Concerned citizen reads many studies. Fails to read room.

Also, school board approves pay raises, staffing plan. Someone sends me teacher survey data.

The school board met on Monday, May 22. A few highlights.

→ During the school board's call for comment on non-agenda items, one man stood up to speak about his proposed alternative to the new human growth and development curriculum—passed last summer to much fanfare and grumbling—but not before warning any parents with young children in the audience that it might be advisable to escort them outside. “I'm going to talk about things that might not be appropriate for them. Nothing explicit, no words. But topics I wouldn’t want my—” The only mother with kids tells him to get on with it. They have headphones on.

He begins, “I honestly find it hard to believe anyone here would be able to disagree with me,” a claim that I at first find unlikely but as he continues begin to reconsider. Not because it’s unusually reasonable and unobjectionable, but because it’s never quite clear what he’s getting at, to the point that I found it hard to have an opinion one way or the other. He tells the board he wants a “publicly subsidized system that I've researched” and that it involves “finding salvation in God.”

“Because the Bible is timeless,” he continues, “norms are easily achieved.” He assures everyone that the system he’s proposing “would give African American students a 10% of being able to read and do math proficiently in Wauwatosa.”

It was a little confusing. You can watch here if you want.

He then turns to the assembled crowd of a dozen residents: “Now, is there anyone with a show of hands that can disagree with any of this?”

No one moves.

“No? Nobody? Everyone thinks this is a good idea?”

This is definitely not what everyone is thinking. One person does eventually indicate as much.

“...no? Okay. Well—” He carries on. He says that Board Member Jenny Hoag, who is also a doctor at Children’s Hospital, has been “paid off” to support the district’s new human growth and development curriculum and the gender ideology it espouses despite evidence that it’s harmful. “If she's an unbiased professional how can she dismiss thirty-one medical studies without any facts to refute it? Either she’s getting paid or she has religion.”

He starts to talk about John Money, a controversial midcentury psychologist who popularized the idea, mainly through the research he published on his most famous—and tragic—patient, David Reimer, that gender was socially constructed. But he kind of runs out of time and wraps up rather abruptly by telling the board he looks forward to speaking with them further about his proposal. Then he walks out of the conference room and is never seen again.

→ On May 8th, the board recognized high school students in Wauwatosa West’s American Public Policy Special Emphasis (APPSE) program for their fifth place finish in the Center for Civic Education’s We The People competition, a national competition among high school students consisting of “simulated congressional hearings” where “students testify as constitutional experts before panels of judges acting as congressional committees scoring the groups through a performance-based assessment.” This year they answered questions like, “What concerns did Socrates have, if any, regarding the stability or fragility of democracy?” and “In your opinion, are there any reasons to deny or restrict a person’s right to vote?”

I would have liked to hear their answers to these questions, but I couldn’t find any recordings.

This past Monday the board recognized Wauwatosa East’s team who placed 28th (oof!) in the same competition. Taylor McDaniel, the teacher who leads the program, told the board what a privilege it was to be involved and thanked all the students for their hard work.

→ Stephen Plank has been selected as the new principal of Wauwatosa East High School at a salary of $156,000. Dr. Plank previously served as the superintendent of Burlington School District and principal of Middleton High School in Middleton, Wisconsin. Prior to that he was the director of fine arts at a high school in Illinois.

Chief of Talent Sarah Zelazoski said that “based on the feedback from the interview teams we did not feel comfortable moving forward” with the first slate of candidates and that they interviewed around twenty applicants before selecting Mr. Plank. School Board President Eric Jessup-Anger said that “East is a place that really particularly values the fine arts and music” and that he looks forward to the new principal’s input and expertise in that area.

→ The board approved the 2023-2024 staffing plan. Superintendent Demond Means noted that personnel costs comprise approximately 75% of the district's budget, that the allocation of personnel requires better tracking, and that he was proud to make the process more transparent. “To have the specific FTE and where it's assigned [...] it's important for staff to see it, [and] I think it's important for the community to see it.”

One staff member at Eisenhower Elementary school, reiterating comments from the prior board meeting on May 8th about out-of-control disciplinary problems in the school said that the current number of vacancies was an emergency:

Under Eisenhower we have 14 vacancies in Eisenhower Staffing, and as I commented at the last board meeting this is an unbelievable, unprecedented amount of vacancies for our school. In comparison McKinley has two vacancies.

Eisenhower has 14 vacancies and this is due to the uptick in aggressive behaviors and non-support from district administration for our staff and teachers.

She encouraged the board to pay closer attention to what's happening at the school and warned that “we are losing more than half of our staff and these are dedicated phenomenal teachers.”

Another parent—and recent substitute at Eisenhower—offered a similar perspective. She encourage parents and board members to make unannounced visits to some of the problem classrooms. “I have been in the building and seen those behaviors as well and have quite a bit of concern. […] I just have a hard time believing that parents aren't concerned about what they're seeing in the classrooms.”

Mr. Means informed the board that over the past several weeks they have transferred or hired several more staff for the school and that “I would respectfully say that we have sent resources to Eisenhower.” He added that “we never tolerate poor behavior from any student regardless of their their status” and asked Chief of Pupil and Family Supports Luke Pinion, when he provides his update to the board in August on student disciplinary data, to also include information on how the district handles difficult children and balances the safety of students and staff with the need to maintain an inclusive learning environment.

→ Last week, I talked about the proposed $1.9 million dollar pay increase for teachers. The proposal would make starting and average teacher salaries more competitive, hopefully improve retention, and restore some of the lost trust between administrators and teachers in the district. It would also create a budget deficit and the district would need to draw down current cash reserves for up to two years until they either received increased funding from the state or residents approved an operating referendum to cover the additional costs.

Comparison of Wauwatosa teacher salaries with surrounding districts before and after proposed raise. Source: Presentation on May 22, 2023.

I also mentioned last week that it would be nice to know what teachers think or what they’re saying in their exit interviews but that compensation discussions were mostly carried out between the administration and the Wisconsin Education Association (WEA), the union who represents an unknown percentage of district teachers:

Board members and administrators speak frequently about following the data, they hire people to analyze data, they implement new systems that make it easier to manage data, and they make detailed presentations full of data that, for instance, outline in granular detail which students are getting in what kinds of trouble and meticulously track them in order to provide individualized support and interventions.

Given that teacher retention seems like a similarly big problem with obviously large financial consequences, the reliance on outdated exit surveys, anecdotal reports, vague and possibly incorrect perceptions about national-level trends, and union reps who may represent the views of only a minority of teachers and certainly have their own interests to pursue seems puzzling.

On Monday, a parent asked what percentage of teachers were in the WEA, to which Superintendent Means responded that he’s not too worried about it:

Regarding membership in the WEA, I don’t know what percentage of our teachers belong to the Wisconsin Education Association and candidly I don't ask. It’s not my role or position to ask. I do know that the Wisconsin Education Association is the official organization that represents teachers in this district. I've seen them do things that are above and beyond what professionals do. I've worked with associations that would say, ‘If you're not a dues paying member, we're not going to help you?’ and that's not what this association does.

But administratively we haven't asked what percentage—I know there's some administrators would ask their association, ‘Well what percentage of the teachers actually pay dues?’ I don't. My personal philosophy and values is that that's not fair to the association. They exist, and they are the voice.

The same mother also asked about getting information from exit interviews. Mr. Means said that exit interviews are not always the best way to understand what keeps teachers in the district.

Best practice in Human Resources will tell you that you cannot make decisions organizationally simply on exit interview surveys. I remember vividly last year we talked about the fact that we need to get tighter and better at looking at stay interviews and asking people, Why do you stay in the organization? and what can we do to better the work experience for the employee?

And that's all employees. So, I think sometimes exit surveys can be weaponized.

He also emphasized that it's hard execute the strategic plan without the buy-in and support of teachers and that listening to their requests and paying them adequately is a good way to facilitate that. He attributed some of the existing acrimony between teachers and administrators to the “the ghost of administration's past of how things were not addressed” and hoped “that our words have demonstrated our commitment to the staff.”

While the district itself hasn’t presented data from exit interviews or other surveys, a kind reader did forward me the results of a survey question completed by teachers this spring that asked, “If there was ONE THING you could change in the District, what would it be?”

This still doesn’t quite get at why individual teachers leave or stay, and it’s also not exhaustive—what I have came from a mix of seven elementary, middle, and high schools and totaled about eighty responses. However, it does provide at least some information on where compensation falls relative to other concerns. I grouped the comments into a few themes and plotted the number in each category below.

Overall, pay really is important to teachers though respondents seemed slightly more upset about discipline, support for special education, and teacher workloads. To the district’s credit, these issues have also been addressed in various ways throughout the past year (though perhaps not to everyone’s satisfaction). Mr. Means also mentioned during Monday’s board meeting that the district was looking at other changes to improve retention, including more flexible paid time-off and extra pay for non-teaching duties.

• Comments on special education support mainly revolved around special education teachers being unskilled, not following IEPs, not being numerous enough, or not having enough support from educational assistants. Quote: “feels like they slap on a SPED label as a bandaid. Not doing work does not equal a disability” and “We are not legally compliant with IEPs. Our special education staff are overworked. FORTY+ kids between two special education teachers with NO AIDES is not okay.”

• Comments on schedules, planning, and workload mainly revolved around teachers wanting more preparation time, lower or more equitable class loads, and really disliking the middle school schedule.

• Comments on discipline and behavior were about what you would expect. Relevant quotes: “spending much of my time on discipline of maybe two or three kids which takes up so much of my days and nights while the other kids miss out on quality instruction from me” and a request for better ways to handle “students who just come to school every day for an entire year and put their head down.” Also: “We struggle with cell phones and personal devices EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. We need a consistent, secondary DISTRICT POLICY - please! (This includes hoods that hide Air Pods.)”

• Comments on grading mainly involved complaints about the Grading For Learning system which replaces the traditional letter grading system everyone is familiar with something much more confusing but supposedly better (I discussed this previously here). Some asked that it be either fully implemented or abandoned. One quote: “We would like the district to re-evaluate (read: get rid of) the Grading for Learning policies”

• Comments on the reading curriculum mostly came from one school and expressed a desire for something that was more phonics-based or at least better than the Lucy Calkins or Fountas and Pinnell curriculums. Quote: “Given overwhelming evidence showing that the Units of Study for Teaching Reading curriculum is based on theories that have been soundly debunked, we are doing much more harm than good to developing readers.”

• Other issues include wanting better communication between administrators and teachers, frustration with academic coaches not being particularly helpful, a desire for more generous and more flexible paid time off, and miscellaneous equipment and staffing requests. Quote: “Coaches are a waste of a teacher's time and resources. They do not directly affect or impact the success of students. We could be using those FTEs [for] staff that directly interacts and works with students.”

Board Member Mike Meier said that while “our teachers need more pay, our teachers deserve more pay, I want our teachers to have more pay” and that he “support[s] going to referendum,” he needs more certainty on the source of funds for paying it.

Board Member Liz Heimerl-Rolland said that “I think we all know that we're underpaying our teachers, and I think that Mr. Brightman and Dr. Means have done a really good job actually saying that we do have the money to pay for these. At least for the next two years” and that the district is lucky so many have stuck around for as long as they have. Both Ms. Heimerl-Rolland and Ms. Hoag (via a letter read by Dr. Jessup-Anger) mentioned the numerous emails they received in support of the proposal, especially from teachers. Ms. Hoag added, “our school district prioritized our bond rating and cash balance over paying teachers and staff a fair salary.”

Board member Jessica Willis said she thinks this “is a great first step” but that they also need more professional development to meet the changing needs of students.

Mr. Jessup-Anger said he'd like to move quicker and faster and that he supports this proposal:

How do we retain 90% of highly effective educators in the district?I think salary is one of those things. I think what we can do to make sure that—as Ms. Willis said—professional development is there, that teachers have the supports in place, that it's a culture of excellence in pedagogy and instruction, a culture of excellence in student learning.

I don't know what all those things are, but I will keep asking the administration to bring those forward.

Teachers in attendance universally expressed their support for the proposal.

The board approved the proposal to increase teacher compensation by a vote of 5-1. Mr. Meier voted against.