Slightly old news: Superintendent deposed. Grading audit presented to school board.
Plus, help wanted for a new project.
Help wanted
In March, I was approached about putting together something like a local news program focused on Wauwatosa and other suburbs around Milwaukee. It would be video, streamed live over the internet, take place in various “third places”—like coffeeshops or diners—within the community, and include both hyper-local news relevant to people living here as well as wide-ranging conversations with elected officials, community leaders, business owners, long-time residents, and everyday people about their work, their lives, and the communities they are a part of. In my head, it’s like Studs Terkel meets the Today Show (with 1952-levels of polish) although this will obviously involve a lot of experimentation and will probably change.
So, I need to hire a few people. Specifically, on-air talent/hosts to present the news and speak to guests, and someone to record it. If you’re a hyper-curious and engaging conversationalist who’s interested in their community, how the world works, and how other people think the world works; if you have a knack for finding, sharing, and getting others to share interesting stories; if you like to have meaningful conversations with everyday people from all walks of life, or if you know someone who does, please email me.
If you know anything about livestreaming or videography, or if you know someone who does, please email me.
If you want to tell me this is a dumb idea and I need to do x, y, or z instead, please email me.
If you are vaguely intrigued, have no idea if you would be a good fit, but just want to ask questions, email me.
Roles would be part-time to start. I can pay you.
My email address is ben@wauwastoa.com
But wait, what happens to this newsletter?
Nothing. Although the pace of updates might slow (as you may have already noticed).
Deposition of Superintendent Means
On November 23, 2022, school board member Mike Meier (represented by Attorney Ben Cross) filed a lawsuit against former-school board president Steve Doman and the rest of the circa-2022 school board (represented by Attorney Lori Lubinski). I wrote a brief timeline of the whole series of events leading up to it here, but I’ll repeat this slightly dramatic portion from the lawsuit itself for flavor:
This case is about the Wauwatosa School Board of Education disenfranchising an entire voting district by denial of the rights of their elected representative and obstruction of compliance with Wisconsin laws. The Wauwatosa School District is controlled by a faction of the Board. This faction makes political decisions in secret and retaliates against anyone who challenges them by silencing the public and their elected representatives.
The faction lost its first leader, Steven Doman, after Doman stripped Michael Meier of a committee assignment and appointed others in secret after Meier alleged the Board violated the public records law.
The Board told Meier and the public it would comply with the law, but the pattern of retaliation continues. Every time, the Board disenfranchises Meier's constituents. Most recently the faction of the Board made secret changes to the sexual education curriculum (human growth and development curriculum) development process, directing District employees to scrub previously reported survey data. The result of the scrub altered the survey results in favor of the faction's political theories. A faction of the Board directed the changes to decision data in secrecy in the weekend prior to a Monday, August 22, 2022, vote. The faction of the Board acted in secrecy as to who was involved in directing the data change process and in secrecy as to criteria for data-removal. This secret process excluded some members of the Board and excluded the community.
Enough is enough; it is time to hold this board accountable to the Open Meetings Law and by extension to hold the board accountable to its own constituents. It is time to return democratic control over the Wauwatosa School Board of Education.
On March 16, 2023, Superintendent Means participated in a seven hour deposition kindly posted to YouTube in a sort-of six-part miniseries format. I binged it.
What’s a deposition?
According to the internet, a deposition is an opportunity to get sworn testimony from witnesses prior to a trial in order to establish facts that attorneys can use to plan their courtroom strategy. This includes even obvious and banal facts that are tedious to elicit from the witness, tedious for the witness to answer, and tedious to listen to. An early exchange:
[Atty Cross]: How are the policies enacted by the school board?
[Atty Lubinski]: Object to the form. Vague. Subject to that you may answer.
[Dr. Means]: I’m not quite sure what you’re asking.
[Atty Cross]: Okay. Do you know what policies are?
[Dr. Means]: I do know what policies are.
[Atty Cross]: Okay, so am I correct that the school board let’s say, enacts policies that the school district follows?
[Dr. Means]: *Pregnant pause, shift of eyes up and to the right, slowly* Yes…
[Atty Cross]: How are those policies enacted?
[Dr. Means]: How are policies enacted in the school district? Is that your question?
[Atty Cross]: Could you please repeat the question?
[Court reporter]: *Reading from the transcript* How are those policies enacted?
[Dr. Means]: What policies?
[Atty Cross]: The school board policies.
[Dr. Means]: There are literally a lot of policies in our policy catalogue. So you would have to be specific.
[Atty Cross]: Okay, well let me be more clear, are those policies enacted by a vote of the school board or something else?
[Dr. Means]: Which policies?
[Atty Cross]: Any policy.
[Dr. Means]: Do you have a specific policy that you’re referencing?
[Atty Cross]: Okay, so we’ll just back up one second here.
[Dr. Means]: Sure.
[Atty Cross]: So the subject here is all policies. All policies. Every policy created by the Wauwatosa school board. Are those policies, all of them, created by a vote of the school board or in any case are they not created by a vote of the school board?
[Atty Lubinski]: I’m going to object to the form. Subject to that you may answer.
[Dr. Means]: Policies are enacted by a majority vote of the board.
Given I am not a lawyer and have never been in a deposition, I can’t tell who, if anyone, is being silly here. But I feel sorry for all involved.
What did they talk about for seven hours?
What didn’t they talk about? Mr. Meier’s attorney Ben Cross wanted all the gossip—who squabbled with whom and when, who felt bad, undermined, angry—even about issues that had nothing to do with the lawsuit. At several points in the conversation, the board’s attorney, Lori Lubinski, tells him to stop fishing and reminds him that the point of the deposition is not to “air all the woes of the school board.” To his credit, Mr. Cross doesn’t take it personally and moves on.
But here’s one thing: at its most basic, the school board’s job is to hire the superintendent and tell him what to do. In an ideal world, the board would ‘speak with one voice’ by first voting on the things they wanted him to do. However, in reality, Dr. Means tended to just get lots of requests from individual board members to do this, look up that, scrub this thing, etc., etc. Mr. Meier thought this was a bad way to operate and said so frequently during board meetings. It didn’t seem like Dr. Means enjoyed it that much either. Attorney Cross, reading from the board handbook, says:
[Atty Cross]: Decisions or instruction of individual board members, officers, or committees are not binding on the superintendent except in rare instances where the board has specifically delegated such authority. Did I read that right?
[Dr. Means]: You did.
[Atty Cross]: Okay. Since your tenure as superintendent, is that the policy and practice of the Wauwatosa School Board?
[Dr. Means]: *Long pause as he thinks* No, I would say the board—there have been various board members who have insisted on certain things to happen and have have made those desires known to me.
[Atty Cross]: How did that happen?
[Dr. Means]: They're emailing, they call me, there's requests for certain things to happen certain ways.
[Atty Cross]: It says if you get a request from an individual board member it’s up to you whether or not you follow it, right?
[Dr. Means]: Yes.
[Atty Cross]: Okay, tell me what the practice is.
[Dr. Means]: In an effort to maintain harmony with the school board, I try to accommodate as many requests as possible.
[Atty Cross]: And the school board is also responsible for renewing your contract, correct?
[Dr. Means]: I serve at the pleasure of the school board. […]
[Atty Cross]: Is it fair to say that you have that in mind when you make decisions on whether or not you fulfill individual board member requests?
[Dr. Means]: I think that is a challenge that every superintendent has when receiving questions from school board members.
A related line of questioning sought to understand whether, contrary to policy, board members would circumvent the superintendent and give directions or make requests directly to his subordinates. Dr. Means responded that “I know that our Chief of Pupil and Family Supports, Mr. Luke Pinion, has received emails from a board member,” that he thinks “it's pretty jarring for my subordinates to get emails or calls from school board members” and that “any time the superintendent is not aware that a school board member is reaching out to your executive team you do feel undermined.”
Another claim from the lawsuit is that a faction of the board is conspiring and coordinating behind the scenes to enact their preferred policies. At one point during the deposition, Attorney Cross asks whether there are political groupings within the school board. Dr. Means is skeptical:
[Dr. Means]: I don’t think they’re organized enough to be in alignment with certain thoughts. I haven’t seen that. I have seen that in the past with my experience of boards aligning and working behind the scenes. I’ve seen that. I don’t think this group of seven—and I don’t say it in a pejorative way—but I haven’t seen that level of organization for them to work in concert that well. I think they just simply land in very similar places.
[Atty Cross]: Do you think that landing is by accident?
[Atty Lubinsky]: Object to the form. Vague. Overly broad.
[Dr. Means]: I think that they come to certain positions on their own. And it just happens to be that they’re fairly aligned.
[Atty Cross]: And who are aligned if you know?
[Atty Lubinski]: Same objections. Form. Vague. Overly broad.
[Dr. Means] […] The questions we have received demonstrates there’s no organized effort in terms of how they’re operating. But I would say that all the board members with the exception of Ms. Muehlfeld and Mr. Meier an observer from afar would make the argument that they seem to be in alignment.
What does Dr. Means think about everything that’s going on? It’s been hard to tell since he tends to be very diplomatic and pretty careful with his words. But maybe the best insight came early in the deposition during a discussion of the AVID program and it’s roll-out across the district in 2021. Dr. Means and Attorney Cross are discussing what types of decisions are made by the board and which are made by the superintendent. Dr. Means tells him that day-to-day operational decisions are made by him, and Attorney Cross asks whether the AVID investigation was a day-to-day operational decision or something else.
[Dr. Means]: That’s an interesting question. That’s the most interesting question so far today.
[Atty Cross]: Alright.
[Dr. Means]: I would say that the public aspect of what was happening with AVID moved it from a day-to-day operational component of things to a governance component, and it moved it from a governance element because people were bringing things to the school board meetings around, What are you doing around AVID?
If we were looking—it’s a really interesting question—if we were looking at it strictly from a governance perspective, someone could make the argument that the AVID issue had nothing to do with the board, and that the board should have said to the new superintendent, “Dr. Means, we will let you handle this.” That the school board would have said to the community, “We are going to let our Superintendent come back with recommendations and we'll go from there.”
But I think it was—again it was within the first 10 to 12 weeks that I was on the job and then when you couple that with we had other personnel issues happening—it was a whirlwind of a start for me. I humbly state that I don't know if a neophyte superintendent would have lasted the last year. They would not have survived what I went through that year.
*Attorney Cross asks him if, knowing what he knows now, he would have handled things differently.*
[Dr. Means]: I would suggest and submit to you that there’s been so much acrimony in the school district and among the board that I have not had the ability to lead the way that I would want to as a superintendent. It has been a very difficult time. I’ve had to navigate a lot of different obstacles. And so your question of looking back a year later, would I have handled the AVID situation differently?
I think we handled it the best way we could have, and I think it was as transparent as it could have been. I think the thing that I regret—if I’m looking back and looking at regret—a lot of our teachers who believed in the AVID system were very disappointed with the decision that I made in December of 2021 to just say we’re moving away from it.
Some school board members cited to me that they were surprised that I made that declaration of—we just stepped away.
I’ll go on record as saying I don’t know if anyone has acknowledged how difficult of a terrain I have been asked to deal with. With all the different acrimony that has happened in this school district.
The deposition touched on other things obviously, including how survey data was treated during the approval process for the Human Growth and Development curriculum and how board members submitted questions and revisions to the strategic plan via a shared Google Doc prior to the board meeting. But it all seemed pretty straightforward, unsurprising, and really, really tedious. There were no explosive revelations.
Look for more updates as I randomly happen across them on YouTube.
Grading System Audit
Teachers assigning grades between 0 and 100? Archaic. An A for effort? Lies! Points for completing homework and class participation? Distorting the truth about students’ learning. “We are an ethical profession,” sir.
The last is a quote from an Op-ed in the Washington Post by Rick Wormeli (archived link) on the benefits and moral imperative of what’s called standards-based grading. The Op-ed was tweeted approvingly by Ken O’Connor, an education consultant recently hired by the Wauwatosa School District to audit their own grading system, the results of which were presented to the board in March.
Mr. O’Connor’s particular form of standards-based grading is called Grading For Learning (G4L). The underlying principle is that grades should accurately reflect a student's mastery of academic material and definitely should not be evaluating behaviors like how consistently he turns in his homework, how frequently he participates during in-class discussions, and how good his attendance is.
Doing so has several negative downstream effects, according to Mr. O'Connor. Students who get good grades because they try hard and turn in their homework on time but who have mediocre performance on the final exam and don’t actually understand the material that well might not be ready for the more difficult course that their grade suggests. A simple letter grade that combines elements of behavior and mastery communicates a potentially confusing message to parents, teachers, or students about what the student is having trouble with and what he or she needs to do to improve.
G4L fixes this. Supposedly. It focuses on detailed rubrics and the evaluation of well-defined skills. It gets rid of those pesky letter grades and assesses mastery using a 1-4 scale. Since we only care about what a student knows at the end of the class, there’s little or no weight on early tests and quizzes, practice exercises and homework are used for feedback only and don’t get graded, and students are allowed to retake assessments as needed to demonstrate skills.
Other differences are helpfully contrasted in this table from the G4L manual:
Any behavioral qualities—like timeliness, effort, and conscientiousness—can be tracked with a separate grade called Readiness For Learning (R4L), although it’s unclear to me what the consequences of a low grade are. It seemed like at one point it could prevent you from participating in sports or other extracurriculars, but this practice stopped in 2017.
Sounds confusing
Indeed. The district’s official Grading for Learning manual was released in 2014. In 2017, they revised it, presumably after much complaining, and walked back some of the more stringent requirements. They decided homework completion could count for up to 10% of a student’s final grade, and they allowed teachers to consider more than the last three or four assessments in determining the student’s final grade.
However, this past March, administrators from the school district presented results from their audit of the grading system, and their recommendations mostly revolved around undoing the changes made in 2017 and adhering more closely to Ken O’Connor’s Platonic Form of Grading.
Several board members seemed vaguely skeptical but mostly went along with it.
Board member Sharon Muehlfeld said she realizes it’s supposed to be a good system, but that it presents a lot of “communication challenges,” particularly for parents:
All of my time as a board member, this grading and Grading for Learning question is the top three feedback loops that I receive from people in the community and teachers in the community—I would say top two in the last five years probably.
So it's important to really—I mean are we gonna stick with this grading system? And then how can we consistently communicate what we're doing?
Board member Mike Meier, relating a conversation he’d had with a faculty member at a nearby university said that, “The feedback was that our students from Wauwatosa at that campus did not feel the Grading for Learning prepared them for the realities of deadlines at that university,” and he wondered whether it was “worth having the strategy if we aren't capable of doing it.”
Board President Dr. Eric Jessup-Anger also mentioned that he still finds middle school grading very confusing and that “it would really be beneficial to do more education, because I think parents don't even know how to respond. What does this mean? and How is it helping? It’s just a black hole of being confusing.”
Mr. O’Connor, who called-in to the meeting, argued—based on surveys and focus groups with teachers that had been completed as part of the audit—that it was not the system itself that was faulty but its inconsistent and incomplete implementation.
Director of Continuous Development Jennifer Fotsch agreed that more education for teachers and parents was needed.
What do you think, Ben?
On the one hand, it seems clearly useful to have a precise way to measure whether a kid knows the things they are supposed to know by the end of a course.
On the other hand, there is still something different between a kid who picks up new concepts very quickly (and therefore does well on initial assessments) and one that only gets it until the very end, and averaging all the grades over an entire semester captures that distinction in a way that ignoring everything but their grade on the final (or final few assessments) does not.
On the third hand, it does seem unfortunate for a bright but lazy kid who aces all his finals but never turns in his homework to get bad grades that prevent him from going to a good university that actually might be a good intellectual fit.
On the fourth hand, I feel like seemingly “imperfect” systems that everyone already understands and that have been around for a hundred years have probably persisted because they are serving a lot of illegible1 and non-obvious functions that the optimizers are underweighting or ignoring entirely, and so maybe we shouldn't just throw it out because it seems irrational or non-optimal.
I’ve run out of hands at this point, but it also seems like a bad sign that they've been trying to make these changes for almost ten years and still haven’t gotten it right. It’s not clear what they’ll do differently this time. I found the recommendations in the audit either very narrow (“Investigate the use of a computer grading program that is more aligned with G4L than Infinite Campus.”) or unhelpfully vague (“Determine what additional changes are necessary to improve G4L, when they should be implemented, and what professional learning is needed.”)
The district will present their response to the audit in the fall.
I wrote about legibility in a different context here. In Venkatesh Rao’s A Big Little Idea Called Legibility he summarizes James C. Scott’s ideas on the peculiar failure modes of authoritarian high modernism like this:
Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly
Ben, I have watched part one of the deposition and I found Dr. Means statements about the situations he was dealing with in regards to his working with the board interesting. It is obvious that some of the board members were/are getting too involved with day to day operations and that there is not unanimity on the board about those actions. That is not an environment within a school district that leads to success. I learned that from listening to one school board member who was a neighbor and being a long time church member with another school board member. You learn a lot when doing most of the listening in casual conversations.