As the magazine reported in 2008, just 1 percent of the college’s budget comes from state funding, compared to 11 percent of the University of Wisconsin Medical School’s budget (because MCW is a private college, its state funding is indirect, going to defray student tuition and the like). But UW is far from the low income, urban families in cities like Milwaukee or Racine who have the greatest need for medical care. If MCW truly served the needs of the urban poor, it could make an argument that it, the state’s No. 2 school, is deserving of a significant increase in public funding.
Because MCW currently has so little state funding, it makes up for this by grabbing revenue that is charged on the patient bills of hospitals – like Froedtert and Children’s Hospital – affiliated with it. Some $400 million of MCW’s annual budget comes from this “clinical revenue,” as it is officially termed. This in turn jacks up medical costs for all of us, including local businesses that decry the cost of medical care in Milwaukee.
Of course, Milwaukee’s business leaders have a fair amount of clout with legislators. If they lobbied for more state funding for MCW, they might just be successful. But only if MCW can show that, even though a private school, it does a far better job than the state’s public medical school of providing care to the medically underserved. This might just be a situation where doing the right thing for poor people will also have tangible advantages for all of us in metro Milwaukee.
The Buzz
-There was a time when the retirement or death of a public official was greeted with unanimous praise by members of both parties. So it almost was in the reaction to U.S. Rep. David Obey’s retirement, with classy statements by GOP stalwarts like U.S. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner. One sour exception was state Republican Party executive director Mark Jefferson, who declared that Obey should be remembered as one of the “most partisan, cantankerous members of Congress in our state’s history if not our nation.” Aside from the sheer stupidity of the remark (has Jefferson gone through the entire history of Congress and proven Obey was the most cantankerous and partisan member in history?) it is incredibly mean-spirited. And completely unnecessary as Obey is retiring.
-No one can say the school choice study overseen by the University of Arkansas isn’t thorough. Now in its third year, with more than a dozen researchers contributing, it has so far released 20 separate reports, some done by as many as six different researchers.
-The Arkansas study on school-switching found that 45 percent of MPS parents have never heard of the voucher program. If they did, you can bet there would be far more seeking vouchers and far more pressure to increase the cap. And yet the study continues to show not much difference in results between public and choice schools.
-Will the proposed deal to sell lake water to Waukesha result in disastrous environmental results? NewsBuzz reports on a potential problem the media has so far ignored.
-And the sex scandal hasn’t killed Tiger Woods, but his golfing just might. So sayeth the Sports Nut.
