Last week, a committee of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors voted to make a seismic change to the way it approaches high schools and middle schools. The rest of Milwaukee needs to get behind this effort with vocal (not to mention monetary) support.
The headline-grabbing part of the news is a change to the calendar, using a Department of Public Instruction-granted waiver to switch all high schools, almost all current year-round schools, and five "true" middle schools to the International Baccalaureate calendar that starts several weeks ahead of the September 1 date mandated by state law. School would end before Memorial Day in May.
But the real change is less glitzy but vastly more important: Low-performing students will be spending more time in school.
I endorsed this idea a while back, celebrating district Superintendent Darienne Driver for this and other proposals. I even braved sub-zero windchills to testify in person last week. The gist of my testimony was firmly grounded in my experience teaching the high schoolers in question. According to the district screening test, taken three times a year by almost all students in math and reading, the mean reading level of my sophomores is between fifth and eighth grade.
This tracks district ACT data presented at the board meeting last week, showing that only five percent of MPS students are college ready in English, math, science and reading when they take the ACT in their junior year.
These are not students who come to high school and fall behind, I told the board. These are students who get to high school already behind. Yet by federal regulations, my high school, like all MPS high schools and the district as a whole, must report and is judged on its four-year graduation rate. That leaves schools like mine with an impossible choice. Do we rush to push unqualified students out in four years so we look good, or hold on to students for an extra year or two and make sure they're really college and career ready when they leave MPS. One does right by students but hurts us when it comes to image and funding; the other is bad for both students and the community.
Hence the benefit of the early-start calendar: It allows MPS to uniformly offer two extra months of structured schooling for students who are behind in credits, academics or both. A wrinkle is that in the district's survey for parents and others about the change, not only did a majority of parents and students oppose the change in calendar, a majority of students said they would not be interested in using those summer months for school. And indeed the current plan is to keep traditional summer school optional for students, and to make the proposed "J-Term," a make-up and enrichment term held in June, optional, as well.
Two things, however. One, I do not know if the parents and students who took the survey are reflective of MPS as a whole. Students who came to testify against the proposal were uniformly white and from schools with high academic achievement (to the best of my memory, no students testified in favor). Even the parents and teachers who testified represented a racial split; every African-American speaker testified in favor of the change, including a former MPS principal who is now president of the venerable Metropolitan Milwaukee Alliance of Black School Educators. He said an earlier start date and expanded summer options were something MMABSE had long advocated.
Indeed, after the parade of relatively privileged, mostly white parents and teachers speaking in opposition to the change, board member Wendell Harris ripped into the crowd. "I've heard a lot of racist comments tonight," he said angrily. Many of those testifying against had called the calendar change "institutionalized racism," which led me – and probably Harris, who is black – to wonder if they have any idea what that phrase means. To me, institutional racism looks less like starting school in August and more like pouty threats to use your above-average means to move away and leave the district, and the poor minority students you leave behind, further starved for resources.
Two, I believe that student perceptions of summer schooling can, should and will change with the "J-Term." For one, a selling point of the June term is the return of summer enrichment. For as long as I have been in MPS, summer school has been restricted only to those who have failed or fallen behind. When the "J-Term" becomes an attraction to the "good" students looking to take an enrichment class, I believe the stigma will start to disappear.
For another, I hope the district will be able to capture more students coming out of eighth grade who need skills to be ready for high school, giving parents and teachers incentive to start supporting the program. This is a real problem, as my test results listed above suggest. MPS high schools cannot offer a math course below algebra despite thousands of students who enter ninth grade and ninth-grade algebra barely able to do math at a third- or fourth-grade level. MPS high schools generally lack reading teachers, and English teachers like me – never trained to teach elementary students – struggle to teach basic reading skills students should have learned long before hitting my classroom.
Will a single "J-Term" solve this? No, especially because only five middle schools are included in the new calendar, and two of them are part of the district's IB program and less likely to promote students unready for high school. Even if all district schools switch to the early-start calendar, it will probably be a struggle for the first few years to convince students who have grown up with long summer breaks – not to mention parents and teachers who have known nothing else – of the importance of taking this extra time.
And yes, board member Michael Bonds asked a good question about how more of the same will be different, about what will happen differently in schools and in the community if this extra time becomes available. Some of those answers might be easy – pre-algebra courses for incoming ninth-graders, for example – but others aren't. Driver mentioned the district's big push to expand Advanced Placement offerings, with up to four schools next year becoming AP "Capstone" schools, offering the AP equivalent of an IB diploma. That's not enough, especially for students not already on the college-bound track, but it is the beginning of an answer for Director Bonds.
Okay, you say. You've convinced us that this new calendar is a good thing. Why did your lede call for Milwaukee to stand behind it?
It's because MPS is in trouble and running out of allies.
The legislature is one obvious impediment. MPS can generally count on Milwaukee-area legislators to stand with it, but those folks are on the wrong side of an unevenly split state legislature. To move the whole district to an early-start calendar will require a change in state law, not to mention restraint on the part of Republicans eager to dismantle the district entirely.
One thing we know is that GOP lawmakers listen to the business community (they pay better than voters do). I don't know what else it will take for Milwaukee's business leaders to change their tune on MPS and throw real weight behind this reform effort. Right now, it's easier for a charter school that's basically a glorified computer lab to get monetary investment than it is for MPS. It's easier for a voucher school explicitly demanding students take a fifth "buffer year" between eighth and ninth grade – a year that won't matter to the stats because the school is private and thus not tied to a four-year graduation rate – to get monetary investment than it is for MPS.
While the lack of air conditioning in MPS schools is hardly a reason not to have an August start (before the law changed in 2001, we did start in August!), by far the heat and health concerns caused by heat was the biggest reason survey takers opposed the new calendar. MPS estimates it will take up to $90 million to add AC to its schools over the next 15 years. I think that's low, but it's also money the district shouldn't have to steal from classrooms. Surely, this is an area where Milwaukee's business community can make a difference.
The image of MPS as at war with itself – its board and teachers union locked in eternal, bitter struggle with administration – is another impediment. You see it in the kind of real estate the state's largest daily paper is willing to give to anti-MPS rants about that very thing. It's even reflected in the original headline of this story about the calendar vote, still visible in the URL: "MPS board members reject unified calendar." That's hardly a correct connotation for what actually happened; the current headline, "MPS moves more schools to early start," is much more accurate. But it's telling that after a unanimous board vote to make a huge change, the first instinct is still to play up a division between board and superintendent.
To its credit, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did run a column in praise of MPS. Sunday, Alan Borsuk, dean of the Milwaukee education scene, applauded Driver's honesty in her push for this change. But the honesty Borsuk credits Driver with, that she included MPS's bad numbers as evidence why a calendar change is necessary, has been happening for a while. True, MPS closes all of its PR emails with a list of accomplishments, but the district has been more upfront about its shortcomings for much of Driver's tenure, including during a year-long self-examination of eight big areas of failure that started not long after she took the reins.
And I'm not saying the board is blameless, or that it blindly follows Driver's recommendations. But the relationship among the three entities – Driver, the board, the union – remains much more cooperative than I have seen it in the 20 years I've been in Milwaukee.
Yet the most most important part of the discussion last Thursday was not the succession of teachers hand-wringing about how hot their classrooms get in the summer, or the way Director Harris called out the mostly white complainers for being racist, or even the board's 8-0 vote to go forward. It was, rather, the moment when Driver had to choke back tears in defense of action over inaction, especially for our high schools. The audio fro the meeting is here, and this starts at about 3:04:
"This is one I'm willing to die on a hill on. I've been in this district four and half years, tried to bring all kinds of stuff to this table as a chief and as a superintendent, and everything gets shut down. At some point, we have got to try to do something. I am willing to fight for that. I usually don't talk like that. But I really am, I really am.
"I have to see those principals week after week, those folks look like they can barely hang on, trying to make a change, trying to do something with our children. I'm willing. And y'all talk about the heat and all that kind of stuff – I will sit you and sweat to death, have asthma attacks all day long if that means 80 percent, 90 percent, 100 percent of our kids can graduate with options. That's what this is about. That's what this is about folks, it really is."
I've seen a superintendent near crying before, when Driver's predecessor Gregory Thornton spoke of how many MPS students meet violent, early deaths; tears are expected in that instance. But here Driver is near tears because she too knows the choice our high schools face: Do we hold our students back and risk sanction, dropouts and ridicule, or do we push them out unready? Do we keep struggling within our limitations and keep failing, or do we start making bold changes that might offer new opportunities?
I think the answer is obvious. The rest of Milwaukee needs to stand with MPS and move this plan forward.
