Yellow Bus

When I attended the Board of Directors meeting of Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) last week, I was curious just how my fellow directors were reacting to all the noise coming out of Madison. A couple board members were right there with Governor Walker wanting to do away with collective bargaining. But several other members had gone to state capitol rallies and stood side-by-side with the public employees in opposing the Governor’s budget repair bill. Around the state, reactions were coming back to WASB. Some school boards stated that they would withdraw from WASB if the organization sided with…

. (1) Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward Into the rotunda of Death Marched the Republicans. “Forward the Right Brigade! “Charge for their pensions!” he said: Into the rotunda of Death Marched the Republicans.                 (2) “Forward the Right Brigade!” Was there an official dismay’d? Not tho’ a legislator knew, Someone had blundered: Theirs not to make reply Theirs but to vote and lie: Into the rotunda of Death Marched the Republicans.                 (3) Citizens to the right of them, Citizens to the left of them, Citizens in front of them Volley’d and thunder’d; Stormed at…

When the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) announced its plan to divide Milwaukee Public Schools into four districts, its local affiliate fired back. “The first time WEAC provided MTEA leaders with any information about their proposal was through a phone call Monday,” said the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association (MTEA) in a press release. The MTEA publically opposes the  breakup of MPS. The MTEA and WEAC have a long history of family disputes. The MTEA actually disaffiliated from the larger WEAC family beginning in the mid 1970s to become the largest independent teacher union in the country. They only patched up…

Previous Milwaukee school boards actually lowered the bar for MPS graduates. They canceled writing and math proficiency tests and decreased credits needed to graduate. We were going in the wrong direction. When I got on the board, I called for making all our students college-ready. MPS should require all our graduates to take the ACT college entrance exam. Six states now required that; I wanted MPS to join them. Up to that point, state leaders shamelessly trumpeted that Wisconsin was number one on the ACT, Wisconsin having the highest ACT scores in the nation. They ignored the fact that a…

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker outlined his educational agenda to the delegates of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) on Friday at Milwaukee’s Hilton Hotel. Walker told the assembly that he loved teachers and remembered some of the most important teachers in his life and the lives of his own children. So you know that Walker said a lot of things that teachers probably didn’t like. Right away, he talked about making it easier to fire bad teachers and defended pay for performance measurements. To his credit, he recognized that we should not judge teachers on a single test. Teachers…

In the 1981 cult movie classic, Escape from New York, the city is so devastated by crime, corruption, and mismanagement that Manhattan Island is turned into a prison colony. The bridges to the city are mined and police guard the shoreline to keep criminals from escaping. The movie’s abandonment of the city was just ahead of reality. Many thought New York could not survive.  In 1975, the city was virtually bankrupt, and the state took over much of the city’s day-to-day operations; the mayor was pretty much a figure head. The state didn’t do any better running the city than…

When Tumbleweed Southwest Grill built on South 27th Street, it got a covenant on the neighboring property barring it from being sold to a Mexican restaurant. So when Chili’s was built next door, Tumbleweed sued because Chili’s sold a lot of Mexican food. Eventually Tumbleweed went out of business. Whether the Chili’s operation had anything to do with Tumbleweed’s closing is questionable since Tumbleweed closed a number of restaurants about the same time. Ultimately, Tumbleweed got one million dollars in an out of court settlement on the violation of its covenant. The Tumbleweed-Chili’s settlement appeared in the same edition of…

Just before the movie, “The Social Network,” hit the theaters, Facebook founder, Mark Zukerberg, gave $100 million for educational reform to the Newark schools. Skeptics of Zukerberg’s donation thought this billionaire was trying to remake himself much in the way that John D. Rockefeller did a century ago  – use every dirty trick to kill your competition, then, when you’ve made your millions, give some of it away to remake your image. Education appears to be the charity of choice right now. Political moderate Bill Gates has given millions for small high schools and teacher development. Sam Walton’s family supports…

A poor principal can quickly destroy a good school. Even the best teachers will either retreat behind their classroom doors or leave the school entirely. But a great principal can turn a school around. Mediocre teachers all of a sudden become good teachers. Despair turns to hope.  Trowbridge Elementary was in danger of closing. Its student population had dropped to 180 students. The superintendent flirted with merging Trowbridge and Dover Elementary and then backed away. Instead he changed principals. When Tom Matthews became the Trowbridge principal in fall of 2007, he found a teaching staff that was beaten down. I…

Last month a Marinette high school student took his own life when police rushed into a classroom after hearing shots fired.  It will be some time before all the details come to light, and we may never know the exact cause of why this student took hostages at his high school or why he decided to end his life. Nor do we know whether school officials could have done something to prevent this incident. It is entirely possible that nothing more could have been done. Nevertheless, an all too frequent statement was made in interviews with people in the Marinette…