Wauwatosa School District and the English Language

District presents results from audit of curriculum asssesment and gifted and talented programs.

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

I. Pre-Amble

The school board meeting on Monday, September 12, was mostly uneventful—the audience comprised of perhaps two dozen people who said relatively little and left when they were finished saying it, and the agenda composed of items insufficiently salacious to arouse much public passion. I sank into a chair along the edge of the conference room next to an older couple with a handwritten sign that said “TOO MUCH, TOO SOON.”

The couple did not speak during the period for Public Comment on Non-Agenda Items but instead moved their sign slowly back and forth at hairline-level as a mother at the microphone chastised the board for approving the new Human Growth and Development (HGD) curriculum at last month’s meeting. She spoke thoughtfully but, supposing she really intended to convince the board to reconsider, perhaps too antagonistically: You were wrong to take so long sending children back to school during the pandemic, you know, and wrong to approve that AVID contract that led to the resignation of a senior administrator following an investigation into potential conflicts of interest. So why should we think you have it right this time?

But perhaps she treated her statement much like I imagined the slow-movers-of-signs treated their silent protest—a ritual maintained even after one’s animating belief in its effects has evaporated. The back-and-forth between opposers and supporters lacked a certain spark this time around. Even the clapping after a particularly righteous dig seemed limp and half-hearted.

There were several more comments—one thanked the board for their hard work, another apologized for the abuse they received—and then almost everyone just, kind of, wandered away.

Superintendent Demond Means then presented a plaque commemorating the Wauwatosa School District’s new Dale Breitlow School Safety Resolution in honor of the Wauwatosa West High School associate principal who was shot and killed by an aggrieved former student in 1993. His son Ty Breitlow, current Superintendent of Lomira School District northwest of Milwaukee, was present with his family to accept the plaque.

In a deft touch, the Superintendent followed this somewhat somber remembrance of past tragedy with a video montage of current students telling the camera why they looked forward to returning to school. Their responses were heartwarming and occasionally funny, but to be honest, I thought the video ran a little long. I didn’t say anything though.

II. Audit Recommendations

But the main event, the event that by my inexact count approximately four of us stuck around to watch, was the presentation by district administrators of the results and recommendations from two external audits. The first, a Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Systems and Structures Audit Response Plan (CIA), was based on an audit completed in December, 2021, of the district’s process for revising courses and curriculum and whose results were first presented to the board in February, 2022. The second was an audit (executive summary) completed in the spring of 2022 that focused more narrowly on the district's Gifted and Talented (GT) program.

I’m not sure what prompted the audits. It may be related to the hiring of Superintendent Demond Means in April, 2021. It may, based on the reports and presentation itself, have been because of some general sense that teachers are frustrated, overburdened, and leaving the district; administrators and non-teaching staff have too many poorly defined responsibilities; and that a great number of the processes in place to make sure the district follows state law and board policy are executed poorly, inefficiently, or not at all.

In any case, Dr. Nicole Marble, Chief Academic Officer, said that, “the audits revealed that [the] infrastructure and overall academic performance of the district is not well,” and that the audit and its associated recommendations amount to a “medical diagnosis requiring an individual to make radical lifestyle changes in order to avoid harsh consequences.”

Both of the audits, and the district’s response to those audits, were kind of long. They had useful information but some of it was obscured by a lot of academic and educator jargon that I had a hard time parsing. I’ll come back to that, but here’s my best summary of the recommendations from each of them in the simplest language possible.

From the CIA audit:

1. Previously the Department of Teaching and Learning was understaffed and overwhelmed and this burdened teachers and caused students to do poorly. The newly proposed Division of Academic Performance will hire enough people to be proactive and let teachers focus on their students.

2. It was hard for principals to tell if teachers were following guidelines on the best ways to keep students engaged mostly because it wasn’t clear what the principals should actually be looking for. Now principals have a list of things (see page 16) to look for.

3. It can be hard for teachers and principals to tell if their students are meeting, or are on progress to meet, state standards. Now there is an explicit assessment cycle that they can use to spot problems early.

4. They created a guide and training to help principals develop and track progress on their 2-year plans for better serving students and families.

5. The school district has a policy for periodically reviewing and updating its courses. It mostly follows this policy with the exception of monitoring how successful the revised courses end up being. Do students learn more? Do they like it? Are we focusing on the most important things? Now they have a plan, but they might need more money to execute it.

6. The district used to have instructional coaches, equity coaches, and reading coaches who were supposed to coach other teachers but often ended up with other jobs like helping students or developing curriculum. Now they will just focus on coaching, and the district will hire other people to do the rest. Also, equity coaches are being eliminated, because, as Superintendent Means explained, “we were actually making things worse when we were using the term equity coaches.” Instead, equity is “everyone’s work.”

7. There used to be someone called an Innovation Specialist. This has been separated (I think?) into two roles: an Academic and Career Planning Coordinator to ensure compliance with state regulations on…academic and career planning and an Instructional Technology Coordinator “to provide leadership of instructional technology at all grade levels” (not sure what this means).

8. On Wednesdays students leave early so teachers can meet with other teachers and staff to strategize on what to teach students and how to tell whether they learned anything. But these questions are hard to answer because of the disorganized way the school district has been managing course revisions and testing. The program devolved, and many teachers thought it was a waste of time. With all the other recommendations above in place, teachers can now productively spend this time together to plan and discuss how students are doing and whether the school is achieving its building-specific goals and the district's vision¹.

From the GT Audit:

The State of Wisconsin requires public schools to identify high-performing students in “intellectual, creative, artistic, leadership, or specific academic areas” and provide additional services for them. In the spring and summer of this year, a consultant hired by the school district: reviewed its Gifted and Talented program, sent out surveys, and held focus groups with students, parents, and educators. She found that the district did pretty well identifying high-performing math students but that many parents didn’t know about the program or understand how it worked, administrators and other school staff felt the process used to screen students for eligibility might be biased and that there needed to be more training on how to meet the unique non-academic needs of gifted students—like dealing with perfectionism or how to make friends—and teachers didn't feel like they were really meeting the needs of some of these students. Recommendations from the consultant included:

1. Review your own policies and see if you're actually following them.

2. Consider using additional screening tests that reduce bias against students with limited English skills and other problems.

3. Set a threshold for gifted and talented students based on average performance within the school district rather than national averages.

4. Consider a wider range of interventions. You can allow gifted students to go through the same material more quickly, you can give them different lessons, or you can group students by ability.

5. Inventory what the district already offers and do a better job of directing kids towards things that they show aptitude for (e.g., if they're musically talented tell them to join the band).

6. Train teachers on dealing with the unique needs of gifted students.

7. Provide gifted students with more social and emotional support.

8. Do a better job telling parents what is available.

Afterward, everyone seemed mostly on board and happy with what had been proposed. I thought it mostly seemed fine, but I had one thought.

III. George Orwell

George Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language” writes about how the abuse and degradation of the written word in contemporary (for Orwell, the 1940s) discourse is not simply the consequence of lazy and insincere politicians but that it can also encourage and reinforce that laziness and insincerity. He says: “It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

I don't think the thoughts expressed in these audit reports are “foolish,” and I don't think they're attempting to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” I think they include some good ideas and the whole project seems like an earnest attempt to fix things that are considered dysfunctional, not just by administrators but by outside observers as well. It seems obviously good to do things like, “know what your own policies are and try to follow them” and “create a calendar to track when curriculum reviews or assessments are required.”

But I think that only makes it doubly unfortunate that these good ideas are so difficult to visualize and understand sometimes. For example, from “Recommendation #6” on changing the job description of Instructional Coaches:

Ongoing, job-embedded professional learning is more likely to have an impact on teacher practice and student outcomes; in other words, instructional coaching (Desimone, Porter, Garet, Yoon, & Birman, 2002). As such, some organizational shifts have transpired to allow for there to be greater focus for staff. With the reorganization and addition of Curriculum Coordinators, Coaches will have the ability to bring greater focus to actual coaching and not be pulled to also attend to curriculum needs. At the elementary level, literacy coaches (Reading Specialists) were also tasked with providing reading intervention to students. This responsibility further prevents these educators from providing coaching support. Therefore, the role of the Elementary Academic Specialist has been established to assist with the identification and delivery of intervention to students with the greatest need across the District. In the reorganization of the district office, the role of the Director of Instruction has been established. This individual will establish a clear coaching model for the District. In recent years, coaching staff and administrators have engaged in training around one particular coaching model - Cognitive Coaching. The District has yet to systematically establish how that training transcends into the model for coaching sanctioned by the District. Furthermore, the Director of Instruction is charged with developing, implementing, and monitoring the instructional expectations of the District.

Why not “Coaches will coach instead of designing curriculum” rather than “Coaches will have the ability to bring greater focus to actual coaching and not be pulled to also attend to curriculum needs”?

What is Cognitive Coaching?

What does it mean that the “District has yet to systematically establish how that training transcends into the model for coaching sanctioned by the District”?

Orwell, in his essay, identifies what he calls verbal false limbs—“the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render.”

And meaningless words—“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. [...] Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.” Depending on your politics, you could probably come up with your own more contemporary list of examples.

You can read the essay if you want. It’s great. But the reason it seemed relevant is that the more I wade into how the public education system works and, more importantly, how some educators talk about the education system, the more abstract and ethereal and less concrete it often seems. And I think one of the main points Orwell tries to get across is that clear writing reflects clear thinking and if the writing is confusing or vague, it suggests underlying conceptual problems that the writer probably needs to fix first.

But aside from benefits to the writer of trying to express themselves clearly, it’s obviously beneficial for the people reading it.

Both of the upset parents who spoke on Monday mentioned trust. One said:

This school board does not have a very good track record of making good decisions. […] Why should we trust you? How much credibility are you allowed?

And the other:

You guys are stewards of a public trust and this public trust is eroding. There are many people in this community that are no longer deciding to send their kids to the Wauwatosa schools.

The district prides itself on transparency and, if not consensus, vigorous public discussion. When they talk of transparency they often refer to open meetings or clearly defined processes for making decisions. But language is also important for these things. If people cannot agree on what words mean or how those words cash-out in some concrete, observable reality, at best people might have no idea what you’re saying but will still be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. At worst, they might grow suspicious and begin to interpret your abstractions as deception.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

I get the sense that many people are at the suspicious end of the spectrum, and I think it would be worth the effort to be more clear and concrete about some of the changes that are being proposed.

1. Per the recently-approved Strategic Plan, the Wauwatosa School District's Vision is to “ensure an exceptional student experience, eradicate inequity, eliminate disproportionality and exceed proficiency for all.”