Yellow Bus

Republicans want to throw as much water as they can to tap down the recall flames. While cuts to collective bargaining and school funding are the main fuels for the recall fire, they don’t want to add any additional combustible material. Republicans certainly don’t want to take on any additional tinder with extending the school voucher system. Last year, along with expanding vouchers to Racine, Republicans created a mechanism for the expansion of vouchers to other communities without a vote of the state legislature. All a community had to do was to meet four criteria: second class city, lower equalized…

The nationally recognized Springboard college prep program may be coming to as many as five MPS schools in the next few years. Prospective schools are Audubon, Bay View, Meir, Morse-Marshall, and Wisconsin Conservatory of Life Long Learning. Springboard is a program of the College Board which also administers the SAT college entrance exam and curriculum for Advance Placement classes. Springboard is well established out East: in New York City, Buffalo, Baltimore, and most of Florida, to name a few. The program is grades 6-12, and most schools in the program fit that grade configuration. All five MPS schools in the mix…

How many layers of the onion do you want to peel back? Originally Madison’s Urban League proposed a charter school only for young men. When sex discrimination charges were leveled at the proposal, the League modified its proposal to include young women but to educate all students in single-sex classrooms. Last month the Madison School Board voted down the proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy. The League charged the school board with racism. I wish it could be that simple. Madison’s teachers opposed a charter school staffed by non-union teachers. Teachers were the main opponent to the proposal. Citizens who supported…

Carver Academy sits in the middle of the Brewers Hill neighborhood just north of downtown. By every measure, this k-8 school is failing. Its students score poorly on achievement tests. Few neighborhood students attend the school. And every year a large percentage of the students leave the school only to be replaced by new students the following year. In December, the superintendent recommended closing the school and expanding the popular eastside Maryland Avenue Montessori program to the Carver site. The lower grades would stay at Maryland. The upper grades would be transferred to Carver. Both sites would operate as one…

At the December school board meeting, the Milwaukee board closed several small high schools. Others were folded into larger programs or stripped of their charter status. Some small high schools were left on life supports. Closing are SUPAR, WORK Institute, and Wisconsin Career Academy. The School of Entrepreneurship lost its charter and will be returned to regular status. Community High School will be required to move once more, four times in eight years. Chances are some other small high schools will be gone by the end of next school year, perhaps the year after. This is an end of an…

Wisconsin Conservatory of Lifelong Learning (WCLL) is tucked away on the far south side in a neighborhood surround by the Greenfield suburb on three sides. The school has an innovative kindergarten through twelfth grade, year-round program with good academic achievement. But a high percentage of its students come from the Milwaukee’s north side. In order to save transportation costs, the administration is recommending that we move the program closer to where most the students live. The building of choice is the empty Sarah Scott Middle School, just north of Marquette University. However, when parents packed into small gym of WCLL…

The state Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, created an independent Milwaukee County comptroller to be elected by the people. I will give you ten seconds to tell me what a comptroller does — Pause, pause, pause. I’m not hearing anything from many of you. There are a whole host of elected offices that most political experts say don’t make sense. In the City of Milwaukee, the suggestion has been made to go in the opposite direction, to make the office of treasurer and the city comptroller one position and/or make the positions appointed. The same goes for some statewide offices.…

 School Wars by Melissa Benn is truly a remarkable book. Although Benn is writing about the British school system, her audience is clearly international. So the reader quickly learns that British public schools are really private schools, and Benn uses the term private school as much as possible. Academies are like American charter schools. Free schools resemble our vouchers. Benn laments the growing privatization of British schools as large for-profit corporations begin to find their way into the British educational system. Some are even international with Edison Learning now on both sides of the big pond. And Benn does not confine…

When the chairs of the Wisconsin senate and assembly education committees spoke before a state school board conference, they knew they were going to get tough questions. Senator Luther Olsen (R-Ripon) and Representative Steve Kestell (R-Elkhart Lake) limited their remarks to the impact of the new state budget. They told members of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) that cuts were necessary because previous state budgets were balanced through onetime monies, raids on other funds, and accounting tricks. There were no magic tricks left.  Both recognized the “tools” given to school boards didn’t solve all the school boards’ financial…

In a closed door meeting, Superintendent Thornton let the cat (or moose) out of the bag. Just maybe he is going to Anchorage, Alaska. I off handedly pointed out to him the superintendent’s job was open in Anchorage. He responded, “I know, people are contacting me about job openings all the time.” He then proceeded to ask me if it snowed much in Anchorage. I told him that the city is pretty close to the coast, so the city proper doesn’t get that much snow. He seemed pleased. I also told him that my sister and her husband live in…