After the first round of judging, Wisconsin placed 26^th out of 41 applicants – a low score, but ahead of states like Arizona, California, and Oklahoma, and comparable to Hawaii, who came in twenty points ahead but still failed to qualify as a Finalist. Just six months later, the Badger State had dropped to 27^th in a smaller field of 36 candidates – and was left in the dust by all of the aforementioned states when it came to improving their national standing.

All four states put Wisconsin in their rearview mirrors in Phase II with drastic improvements. Arizona, California, and Hawaii made the cut for the finals as their scores rose between 79 and 174 points. Oklahoma, despite a 97 point increase, finished one spot away from qualifying. Over this same period, Wisconsin’s application only improved by 27 points, which left the state languished in the bottom 25% of all applicants.

This table showcases the strides made in the categories that Wisconsin had the weakest scores. Nearly all of the states faced similar challenges going into Phase II, but these competitors were able to blow Wisconsin away in fields like accommodating and influencing the hiring/placement of great teachers and administrators as well as securing statewide buy-in to reform. While these states made strides that moved them up the ranks, Wisconsin’s relative inability to reform kept the state from joining them.

The results of Arizona, California, Hawaii, and Oklahoma prove that states with mediocre or even horrible results in Phase I of RTTT could become Finalists in Phase II. Despite lots of conjecture and puffery, Wisconsin simply did not do enough to keep up with these success stories. In the end, a weak history of reform struck again, and an application stuffed with hollow change failed to hold weight against other states whose commitments were solid.

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Despite the promise of drastic improvement from Governor Jim Doyle and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s overall score only increased by 27 points, allowing other states to jump ahead. Many of the problems that reviewers had with the state’s application stemmed from teacher involvement and qualification.

Sticking points on Wisconsin’s latest application included:

• A refusal to tie student performance to teacher and administrator evaluations;
• The inability to use this performance data to inform administrative decisions;
• Tepid Local Educational Agency (LEA) buy-in to race to the top reform efforts; and
• The inability to train effective teachers and place these teachers where they are needed most.

Wisconsin lost more than 70 points in these areas, essentially disqualifying the state from consideration. With these deductions in place, even a perfect score across the rest of the rubric would have put this application in 15^th position – barely in the top 50 percent. These drawbacks from personnel issues essentially stripped the state of its chance to earn a piece of a $4 billion federal education fund.

Aside from teacher and administration issues, reviewer comments frequently touched on common themes of discord, including limited innovative reform to turn around urban schools, an insufficient presentation regarding methods to measure student growth, and a weak centralized testing program that made state standards difficult to interpret. Vague language and insufficiently detailed planning left reviewers skeptical over the adoption of many of the processes that Race to the Top funding was meant to ensure. Other significant grading deductions can be tied to problems such as issues with the achievement gap between student groups, as well as innovation of charter school laws and advancement.

While the state’s application actually scored slightly higher in its second attempt, it was not nearly enough to keep pace with the progress of competitors. States that had been in the same boat as Wisconsin – and even those who scored significantly worse – were able to either close the gap in the rankings or pass the state entirely in their second applications. Amongst the bottom 50% of RTTT applicants from Phase One, Wisconsin’s improvements placed them just 10th out of 13 qualifying states for Phase Two. Only Michigan, Missouri, and Alabama had a lower rate of progress between the two iterations.

As a result, states that Wisconsin had previously outperformed, such as California and Arizona, earned spots as Finalists while residents here were forced to wonder what went wrong for a second straight competition.

Despite having a solid presentation at face value, Wisconsin’s Race to the Top application failed thanks to a lack of accountability and support from local teachers, an inability to tie student performance to administrative decisions, a lack of recent innovation and reform, and a vague application that left questions about how successfully changes could be implemented.

As a result, the state missed out on $250 million in proposed funding that would have changed education in Wisconsin and helped local and state entities keep up with the rest of the country. A timid approach, governed by a reluctance to commit to meaningful reform, left the state in the back of the pack in this national grant competition. Thus, Wisconsin’s race to educational innovation ended nowhere near the top.

By Christian D’Andrea
MacIver Institute Educational Policy Analyst

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Matthew Ladner, Ph.D.

August 2010

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Florida lawmakers began a comprehensive education reform effort in 1999, combining accountability, transparency, and parental choice with other far-reaching changes. In March of 2009, the MacIver Institute released Florida’s Education Reform Lessons for Wisconsin and the Nation. This report demonstrated that Florida made far larger gains in academic achievement from the late 1990s until 2007.

In March 2010, the National Assessment of Educational Progresa (NAEP) released new results for 2009. These results show the scale of Florida’s stunning success, and reinforce the case for Wisconsin policymakers to make influential changes.
This study documents how the 2009 NAEP results further strengthen the case for Florida-style reforms in Wisconsin. These scores showcase the divergent paths of recent educational trends in each state. Where Wisconsin once led handily, the state’s entire population is now trails Florida’s Hispanic students in fourth grade reading scores. This group of students, which was once saddled with lagging test scores, currently outscores Wisconsin’s entire class of fourth graders when it comes to literacy.

Building upon the previous study, this report explains in some detail why Florida’s reforms, while benefiting all students, have been especially beneficial to disadvantaged students. For example, Florida’s method for grading schools looks not only at students’ overall performance and overall gains, but also considers gains among the 25 percent of students with the lowest scores. Importantly, those bottom 25 percent of students count in all three categories: against the overall scores, the overall gains, and their own gains. This method provides a very strong incentive for schools to help their lowest-performing students make academic progress.

This paper details the key components of Florida’s K-12 education reform strategy and explains why the adoption of the Florida reforms in Wisconsin would aid all children, especially disadvantaged students.

Click here to access the full Report.

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[Madison, Wisc..] For the second year in a row, a comparison of the educational systems in Wisconsin and Florida indicates policy makers in the Badger State have a lot to learn from their Southern peers.

“Americans of all philosophical backgrounds believe in providing equality of opportunity, and equipping all children with the skills necessary for success,” said Dr. Matthew Ladner, author of a new report issued by the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy. “People everywhere talk about reducing racial achievement gaps, but Florida is actually doing something about it.”

The MacIver Report suggests Wisconsin follow Florida’s lead in several areas:

• Providing transparency in the evaluation of schools and teachers
• Empowering parents to make and finance educational choices
• Addressing an array of issues through effective literacy instruction

Focusing on literacy, the Report argues, helps close the achievement gap between minority students and their Caucasian peers. Better performing students stay in school longer therefore a commitment to effective literacy instruction also addresses the problem of a high drop out rate, according to the report.

“Where Wisconsin once led handily, the state’s entire population is now trails Florida’s Hispanic students in fourth grade reading scores,” reads the MacIver Report. “This group of students, which was once saddled with lagging test scores, currently outscores Wisconsin’s entire class of fourth graders when it comes to literacy.”

The report echoes Ladner’s 2009 findings for MacIver, which focused on academic standards, alternative certification and school choice.

“When we commissioned this ongoing comparison, we had hoped to find results that would spur debate and lead to real efforts to improve education in Wisconsin,” said MacIver President Brett Healy. “We now have even more data to back up our suggestion that Wisconsin should emulate Florida’s model and implement similar systemic reforms.”

The MacIver Report details how several other states are already following Florida’s lead.

“Lawmakers in Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana and Oklahoma have passed Florida-inspired policies between 2009 and 2010. New York City has drawn from this experience – adopting A-F grades for schools, curtailing social promotion and embracing more options for parents,” said Ladner. “Georgia lawmakers have passed reforms based upon the policies of their successful southern neighbor. Wisconsin should as well.”

The John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy is a Wisconsin-based think tank that believes in free markets, individual freedom and responsible government. MacIver commissioned Dr. Matthew Ladner, the Vice President of Research for the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, to author the Report.

The Report can be accessed here.

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Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) highlights the state’s deficiency when it comes to educating African American students versus Caucasian students in the state. When it comes to eighth grade reading and math, Wisconsin has ranked amongst the top five states when it comes to the achievement gap since 2000 – and in seven out of eight results, ranks either first or second in the country.

The NAEP data – often referred to as “the nation’s report card” due to its use in comparing public education between states – showcased above average scores for white students, coupled with below average scores for black students using the same mechanisms. In each year during the 2000s, Wisconsin’s achievement gap has been at least 23% higher than the national average – culminating with increases of 45% in math and 46% in reading during the 2007 tests.

These staggering gaps have emerged as one of the most pressing problems with public education in Wisconsin today.

While the achievement gap, according to NAEP data, has been reduced recently, Wisconsin is still lagging behind the rest of the country. Despite focused efforts to close this gap, the state lags behind the national average of improvement on 8th grade math scores, meaning that while Wisconsin has closed its achievement gap slightly, its African American students have lagged behind the improvement made by the rest of the country over this time span. Conversely, African American achievement is slightly ahead of the national rate of improvement in 8th grade reading scores.

An uptick in scores between 2007 and 2009 are a light of hope, but not uncommon in the state’s string of failure when it comes to NAEP scores. Dramatic jumps in test scores have not been sustainable in the past, and backsliding after significant gains is a legitimate possibility to happen again. A nine point jump in math scores for black students in 1992 was followed by a five point drop – and these results didn’t reflect significant improvement from that year until the most recent scores from 2009. A seven point jump in reading scores amongst the same students comes with its own caveats as well – this increase came after a five point drop, and shows just a two point improvement from 2005 and a four point improvement since the test’s adoption in 1998.

Wisconsin’s achievement gap is not a new issue, and the reflection of nearly 20 years of federal testing data showcases this. Though recent results may give a glimpse of a light at the end of the tunnel, past performances indicate that it’s too soon to be optimistic.

Even with pinpointed efforts, the state still lags behind the national average when it comes to educating its African American population. As the diverse growth of the student population expands, this is a problem that cannot continue.

By Christian D’ Andrea
MacIver Institute Education Policy Analyst

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[Madison, Wisc...] Virtual school advocates in Wisconsin say this year’s lockout of would-be online public charter students continues to anguish hundreds of families across the state. So they will be pleading with the next legislature to change state law that caps enrollment in these schools.

“The arbitrary and onerous enrollment cap is needlessly impacting the lives of hundreds of Wisconsin families,” said Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families’ Vice President Julie Thompson. “The teacher’s union and some politicians demanded this outrageous cap, and the families are paying the price—imagine all through this summer, hundreds of families didn’t know where their children will be attending school in September.”

Because of the cap on enrollment, nearly more than 1,700 children were locked out of the public school of their choice and had to wait for others on the list to drop off before being able to enroll in their chosen school. As of today, dozens of students who hope to enroll in one of Wisconsin’s online public charter schools still remain on a state-mandated waiting list.

The Coalition explained how the enrollment cap is administered:

• Families who wanted to enroll their children in virtual public charter schools in Wisconsin for the 2010-11 school year submitted their open enrollment applications to virtual schools in February.
• After returning students and their siblings take their spaces (according to state law these applicants have priority) new applicants are admitted to the extent that space is available under the enrollment cap.
• Because of the enrollment cap, DPI had to determine if the number of new applicants to virtual schools would cause the number of students enrolled to exceed the 5,250 cap.  Because that cap was reached, the new applicants who were allowed to enroll have to be selected at random.
• DPI reported that there were 4,151 new applicants for the 2010-11 school year, more new applicants than there were spaces available for new applicants under the enrollment cap.
• Taking into consideration returning students, in May the state law only allowed 2,395 new applicants to receive firm approval to enroll. DPI told the schools which specific new applicants should receive firm approval letters then.
• The 1,756 new applicants whose applications were not firmly approved were placed on a waiting list this spring.
• Since May, several families opt for more certainty and decide not to send their children to the virtual school of their choice.

The parent advocates say this enrollment cap has had a severe impact on families across Wisconsin.

“Supplies have been shipped and were in our homes weeks ago,” explains Thompson, whose daughter has been a student in online schools for 7 years. “Online offerings to prepare new families for the school year were offered over the summer, but everyone who was still on the waiting list missed out.”

Thompson said local school districts who offer the virtual school option are also left in a bind because of the cap.

“Schools have had to hire and assign staff and even now teachers could have to accommodate significant increases in their student numbers,” said Thompson.   “The only reason this enrollment cap exists is because of the disproportionate power wielded by the state teachers’ union.”

According to statistics from the State Department of Public Instruction, as of today: 1,670 students on the waiting list could be offered spaces in the virtual schools, which leaves 86 still locked out of the public school of their choice.

“Hundreds of families gave up hope during this waiting period,” said Thompson. “The state is needlessly causing pain and grief for children whose only crime is their desire to attend a public school about which they are actually excited. Imagine that.”

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Wisconsin’s two largest public universities are highlighted in a new report that assails excess management costs in higher education.

The study,  Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education was published by the Goldwater Institute, a self-described independent government watchdog located in Arizona.

“Universities have pressured students, taxpayers, and private donors for more money to improve the quality of higher education, and then these schools have hired far more administrators than teachers,” said Dr. Jay P. Greene, one of the study’s authors and a Goldwater Institute senior fellow. “Hiring nearly three times as many administrators as professors probably isn’t what people have in mind when they agree to give universities more money.”

Greene also heads the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Among the report’s findings:

• At the University of Wisconsin – Madison, the number of full-time administrators ‎per 100 students increased by 32 percent between 1993 and 2007, while full-time employees engaged ‎in instruction, research, and service increased by only 5 percent.
• UW-Madison, the UW System’s flagship university, employs 14.4 full-time ‎administrators per 100 students, compared to only 7.4 teachers and researchers.
• At the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee the number of full-time administrators per 100 ‎students grew by 2 percent between 1993 and 2007, while the number of full-time teachers, ‎researchers, and service-providers actually declined by 3 percent.
• UWM employs 3.6 full-time ‎administrators per 100 students, compared to 3.5 teachers and researchers.

Nationally, between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent.

Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.

The report’s authors assert that a significant reason for the administrative bloat is that students pay only a small portion of administrative costs. They note that a lion’s share of most universities’ resources come from the federal and state governments as well as private gifts and fees for non-educational services. The large and increasing rate of government subsidy for higher education facilitates administrative bloat by insulating students from the costs, they say.

“If there are any universities realizing economies of scale to reduce their costs per student as their enrollments grow, there is no sign of it among these leading universities,” the report concludes.

Reducing government subsidies would do much to make universities more efficient, the authors argue.

Click here for a copy of the report.

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Each student in the Milwaukee Public School system accounts for $15,373 in funding for the 2010-2011 school year. This is a 54.2 percent increase over where this figure stood in 1990. This escalation comes thanks to boosts in state aid and property tax support, which both showed substantial increases in this time span – including a 133 percent raise in Nominal State Aid.

While per-pupil spending has gone up by over 50 percent through the past two decades, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing data shows a decrease in math scores of 1.8 percent amongst Wisconsin’s fourth grade students. Reading scores using the same testing mechanism tracked a positive trend of just 6.6 percent over this same span.

Milwaukee, a city that has historically produced low test results on the state’s standardized Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Examination (WKCE) exams, is likely lagging behind these results, which show minimal gains, at best.

Public school students in Milwaukee will have an annual cost of $15,373 for the 2010-2011 school year–a high cost for the below average academic performance than has become standard for MPS.

The study shows that residents of Milwaukee, and indeed the entire State of Wisconsin continue to make significant investments in the education of Milwaukee’s public school students.

The study also supports the argument that taxpayers are not seeing a healthy return on that investment.

By Christian D’Andrea
Education Reform Analyst, MacIver Institute

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Last week, Obama signed a bailout bill for the states’ Medicaid and education budgets. Like Milwaukee’s recent flooding disaster declaration, there is plenty of money for the government to be found. The taxpayers, however, get shorted.

Of the $24 billion in “Son of Stimulus,” $16.1 billion is for education spending, ostensibly to prevent teacher layoffs. Wisconsin’s share of that education money is around $180 million.

The money for “Son of Stimulus” comes from a tax increase on business and a “cut” in the federal food stamp program. Except it isn’t really a cut. “Son of Stimulus” merely shortens by one year the expiration date of the expansion of the food stamp program under the Democrats’ original federal stimulus program. So really the Democrats in Congress and President Obama have merely shifted the borrowed money from one pocket to the other.

The new federal education money, of course, is counter-productive. It will not reward those school districts that were able to control costs successfully, including teacher compensation.

The “Son of Stimulus” will reward those districts like Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) where the union has been intransigent on making concessions on health care benefits that would have allowed the district to avoid teacher layoffs. MPS planned to layoff 393 teachers this fall if the union failed to agree to a switch to a less expensive health plan that would have saved the district $48 million. In June 482 teachers were laid off by MPS but since then 89 have been called back.

The teachers union in Milwaukee also made news last week when it was announced they were suing MPS to have coverage of prescriptions for Viagra restored to their health plan. The little blue pills were dropped from MPS teacher health plans in 2005. If coverage of the erectile dysfunction medication is restored it is estimate the cost to the district will be $786,000. (That could keep a lot of teachers on the payroll, something about which the union seems to care not a bit).

As the MacIver Institute’s communications director Brian Fraley said on Sunday Insight this week, “You’re never going to get teachers’ unions to negotiate to make concessions to pay for health insurance, or whatever, as long as we know that Uncle Federal Government is there to bail them out.”

There was every incentive for the Democrats in Congress to pass the “Son of Stimulus.” Money from the bill goes directly to fund a core constituency, the teachers’unions. Aside from the votes the unions provide, the money will result in more teachers paying union dues. In turn, the unions will be able to support Democratic candidates more, and the symbiotic relationship continues, unabated.

The National Right to Work Committee estimates that local unions’dues could mean $40 million for the teachers unions nationally. The Wall Street Journal says a reasonable estimate of the percentage of teacher salaries that goes to union dues is between 1% and 1.5%. The teachers unions in Wisconsin could see between $1.8 million and $2.7 million in additional dues money, money that will ultimately benefit the Democrats.

This marks the first time that President Obama has returned to Wisconsin since the second Wisconsin failure in the federal Race to the Top education grant program. Obama originally announced the creation of the Race to the Top program in Madison last year when it was believed the president was actively courting the reluctant Barrett to run for governor. In exchange for all the borrowed federal money the president is bringing today, it would be understandable if the president asked Barrett why Wisconsin has failed to do well in the Race to the Top competition.

Fortunately for Barrett, the MacIver Institute has already created a report detailing the failure of the Democrats in the legislature, the governor and the educational establishment to make the reforms necessary for Wisconsin to be competitive for Race to the Top money.

So now, perhaps Barrett could explain to the President that while the extra federal money is nice even as it drives the country further into debt, the money has just alleviated some of the pressure on Wisconsin’s schools to reform.

Much like the campaign cash he’ll help raise today, more money can’t guarantee enhanced performance.

With the exception of funding Viagra coverage, of course.

By James Wigderson
Special Guest Perspective for the MacIver Institute

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These grants, the President announced, would be awarded to the states that showed the most vigorous, innovative approach to education reform.

Expectations for Wisconsin’s chances and our seeming home-court advantage were misplaced, however, as the State finished in the bottom half of the applicants in round one, finishing 26th out of 41 applicants.

At the time, Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle said that the state would “take to heart” the criticisms Wisconsin’s application received. Doyle focused primarily on the criticisms referencing the inability of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to take action against individual schools rather than entire districts and the lack of “buy in” by much of the educational establishment, notably the various school districts and teacher unions.

Yet, despite Governor Doyle’s assurance, and legislative action to address some of initial criticisms, Wisconsin once again failed in second round of the Race to the Top grant program this July.

In this report, Christian D’Andrea, our education reform policy analyst, examines what went wrong with Wisconsin’s application.

Click here for the full report.

Click here for the news release.

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