Happy New Year - Highlights from the School Board Meeting, Dec. 11
Open enrollment, school board reconvening on Jan. 2, board member upset that black students aren't doing better, wants to disrupt the system.
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My kids don't quite understand how New Year’s Eve works, so what my wife does is play a YouTube video of the “ball drop” from last year around 7:30, shout “Happy New Year,” and then send them to bed. Which is nice, because I had some other things to do.
For instance, the school board met for its last meeting of the year on December 11, which I only recently watched. There were many things of note, but I’ll discuss two.
The first was a presentation by the district’s Chief Financial Officer, Keith Brightman, and Chief of Talent Sarah Zelazoski on changes to the open enrollment policy that could potentially make fewer spaces available for non-resident students. Mr. Brightman and Superintendent Demond Means attempted to explain why open enrollment had ceased to be a financial benefit to the district, but board members really wanted to wrap things up by 9:30 p.m., and the presentation was so rushed and confusing, and generated “so many questions” that they decided to meet again on January 2nd.
The second was a presentation by Chief Academic Officer Nicole Marble on how the district is trying to provide culturally responsive teaching and improve instructional clarity. Board Member Jessica Willis expressed her frustration that black students were continuing to do poorly and wanted to know when administrators would stop talking about all the great things they were going to do and actually do them.
I. Is Open Enrollment worthwhile? Many graphs and tables. Few answers.
Open enrollment is the process whereby kids who live outside the district (non-residents) can apply to attend Wauwatosa public schools. This can be good for the student—maybe they get out of a failing school in their neighborhood and into one that better meets their needs and aspirations. And it can be good for the school—if a classroom can hold 20 students but there are only 19 resident children, letting a non-resident student fill the empty seat brings $8,700 of extra revenue (by state law) for relatively little cost since we’re already paying for the classroom, teacher, and school regardless. In other words, the marginal cost to educate one additional student is low compared to the marginal revenue he or she brings in.
Currently, the school district has a yearly operating deficit of $9.3 million partly from the approval of significant pay raises for teachers as well as the hire of several new staff to deal with increasingly bad behavior from students. Open enrollment can be a good way to increase revenue and plug holes in the budget. However, this $9.3 million deficit exists despite having around 1,100 open enrollment students. Why?
For the school district, the greatest ratio of marginal benefits to marginal costs1 occurs when non-resident students only fill classrooms that would exist anyway, like the example above. Maybe you receive revenue of $8,700 while only spending $1,000 (for books or something). If you add open enrollment students beyond that then you have to hire more teachers or build bigger schools or maintain a greater number of schools than you would otherwise need, and that ratio decreases. But that doesn't mean it stops being profitable. If you add 20 more open enrollment students then you might need to hire an extra teacher, but if you can hire them for less than $174,000 (20 students x $8,700 revenue per student = $174,000) then you're still make money. The point at which the ratio of marginal benefits to marginal costs falls to 1 is the point at which you're extracting the maximum profit from open enrollment. You want to find the point at which one more open enrollment student costs exactly $8,700 and then stop adding more students.
I wish someone could tell me what that number is.
Right now, the Wauwatosa School District has more open enrollment students than almost any other district in the state. Approximately 16% of the student body is comprised of non-resident students. At the elementary school level this leads to 13 additional classrooms of students (and the teachers to teach them) that would otherwise not be needed.
These issues are not only being discussed by the school board, but by “Tosa Task Force 2075”—a group of parents and residents, including me—who have been meeting about twice a month since June. We were supposed to offer a final recommendation in May, 2024 on open enrollment policy, school boundaries, how many schools to close (if any), and which ones to repair, renovate, or rebuild. However, last month we were told to provide a recommendation on open enrollment by January. But even after several months, I’m still not sure if we make or lose money on open enrollment
Partly this is because it’s complicated but partly it’s because the numbers keep changing.
When Superintendent Means announced the creation of the Task Force, one person emailed me to say, “This is one of my worries, that whatever data is given to the task force, it must be recent, correct and valuable.”
The data does seem recent, but I’m not sure it’s always correct, and it could certainly be more valuable.
Two examples:
1.
On September 27th, administrators presented the Task Force with estimates of how much open enrollment students cost to educate compared to how much revenue they bring in. Here, the total costs ($11.6M) are slightly larger than the total revenue ($11.1M) which, to me, means that eliminating open enrollment would create a $560k net increase in revenue.
On October 24th, a handout (page 20) for the Task Force said revenue from open enrollment was $11.1 million but that costs were $9.3 million. To me, this means open enrollment students bring in more revenue than they cost ($11.1-9.3 million = $1.8 million net benefit) and so eliminating open enrollment would actually increase the operating deficit by $1.8 million.
Then at the board meeting on December 11th, Mr. Brightman presented a different graph-like figure of the relative revenue and costs of open enrollment students. These are close to but not the same as the previous numbers from prior meetings:
If you subtract the costs from gross revenue, you get $2.3M in net revenue; however, the figure says net revenue is $2.5M. I don’t know why. But if you ignore that, it still seems like the revenue from open enrollment exceeds the costs.
But actually, according to Mr. Brightman and this slide, the costs of open enrollment greatly exceed the revenue.
$2.5M divided by $11M is 22.7% which is maybe how they got the 23% figure above. But I don’t understand why they did this.
2.
Similarly, Chief of Talent Sarah Zelazoski gave a presentation on open enrollment, including a new formula they'd like to use and an example of how to use it, but the numbers don’t make sense to me.
For example, this is how the Open Enrollment formula works:
If you think you'll have 350 students in third grade, divide that by the class size you want (20) and you get the number of class sections you'll need (if it's not a whole number, round up). You get 18. Multiply that by your sections to get grade capacity (360). We want to add open enrollment students if the grade capacity implies a class size less than 85% what we desire (306). If enrollment projections are less than 85% of ideal grade capacity (in this example they're not), subtract one from the other to get the number of open enrollment seats for that year.
That’s fine, but then they do this for the whole district and get numbers like this:
If I divide JK enrollment projections of 344 by a class size of 21, I get 16.4 sections required, not 20. This should round to 17, and give a grade capacity of 357 not 420, and an OE capacity of 303 not 357 and there should be 0 OE seats not 13. I can't figure out how what’s going on here.
The school board has to make a decision by the end of January. I hope they can figure it out.
II. Why are black students performing so poorly? Is it the teacher’s fault?
II-A.
Following the presentation by Dr. Marble on culturally responsive teaching and instructional clarity, board member Jessica Willis expressed frustration with the fact that black students in the district continued to underperform academically and wondered whether the staff and teachers were doing enough to help them. A conversation ensues.
Ms. Willis:
I'm going to be very straightforward. I was going to say 'students of color,' but time after time we continue to get data that our black students are not achieving many of these things, different data points being low enrollment in accelerated classes, right? So not the rigor. A lower sense of belonging from surveys that we do, disproportionate number of behavioral referrals and, most recently, significantly lower academic achievement.
When we look at the first quarter of our academic achievement for students at the secondary level by Ds and Fs, we know that our district is comprised of 21% black students, yet they make up almost 50% of all Fs at the secondary level.
Ms. Willis continues by saying that the district needs to build the capacity of teachers to “meet the needs of our black students” and asks how we ensure that culturally responsivee teaching is being practiced, “and that there's a focus on our black students?” She adds:
I find myself frustrated because I feel like I weave it into many of my questions that I have for the district, and this just laid it out exactly what every student in the district should have, and time and time again, our black students do not receive the same, or even comparable, educational experience as their white peers."
Dr. Marble tells Ms. Willis that she appreciates these tough, courageous questions, because “we have to be disruptors” and “we all carry unconscious bias and we can't do anything until the unconscious becomes conscious.”
Dr. Means adds that the work has started in a small way tonight with Ms. Willis' comments and that “we're ready to disrupt the system.”
Ms. Willis:
I'm ready to see action being taken. Teachers, educators, and staff have had enough time to digest our strategic plan. They understand what this board wants, but now it's time to take action.
[…]
We'll continue to support the efforts like we have as a board. We care about making sure our teachers have the resources they need and that they're being compensated fairly, but now we need to hold them to a higher expectation and say, 'This is what we demand of you because all of our students deserve it.'
At this point a student representative on the school board said she didn’t feel teachers were compassionate enough about black students who skipped class to hang out with their friends.
Student Rep:
I feel like there is a large misconception with teachers and black students who skip class. Just because a black student skips class a few times, it doesn't mean they automatically don't want to be there and do not want to learn. That is not the case. I've seen many of my black African-American peers who want to learn but have skipped class a few times and then are refused by the teacher. They say, 'You wasted my time; you didn't show up, so why should I teach you what you missed?'
I just feel like that is a reason why there are some of those Fs in the 50% of African Americans in the standings. That would not be there if some teachers were more compassionate and realized that yes, people do skip class to hang out with their friends, and it's not what they're supposed to do, but these people are coming here taking accountability.
Dr. Marble, describing what happens when trying to hold teachers to higher expectations, explains that “There's a lot of excuse-making, and we need to interrupt the excuse-making. We have some building principals that are newer to the organization and are interrupting the excuse-making where that maybe hasn't been happening.”
Dr. Means: “What happens to those principals when they are engaging in that interruption or that disruption of the system?”
Dr. Marble: “It becomes miserable because they are interrupting the language [or] beliefs of the educators that are excuse-making. Then there are complaints about the building principals, and then the building principals feel like they need to backtrack.”
Ms. Willis: “Next year, if we have teachers who still aren't able to build the capacity to educate all of our students, then maybe they don't need to be a part of this district.”
Board Member Mike Meier mentions that we’ve spent millions on equity coaches and they haven’t really done anything, and then he mentions a long term substitute who had the class read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and that it really engaged some of the black students.
Ms. Willis: “But we can't add things like a book about a black person. We need to disrupt the systems—like STEM for instance—that perpetuate the inequities that we have in our district and that's a hard ask, because it's going to make some people really uncomfortable. Because they feel really good that they can insulate their kids from the rest of the population.”
II-B.
I think the underlying assumption is that if kids get Fs, skip class, or don’t get into an AP course, then it’s the school or the teacher’s fault. It could be. The school board is certainly betting a lot of money on that being the case.
But, honestly, reading education research is pretty discouraging. Most educational interventions just don’t work. They look promising, but they don’t scale or don’t replicate or don’t have any persistent, long-term effects.
The Coleman Report, a very large study on educational equality and the predictors of educational achievement completed at the behest of Congress following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, concluded that schools have relatively little impact on outcomes relative to the individual and his non-school environment:
Taking all these results together, one implication stands out above all: That schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context; and that this very lack of an independent effect means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.
Psychologist Douglas Detterman, surveying some of the research since then, similarly finds that only a small percentage of the variation in academic achievement is explained by teachers and schools:
In the literature surveyed, schools clearly account for about 10% of total variance in academic achievement and teachers within schools account for from 1% to 8% of total academic achievement or from 10% to 80% of what schools contribute to academic achievement. Though teachers have very powerful effects on academic achievement when only school effects are considered, they have very weak effects when all sources affecting academic achievement are considered. It seems inappropriate to blame teachers for all of the problems of an educational system or perhaps even a social system.
Economist Eric Hanushek in an article for EducationNext (where I got the quote from the Coleman report above) mentions that the black-white achievement gap in schools has remained stubbornly persistent for over 60 years:
In both math and reading, the national test-score gap in 1965 was 1.1 standard deviations, implying that the average black 12th grader placed at the 13th percentile of the score distribution for white students. In other words, 87 percent of white 12th graders scored ahead of the average black 12th grader.
What does it look like 50 years later? In math, the size of the gap has fallen nationally by 0.2 standard deviations, but that still leaves the average black 12th-grade student at only the 19th percentile of the white distribution. In reading, the achievement gap has improved slightly more than in math (0.3 standard deviations), but after a half century, the average black student scores at just the 22nd percentile of the white distribution.
He also notes in a separate article that this is after many hundreds of billions of dollars in spending by state and federal governments:
Since 1980 the federal government has spent almost $500 billion (in 2017 dollars) on compensatory education and another $250 billion on Head Start programs for low-income preschoolers. Forty-five states, acting under court orders, threats or settlements, have directed money specifically to their neediest districts. How much have these efforts helped?
To find out, we tracked achievement gaps between those born into families with the highest and lowest levels of education and household resources. […] The gaps have not narrowed over the past 50 years, despite all the money spent on that objective.
So I think maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on the teachers.
The school board meets tomorrow, January 2, to discuss open enrollment.
This is different than average cost. Average cost is the total cost divided by the total number of students. But this doesn't tell you the cost of adding one additional student which might be much less, or much more.
When my children were attending schools in Wauwatosa in the 1980s, each year the school board had to determine the number of new chapter 220 students that would be accepted by the district. New chapter 220 students were only accepted at the early elementary grades. The board was presented with a number that was based on the number of current resident students and the historical number of new students that moved into the district during a year for each elementary school. The sum of those two numbers was subtracted from the number the district used to determine if a new section was needed in a grade. It was a process that created a number that was easy to understand and did not burden local taxpayers with any program costs.
It looks like all the money that has been spent has missed the target. Perhaps these dollars could be better used to lift families out of poverty and give the people a sense that their life has meaning,. Education is one part of it, but decent housing and good food and a sense that tomorrow will not bring economic disaster - these all play a part of it. And, incidentally, that you will not be stopped for driving while black or scrutinized in stores, or generally given the idea that you don't "belong".
I wish I could have more confidence in our School Board's decisions. It's hard to do so given the ambiguity of the statistics and numbers being cited by the experts in the school system.