This should spark a clarion call for a complete blow-up of the status quo and a start-over.
An epic FAIL.
Reading scores for fourth grade black students in Wisconsin (read: Milwaukee Public Schools primarily) trail every other state and the District of Columbia, and for eighth grade black students the news is just as discouraging, as they trail even students who are not native born speakers of English in every state as well.
Reading scores for Wisconsin’s African-American fourth-graders trail those of their racial peers in every other state and the District of Columbia, according to a national government report that delivered dire news Wednesday about how Wisconsin prepares its students.
Further, fourth-graders as a whole in Wisconsin are losing ground in reading while other states make gains, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card. Only 33% of the state’s fourth-graders scored at a level considered proficient or advanced by the test; the rest scored at a basic level or lower.
Reading results for Wisconsin’s eighth-grade students, the other grade that took the reading test, were somewhat more promising.
Wisconsin’s eighth-graders matched their highest score of the last decade. Even so, only 34% of Wisconsin’s eighth-graders were considered proficient in reading.
However, the average score for African-American eighth-graders was the same as that for three other states and higher only than the average from black students in Arkansas. The average score for black Wisconsin eighth-graders was even below the average score for the state’s eighth-grade English language learners. In other words, black students scored poorer in reading than students for whom English is not their native-born language …
Only 9% of African-American fourth-graders performed at a level considered proficient. The same percentage of the state’s eighth-grade black students tested at a proficient level.
This is a scandal, and former MPS Superintendent Howard Fuller is outraged:
“It’s an outrage,” said Howard Fuller, former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent, voucher advocate and head of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University, in response to the latest scores. “And the thing that angers me more is that there is no widespread outrage. We get these statistics, and people mutter the normal this and that, but then everyone goes back to whatever they were doing.”
Fuller added: “These are not the children that we all care about. Because if we did, we wouldn’t continue to allow this to happen year after year.”
Here’s a Sentinel Journal graphic showing just how dire the circumstances are:
Of course, we have state Sen. Lena “Don’t you know who I am?” Taylor (Statist-Milwaukee) with her customary excuse:
Taylor added that generations of hopelessness and low expectations among black families in Wisconsin – especially in Milwaukee – have resulted in an education crisis that Wisconsinites must band together to solve.
“We created this, and we have to put our hands on this to start making a difference,” Taylor said. “We have to start with reading. If you can’t read, you can’t do anything.”
Excuse me, Sen. Taylor, but it’s your side that has created the low expectations as well as the culture of dependency in areas like the Central City as well as other urban areas across the country. Liberalism has helped destroy the black family, has helped create that culture of dependency by subsidizing out-of-wedlock births to women that could not afford to have children and were not mature enough to raise them. The deplorable ghetto hip-hop culture and its trash music and lifestyle doesn’t help, either.
Charlie Sykes says it best:
These results are scandalous and ought to be a wake-up call.
Keep in mind, too, that Mayor Tom Barrett has been seeking to take over MPS and run it, with support from Gov. Jim Doyle.
Read this analysis from Alan J. Borsuk, former reporter and editor at the Sentinel Journal, who spent years covering and analyzing MPS. Here are some quick facts about MPS from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute:
Enrollment: About 82,500
Composition: 57% black, 23% Hispanic, 12% white, 4% Asian, 4% other
Percent in poverty: 79%
Percent truant: 76% (high school)
Graduation rate: about 68%
Test scores: 40% or less of 10th-graders rated proficient or better in each of five subject areas
Budget: $1.1 billion-plus
Number of schools: about 200
Number of employees: about 11,000
In each of five key subject areas, 60 percent or higher of MPS students are rated as basic or lower.
And all the time, the educrats and their state-run media enablers tell us we just don’t spend enough money. Tracy Coenen of The Fraud Files has thoroughly fisked that claim.
Milwaukee Public Schools will be spending more taxpayer money next school year. JSOnline reported: “MPS cuts spending, spends stimulus.” The truth is that MPS is not cutting spending, it’s increasing spending.
Last year’s budget was $1.2 billion. The budget for this year is $1.3 billion. But you won’t hear the media reporting that.
Here’s how taxpayers are being deceived. The “regular” budget of $1.2 billion is $10 million less than last year. The school district, however, is going to be spending almost $100 million in “federal stimulus” money, making the total budget $1.3 billion. Someone apparently thinks that spending $100 million of federal money (coming from taxpayers, incidentally) doesn’t count, so the district is spending less. The truth is they’re spending about 8% more.
Why is the media lying about the spending of MPS? The liberal agenda regarding the schools is always about money, and nothing else.
How much money? In the current school year, MPS is spending $15,500 per student, an increase of $1,500 over the previous year. As Tracy notes with a significant amount of snark:
Quite the bargain when you consider only 39% of 10th graders can read and 29% of them can do math.
Here, also via Fraud Files, is a spreadsheet depicting the runaway spending in MPS over the past 10 years:
Where’s the money going to? The MacIver Institute tells us where a lot of it’s going: teacher salaries and benefits, which total over $100,000.
For the first time in history, the average annual compensation for a teacher in the Milwaukee Public School system will exceed $100,000.
That staggering figure was revealed last night at a meeting of the MPS School Board.
The average salary for an MPS teacher is $56,500. When fringe benefits are factored in, the annual compensation will be $100,005 in 2011.
Or, as Tracy notes:
Let’s leave the salary issue out of it for a minute. I believe the salaries for MPS teachers are too high, but let’s ignore that for the sake of this discussion, and focus on the benefits. There is simply no way any business can survive with such a large benefits package!
The benefits package costs 77% of the salary. In the real world (read: private industry which is self-sustaining), benefits typically cost about 30% of wages. MPS has a benefits cost nearly 2.6 times higher than the real world.
For this school year, MPS is employing 5,766 teachers. That’s a total cost of $577 million in wages and benefits. If the benefits package cost was reduced to the 30% level that the rest of the country receives, the cost would only be $424 million. Voila! $153 million of instant savings.
But then again, despite their claims to the contrary, it’s never been about the children. It’s about the district employees with a permanent gravy job, earning over $100,000 in salary and Rolls Royce benefits plus the benefit of having their summers free.
And what usually happens from the Left when you point out all of this? You’re accused of teacher-bashing and bashing the gummint-run skoolz.
I can personally say that the students I have worked with through the SES program I spent six years working in were so far behind the curve they have little if any chance to catch up. There were kids with little personal incentive to work hard and worse, when they did, were stigmatized by their peers for trying to become better-educated. More than once, I was told by a young black male, often in front of parents, that if he did learn how to read at grade level or become competent in math or show an interest in learning, he’d be accused by his friends of “acting white.”
That’s how you have so many in the black community ending up as wards of the state for the most part. Can’t find a good paying job — not that there are many of those around in the Obama recession. Can’t read? Can’t do math? Good luck doing anything other than fast food, not exactly family supporting wages.
These same young blacks — male and female — then wind up in the gangsta culture, looking for the easy money and the bling-bling and the respect that comes from the criminal culture. Fact is, TV and movies as well as the rap/hip-hop music has glorified this. Heck, dealing drugs is an easier way to make big bucks than working at Burger King.
In many cases, we’d start to make progress with these kids then all of a sudden they’d drop off the map. Fail to be home for scheduled sessions, not be prepared if they were home or more interested in what was on TV or constantly on their cell phones. We’d insist on the TV and cell phones being turned off, but it made little impact. Eventually, we figured we’d lost the kids to their friends and the culture. Eventually we may wind up seeing some of these kids on the news.
It’s why I refer to the Central City of Milwaukee and urban areas of other major U.S. cities as the new slave plantations. Generation after generation enslaved by welfare and the culture of dependency, enslaved by limousine liberal white politicians and the real House Negros (liberal black politicians and media sorts and poverty pimps like The Reverend Jackson and The Reverend Al Sharpton), all of them proffering lip service to education while keeping ‘em illiterate and uneducated.
Remember: uneducated people are easier to brainwash with propaganda and lies like it’s poverty and racism and whitey that’s keeping them enslaved.
