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Public school parents in Wisconsin were advised this week to rest easier this summer knowing the public schools their children will attend in the fall may be a little better because Gov. Jim Doyle, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers and representatives of education organizations “sat in a room”¹ this spring.   After Wisconsin’s initial application for federal “Race to the Top” funds was rejected, a comprehensive school-reform agenda was released June 1 as a revised application to earn $250 million of the second-round grant funds.

The Race grant application was described by Doyle—standing in Milwaukee alongside Evers and Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC)—as “a blueprint”² for change.

Overall, the school reform plan says Wisconsin would first use the money to: hire state employees to lead educational reform efforts and share knowledge and resources across district boundaries; adopt and implement standards for what children should know and be able to do; create state assessments and policies to  measure and evaluate student learning toward achievement goals and hold schools accountable; and collect data to make intervention decisions, support meaningful parent communication with schools, and inform policy.

But isn’t that “new” plan exactly what Wisconsin policymakers have been talking about and working on at least since the 1980s? Isn’t that precisely what most parents think the people who serve in about 631.5 full-time equivalent positions at the Department of Public Instruction are doing already?

One of the state’s specific spending priorities for the Race money, which was also included in the first round application, remains largely intact in the new proposal: Wisconsin would “create” an Office of Education Innovation and Improvement (OEII), hire an OEII director and staff with specialized expertise, who—after their 2010 recruitment through the state hiring process and their subsequent receipt of training in state-employee HR—in 2011 would get to work on “processes to facilitate the flow of best practices among LEAs, coordinate regional trainings and supports through CESAs, as well as collect and analyze data ...”

The goals for the OEII on their face seem to be nothing more than a description of what any state education agency does by definition. Furthermore, the Wisconsin DPI presently has an “Office of Educational Accountability” with an “OEA” director, assistant director and about 16 employees.

The Race application asserts that when the newly created statewide office of innovation gets rolling, when new “Common Core” standards and curricula are adopted and educators are trained to use them, and when standardized assessments are developed, the state will start to make real progress in narrowing the achievement gaps among students. What have we been doing for the last 30 years if we still need all these widely known and accepted foundational elements of a plan to improve student achievement?

Nowhere in the blueprint does Wisconsin boldly confront the facts:

• Ninety percent of Wisconsin’s African-American fourth-grade students and two-thirds of Wisconsin's fourth-grade students overall are not proficient readers. Wisconsin African-American fourth graders rank behind their peers in every other state in the nation and Washington, D.C., according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress—the Nation’s Report Card—reading exam. A group also performing poorly, only marginally better than African-Americans in Wisconsin, is children identified as economically disadvantaged based on subsidized lunch status.

• The test score that the DPI presently uses to define proficient reading in Wisconsin is below the level many other states define as basic reading, and students who earn a score at or near the proficient cut score in this state are likely demonstrating lower reading skills than 75 percent or more of same-aged children in the United States, according to the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a nonprofit test developer that provides the Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) computerized progress-monitoring assessments used locally by about 150 Wisconsin school districts. It is not clear Wisconsin has clearly articulated a good target for innovation.

• Wisconsin’s reading scores on national assessments are flat while other states where students formerly scored far behind Wisconsin are improving at an astonishing rate in closing the achievement gaps among groups of students who have traditionally struggled to learn basic skills—a potentially significant economic disadvantage for Wisconsin in the future.

Rather than facing these frightening facts about public education honestly, the state’s Race application passively backs into the story with a begrudging admission:

[T]he State has documented nation-leading graduation rates, strong college entrance exam scores, and significant increases in students taking rigorous college-level courses. Despite its strong overall educational performance, education concerns and challenges still exist – many centered on achievement gaps. Achievement gaps by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status are wide, particularly between African-American and white students. In some instances, Wisconsin’s achievement gaps are the worst in the nation.

Disaggregated achievement data are included in the grant application and its appendices as well as referenced throughout as isolated “challenges” for the state amid the preponderance better facts, but they are never clearly connected to the agenda of the proposal or the overall fabric of Wisconsin’s schools. Graphs on pages 20 and 73 of the application are provided with statistical precision and bright, colorful lines, but the sickening, heart-breaking reality of what those pictures foretell about the long-term future for many Wisconsin children is largely unspoken.

A 2009 “Cradle to Prison Pipeline” report on Wisconsin, issued by the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., presents the Wisconsin data another way by saying, for example: “89 percent of Black, non-Latino 4th graders cannot read at grade level. And 90 percent of Black, non-Latino 4th graders cannot do math at grade level.”

Doyle’s and Evers’ news conference³ further seemed to miss the school bus by suggesting the plan was largely driven by their attempts to “honestly” confront, not student achievement data, but, instead, specific grant-reviewer criticisms and opinions of the first application. It is difficult to believe we get anywhere if our top policy leaders spend their time chasing grant reviewers’ comments.

A gaping omission, if this were a blueprint for reform given the state’s fiscal situation, the plan fails to discuss substantively what Wisconsin schools are not going to do anymore in order to start doing what is believed to be needed right now to better serve all children, particularly those who are struggling to learn to read, calculate and behave. Without such a critical or forthright analysis, the plan implies achievement gaps can be closed simply by “building”⁴ on what is already happening. That might be true if money were not a consideration. Money has to be a consideration.

Let’s be clear and blunt: Any change in Wisconsin education priorities means we have to discard some of the old initiatives and re-examine sacred cows.

While it would be fantastic to win the Race money and for Wisconsin to be among the nation’s 21st century bellwether states, let’s hope the Race application is merely a poorly written government document crafted for the singular purpose of earning a share of the federal cash—not really our state’s blueprint for change.

1 Gov. Jim Doyle comments June 1, 2010, at Milwaukee's South Division High School, retrieved June 2, 2010, from a Wispolitics.com audio recording posted here..

2  Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.