Great Schools? Great Ad
Milwaukee’s Charlie Sykes (props to Milwaukee), has the school choice TV ad currently running in an unknown number of WI media markets -- sure beats the bejesus out of those say-nothing, self-serving, inane Great Schools ads WEAC airs with great repetition.
The ad is a base-clearing shot over the deep center field fence.
School choice is one of those 80-20 issues that both motivates the GOP base and plays well with moderate suburban voters.
And it’s those suburban voters that an incumbent Democrat governor so desperately needs; what with being stuck in the mid 40s on reelect after defeating an accidental governor with about the same percentage.
The Doyle team misses policy dude Kirk Brown, a former partner of Paul Maslin, Howard Dean’s pollster.
How brilliant was it to place your campaign pollster on the inside, sitting at your side, whispering public opinion numbers with each zig-zag that the Republican legislature sent over? Very. And he is clearly missed.
WEAC is sure to respond to this school choice shot, but Team Doyle seems to be struggling; which may be why he skipped-out to Ireland.
posted by Slide @ 12:02 AM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
GetItRight:
I am a Milwaukee Public Schools teacher, and a vehement opponent of the voucher plan. I'd like to take up your challenge.
In the mid-90s (before I started teaching), several schools--including the high school where I currently teach--were shut down, reconstituted with new administrators, some new teachers, and some new students due to performance problems. In the ten years since my school went through that, we have more than doubled our graduation rate and significantly reduced both our drop out rate and our truancy rate.
In the past several years, three high schools were selected for phasing out due to performance data. Within another few years, North Division, Marshall, and Washington high schools will be no more. Pulaski, my own school, and most of the other comprehensive high schools will also be radically different, depending on whether we get the Gates money to pay for the redesigns.
You ask, "Haven't Choice schools - in the few short years of the program's existence - in fact gone under when they've non-performed?" The answer is, generally, no. A 2003 study by the non-partisan public policy institute showed that one school up to that point had closed because parents abandoned it. Further, the same study showed that much of the performance data gathered by choice schools never made it into the hands of parents. A grand total of two schools have been closed by the DPI for not meeting the barest minimum definition of "school."
The state puts MPS's African-American graduation rate at over 50% for the last couple of years.
I also ask why you think parents in MPS--with more than 200 public (including charter) programs available--can't CHOOSE from among the public schools, where there is demonstrable accountability and vast amounts of data available to parents and the public.
Doyle is not trying to kill choice, but to offer more to the 96,000 MPS students who will not be in a voucher school next year. The Republicans, who were falling all over themselves to starve these same public school students' classrooms with their state budget, are showing their true colors. The multi-million dollar pro-voucher movement doesn't just give to them out of the goodness of its heart.
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