Tuesday, September 23, 2014

MILWAUKEE MOVES TO OUTLAW 'CASH FOR KIDS' AT ITS CHARTER SCHOOLS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Ald. Nik Kovac
Starting today (September 23)  leading aldermen of the Milwaukee Common Council are working out a resolution declaring illegal the use of financial incentives for  adults  to lure children to sign up for state taxpayer money at the city of Milwaukee charter schools.

UWM is currently investigating its own legal reaction to similar “cash for kids” maneuvers -- a $100 referral at Urban Day School and a quizzical $50 grocery store card at another school. State legislators are also asking for answers to the legality of the “cash for kids” concept, one even arguing it is “100% against the law according to federal guidelines” for K-3 and K-4 education.

The aldermanic move is being led by council president Michael Murphy and the 3rd District’s Nik Kovac, though they expect widespread agreement. “I can’t see anyone opposing this common sense cleanup,” said Kovac in a chat September 22.  “I think by the time it is introduced, many others will come along.”

The trigger was evidence that one city authorized charter school, Central City Cyberschool, a K-4 through eighth grade city charter at 4301 N. 44th St. in Ald. Willie Wade’s district, had offered $200 in cash to get a new student to register at the school by the date the state gives out taxpayer money for the first semester, September 19. The referral reward would be paid on the October date the state confirms the school is getting tuition money in the name of the new student.

The school’s literature is particularly blatant in appealing to adults connected with the school to bring in new students: 

Cyberschool Parents! Here is your chance to handpick the students that attend school with your child. If a new student enrolls at Cyberschool by September 19th, and lists your full name on their application in the REFERRED BY section, you can earn $200.”

The appeal is not limited to parents but is extended to staff and various unaffiliated “daycare centers” used by others at the Cyberschool.

 The “cash for kids” device came under fire in recent stories that went beyond the Journal Sentinel view of the practice as simply business as usual in a competitive “free market” environment. It evoked broader outrage in the community about bribing adults to convince families to send their kids to a school for the adult’s financial gain. 

 “At the very least you’d expect a responsible parent to ask about curriculum,” said Bob Peterson, president of the Milwaukee teachers union at a campus rally the MTEA and community education activists organized in great haste and anger in front of the UMW education school building on Hartford Ave.    

“It’s not the same,” one business leader told me, insisting on anonymity because he is a major funder of conservative causes. He was pointing to what he calls the “bring in a customer gimmick” that companies he’s close to --  phone,  cable and even Internet providers –- are now using  to attract new customers.  A private business might see a marketing lure in offering a discount, free service or cashback to an existing customer to bring in a new one   -- “but that should not be applied to children and education.  That is a hell of a way to choose a school for your kid.”

Learning of the Cyberschool flyer, Common Council leaders immediately scorned the practice and are moving to make it illegal for all city chartered schools, hoping to write the resolution to allow “more normal incentives such as a free pizza party,” said Kovac.  Under state law, the city is one of several government agencies authorized to approve charter schools.

Cyberschool received $305,000 in government money from planning to opening (2000) and then into 2003. All required city of Milwaukee charter committee approval before the state as conduit could pass along the federal charter funds. There is a considerable financial reward for such funding of planning and startup. Today a charter school receives annually about $8,075 per pupil it lists as enrolled on Sept. 19. Cyberschool operators were willing to set $200 per new pupil aside -- not for classrooms or teachers but to give adults who goose their numbers.

Those new students can leave a few days later – a growing practice at the city’s private voucher and charter schools -- and Milwaukee Public Schools will have to take them in even if state funding doesn’t follow for months.  In the meantime, the private school gets to keep the state money.

Recent reports from the Department of Public Instruction put Cyberschool’s earlier enrollment (2013) at 278, but neighborhood observers say it has declined since then. Still, in 14 years of operation, the government money for a school of this size can easily top $23 million.

UWM has also said it will investigate the practice at its dozen schools and as of this writing had reached no conclusion.  But pressure is being put on.

Their recent chancellor, Mike Lovell, was tapped by Marquette University to become its first lay president in August (and he will probably not be totally out of this thicket over there, since the vetting organization for city of Milwaukee charter schools is Marquette University’s Institution for Transformation of Learning, run by Howard Fuller, whose admirers stack the city of Milwaukee charter committee, which is also being questioned on this practice).

UWM meanwhile is searching for a new chancellor, and the issue has been put before the University Committee (leaders of the faculty senate), an influential search arm.  The faculty is directly being encouraged to weigh in their search for a new chancellor this practice of bribe/incentives as well as the larger impact on a public university of authorizing separate K-12 charter schools that undermine the state’s financial support for MPS, according to speakers at the public comment sessions. 

The city says it is not waiting on UWM in outlawing the practice at the schools it charters. The aldermen are confident that the resolution will move through with little objection if written precisely, partly because leading charter school spokesmen are quietly agreeing that the come-on of “cash for kids” has been a black-eye for them.

There is a larger hidden reason for the charter leaders’ distress. They have reason to fear future scrutiny by Wisconsin, which has expanded voucher and charter funding but without some of the immediate controls and accountability pushed for by educators.  There is already agitation in the state legislature, hardly all Democratic concerns, to move beyond outlawing direct financial gimmes to establishing tighter rules of the road on how voucher and charter schools can market themselves to children. 

Bob Peterson
MPS didn’t seek out this issue, Peterson told me. “A person who lives in the Urban Day neighborhood alerted us to the bribery scheme after she got a flyer at her house. After it was posted on Facebook other people described similar schemes.”

“The good thing about this whole incident is that it exposes how far the privatizers will go to undermine the public schools. They use public tax dollars to increase enrollment at private schools at the expense of public schools -- it's like the taxpayer gets hit twice.”

While a strong advocate of unionized teachers, Petersen says his main reaction was surprise at the degree of ignorance among citizens to the double whammy.

“It became obvious after our picket line and further discussions at UWM that many UWM staff are not even aware that UWM charters privately-run schools,” he told me. “Furthermore they have no clue what the process is.”

UWM’s charter advisory  committee, chosen from its various education divisions and including five faculty members, a community member and a representative of the dean of education,  recommends which private schools, K-12,  will receive state tuition money for each student under UWM’s authorization.

According to vice chancellor Tom Luljak, UWM administrators did not know in advance of the Urban Day School’s marketing method -- despite the advisory committee’s mandated responsibility for operational policies and monitoring.

Said Peterson: “It's a sad day when a public institution like UWM or the Common Council of Milwaukee charters privately-run schools which ultimately have negative impact on Milwaukee public schools.” 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its famous entertainment Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news.From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with its still operative archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com


Thursday, September 11, 2014

RALLY AT UWM ATTACKS ‘CASH FOR KIDS’ SCHEMES AT CHARTER SCHOOLS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Marva Herndon of Women Informed addresses
 the UWM campus rally Sept. 11 while Father Tom Mueller (center)
 listens. Watching (back to camera) is MTEA President Bob Peterson.
It was somewhat impromptu when the teacher’s union and community groups called within hours  for a rally in front of Enderis Hall, the UWM School of Education building,  September 11, to protest the “cash for kids” insult to public education represented by revelations that week that not just UWM charter schools but – it turned  out –  a city of Milwaukee charter approved school were engaged in such lures to boost enrollment in time to get state  taxpayer money.   

(Central City Cyberschool in Ald. Willie Wade’s district has a flyer offering $200 for a student referral by Sept. 19, so look for a major City Hall protest soon that will likely draw more than 40 insiders to the issue.)

While Milwaukee teachers were there, and community activists including South Side Greek Orthodox priest Thomas Mueller, it was notable how many UWM staff and teachers also participated since they see this as a stain on their own public university's values. The late afternoon rally with bullhorn and media observers drew fleeting attention from most students rushing to classes, but dozens of other students  stopped to listen and seemed caught in a bizarre middle – attending classes at a place being criticized by people who teach them or whose professions they are studying to join. 

Some asked for more information. One student watching from behind a  glass window wondered  if $100 per child was reducing children to the sort of discount items he associated with TV or phone service (“give us a new customer and you’ll get a free month”). Another asked if all this proved these charter schools, set up in poor neighborhoods to draw students from MPS, were “failing if they have to pay to get their hands on our taxpayer money.”

And a UWM staffer asked if  using adults to trap children pointed out a bigger problem in today’s education game -- that saving money can sound  more attractive to struggling parents  than curriculum or quality. 

“With kids and education,” one student asked me as I watched from the sidelines, “isn’t that bribery?  Is it legal?”

UWM administrators and public officials are now belatedly asking the same question, as UWM vice chancellor Tom Luljak confirmed in an email:

“UWM was not aware of and did not approve  incentive programs that some of our Charter schools have used to increase enrollment,” he wrote.

“In its sponsorship of Charter schools, UW-Milwaukee has always been focused on one key objective – helping students receive the very best education possible.  In determining whether the use of incentives is appropriate . . . we will evaluate whether they serve the best interests of students and do not detract from the quality of educational programs within the schools.”  

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

$100 FOR A CHARTER REFERRAL EXPOSES SCHOOL CHOICE MOVEMENT AS CRASS CHARADE

By Dominique Paul Noth


Dancing  $100 bills at the Urban Day School website
A hundred dollars for any parent who refers another parent to a charter elementary school? Even when the Journal Sentinel reported this scheme by UWM chartered Urban Day School, it couldn’t resist some false equivalency. It suggested that such cash for kids in a poor neighborhood  – timed to the date the school would get taxpayer money if the referred student shows up – is somehow a shrewd extension of the competitive “free market” system in education, to paraphrase the article.

Sorry guys. Bribery ain’t an “economic incentive” outside of cadging cigarets in prison.

The Wisconsin funding formula does put pressure on all schools to make sure students are there to be counted on the third Friday of September – the state’s official enrollment day to get taxpayer money.  But in the city of Milwaukee, parents unhappy with their voucher or private school education can approach the MPS any day of the school year to get their child transferred, regardless of whether (weirdly) the MPS has to wait a semester or more to get state payment. 

Not apparently at Urban Day. The $100  offer to a referring parent --  who may quietly share the proceeds with accepting parents, there is no regulations about this, and it’s even more lucrative if you bring in two or three children --  disappears after Sept. 19, as the website warns.  And if the school gains back with dollars  the 110 kids it is short,  this “public school” can cut applicants off, which strikes me as hardly public.

The school doesn’t see anything wrong with giving $100 per student, because it eventually comes from the taxpayers to go to adult salesmen.

The charade is exposed. (And that should have been the JS headline.)  The school choice movement  has lost any intelligent claim that it is concerned about the kids, not the money. 

“Free market” competition? Natural share? Well, nature is working in favor of  the public schools and  so is the competitive  marketplace when you take away gimmicks.

Noted Rep. Evan Goyke, in whose legislative district the school at 1441 N. 24th St. is located, “This disgusts me. It reduces educating kids  to the level of a retail market, like cable television, which offers a discount if you bring in a customer.”

For years educators have been pleading in vain with the Walker administration for  some oversight agency with teeth  to monitor how charter and voucher schools peddle their wares. Now those who care about education have  been done in yet again by unsupervised schools feeling free to hire marketing Mad Men.

Of course there are some good charter schools, but more and more news analysis is exposing how much of the charter movement is a racket under investigation.

Privately operated charter and voucher schools claim that profit is not primary in their blandishments.  The selling game at Urban Day School flat undermines that concept. It  also should serve as a warning to neighborhoods that think there is anything permanent in the polished presentations and promises, since all those riches and attention can rapidly evaporate as the market turns and the only way to keep enrollment up is manipulation of parents, not what is happening in the classroom.


For those who don't Internet, the
school produced flyers.
Bob Peterson, the president of the Milwaukee teachers union, posted an angry blog about this but it can hardly be regarded as a pro-union comment by an outspoken pro-union figure. Peterson was making a basic point about education. Schools should be about what’s best for the child, not artificial inducements that drive a parent to drag a child to a school regardless of curriculum. Because that is what Urban Day School is doing. And authorizing agency UWM, as he says, should be ashamed at this  blatant appeal to the wallet.  It isn’t even asking parents who like Urban Day to tell their friends. It is a bribe to any parent who makes a referral.

So any claim that this is simply a competitive marketing ploy evaporates when you think of sticking a hundred dollars into some grownup’s hand to talk another parent into getting his child there by a specific money-generating date. Any conniving citizen who needs a hundred bucks (not all parents are saints) could have many motives beside education.  And if they do care about their kids, they have to realize that the MPS doesn’t do this and they can walk away to another school a week later! So much for family involvement.

At Urban Day it’s $100. At another UWM charter school a referral brings a $50 grocery store  cardSuch rewards for referrals are clearly the bridge too far for serious educators.

The false equivalency rampant in our media was also in the JS story, comparing this tactic to simply making sure students show up for the Sept. 19 count.  But when MPS offers pancake breakfasts that key day, which the article points out, that is for students already enrolled. It’s a nutritious way to assure they show up  rather than stuffing bills in a parent’s pocket. 

Other complaints I got from UWM staff  and Milwaukee parents dealt more with the  optics – the JS story used a totally unrelated photo of a happy CEO surrounded by grinning Urban Day kids rather than the school’s website of  floating $100 bills for greedy parents. TV stations proved more mature in their coverage, realizing the brazenness of the website was the real story.

The come-on damaged Urban Day’s self-proclaimed vision of competence.  The school has  suffered a major enrollment drop in the last few years and also lost its federal Head Start funding. Previously it had not been demonized as one of the problem offspring of the voucher and charter movement, having been around for more than a century in various forms, then taken over as a UWM charter school in 2010. 

But this selling tactic as a response to its free market economic downturn  reflects poorly on its prestigious set of officers and trustees representing such organizations as the Milwaukee Bucks, Northwestern Mutual, We Energies, Time Warner and even a children’s court judge, all of whom must now be raising some troubling questions of their own. Apparently the dollars for kids idea has never been adjudicated or even found legal.

We weren’t aware of this before,” said UWM spokesman Tom Luljak in a phone interview September 9, “and our legal team is now investigating.” 

If charter schools – technically public schools though MPS always accepts every student without checking with the bookkeeper, while private charter schools seem able to turn away kids or find ways not to take them in – are allowed to behave this way, the next question is clear: Just what is going on at voucher schools? 

Up to now most of the coverage has focused on the cost in the voucher legislation to public schoolsBut now that  Gov. Scott Walker seeks to expand  it statewide despite outrage in Beloit and elsewhere, more attention is being paid to how these schools sell parents to participate despite poor educational outcomes.

News story exploring the insides of the voucher schools in Milwaukee have largely had to appear in publications outside Milwaukee, given what many academics regard as a partisan tilt in local education coverage. But as more such stories are coming out,  their conclusions are frankly sickening, even if a must read for any parent contemplating this path.

Perhaps in its blatancy, Urban Day has done a public service. Its overt grab for artificial enrollment figures using money as a carrot for grownups has launched in-depth investigations by UWM, the DPI and Madison legislators, all thinking the state is now suffering an ethical black eye.


About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its famous entertainment Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news.

From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with its still operative archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com


Friday, September 5, 2014

BODY POLITICS ARE REAL FOR GWEN MOORE IN ARREST

By Dominique Paul Noth

As tweeted by Wisconsin Jobs Now,
Gwen Moore under arrest in West Milwaukee.
The reason so many Milwaukeeans admire US Rep. Gwen Moore – while some loud 
GOP Wisconsinites on social media and talk radio openly hate her – was demonstrated September 4 in West Milwaukee when she along with dozens of fast food workers protesting for living wages were handcuffed and ticketed for entering a northbound lane of the Miller Parkway.

While President Obama and multiple senators and representatives support national pressure on the fast food industry to raise wages, Moore was the only member of Congress in the nation to put her body where her beliefs were and get arrested.

There was no advance planning in this – the only photo was tweeted by Wisconsin Jobs Now, a protest organizer.  

The plainclothes officer who handcuffed her during the noon hour protest was described by Moore as courteous and professional.  She was detained until about 3 p.m. and has been mailed a $691 ticket she intends to pay. Moore has participated before in union and political actions (some leading to jail).  She simply woke up that morning convinced that she had to show physical solidarity despite having broken her arm a week earlier (another reason the police officer handcuffed her gently in front).  Her aides are convinced the police  knew who she was though she was wearing a “Raise Up Milwaukee” T-shirt and blended in with the other predominately African American protesters.

Which raised an impossible question – impossible because it would be ideologically ridiculous to imagine that fellow area Congressional representatives Paul Ryan or Jim Sensenbrenner would agree with the protest much less join it.  It did raise the specter of whether well-dressed white men flanked by their inevitable aides-de-camp would be so treated.  But social media jumped into the speculation, by some avid supporters, that she was arrested because she was black or, by some extremist opponents, that she took “advantage  of being black" (their bizarre term) to get arrested.

Planned and a few spontaneous demonstrations went on that Thursday in some 150 cities as part of the nationwide Fight for $15 campaign to raise the minimum hourly wage of fast food employees along with other concerns, such as allowing unionizing efforts.   The Milwaukee events gathered workers from Taco Bell, Wendy’s, McDonald’s and other fast food chains, joined by supporters at several locations – including the McDonald’s outlet that drew Moore. In an MSNBC interview that afternoon, she spoke to how many adult workers she met who were “cobbling together” minimum wage jobs to help their families survive.

She called a higher wage floor inevitable “and I’m proud to stand up for it.”

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its famous entertainment Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news.
From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with its still operative archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com