By Bruce Murphy
Milwaukee Magazine
December 8, 2009
http://www.milwaukeemagazine.com/murphyslaw/?utm_source=murphyslaw&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weeklyemail
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All states have the responsibility of providing a quality education for children. Who ever imagined virtual schools would qualify?
We taxpayers pay nearly $6,000 per pupil for the 3,635 elementary and secondary students who attend virtual schools in Wisconsin. This is one of just 18 states that pay for students who take all of their courses online. That seems odd from several perspectives.
To begin with, why is it so expensive? The major cost at any school is personnel. But as a January 2009 story in Milwaukee Magazine reported, just 37 percent of tax money going to virtual schools is for teacher compensation, and that figure comes not from some outside analysis but from the coalition representing the virtual schools. The coalition claims its schools have a 50 to 1 student/teacher ratio, compared to 20 to 1 for a traditional school.
I question the priorities here. The state’s per-pupil payment is just over $6,600 per student for choice students in Milwaukee. These are mostly small schools, probably with smaller-sized classrooms. They are personnel heavy. I’ve questioned before why we spend so little on choice schools compared traditional public schools ($11,981 per pupil statewide), but the choice payment seems all the more absurd when compared to what we’re spending for online schools.
And just what is being taught at virtual schools? That question arises when you consider how concentrated the enrollment is geographically. Remarkably, two-thirds of all virtual pupils are located in just three school districts: Waukesha, Northern Ozaukee and Grantsburg. What in the world would they have in common?
One possible answer comes as you look at the town of Grantsburg. This is a rural community (founded 1887, with a population that was heavily Swedish, German and Norwegian) along the Minnesota border about halfway between the Twin Cities and Duluth. Its population is 1,356, yet it has 708 pupils attending virtual schools. Is this some hotbed of computer-crazed utopians?
Perhaps not. Grantsburg became nationally known in 2004 when its school board commanded teachers to balance the theory of evolution by teaching other theories. This earned the town a slapdown from academia: Forty-four deans at colleges of letters and science in the UW System signed a statement warning this policy was bad for science education and potentially detrimental to the future academic success of the children.
My guess would be that many of the pupils attending virtual schools in the districts of Grantsburg, Northern Ozaukee and Waukesha are from fundamentalist Christian households. Back before the legislature approved funding for virtual schools, some of these households were home-schooling their children.
The home-school movement has included everything from free-thinkers to left-wing hippies to fundamentalists, but the biggest percentage has typically come from the last category. Home schooling has long been legal, but the advent of virtual schools, it would appear, has put the state in the position of paying for this instruction.
As recently as 2002, there were just two virtual schools in the state but their number has steadily grown. Virtual schools first got funding under the open enrollment law, which allowed students to transfer to schools in another district. Now, virtual schools are treated as charter schools. There has been considerable legal and legislative jockeying over their status. It’s worth asking why taxpayers should pay for them – and why should they pay so much.
More Crisis for Catholics
The introduction of new Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki seemed
Subscribe now and save up to 53% off the newstand price! to offer hope for the Catholic archdiocese. The Chicago native and La Crosse bishop was described as an easygoing people person and a fine storyteller. Most importantly, he was the first Polish leader in a community that has long had a huge population of Polish Catholics.
But the shine has come off quickly. The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests has charged that Listecki’s diocese of La Crosse has the highest percentage of priests cleared of child sexual abuse allegations of any Catholic diocese in the United States, six times the national average. When asked about this by Wisconsin Public Radio, Listecki replied that he didn’t have enough time left in his tenure to address the question, and besides, it was the holiday season.
Next came the revelation that former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland had routinely shredded copies of weekly reports about sexual abuse by priests. He made this statement in formerly sealed testimony turned over to the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office last week. Weakland testified that he didn’t want to keep the documents in his office.
The day after this bombshell hit, the archdiocese sent a memo with “talking points” to priests and parish directors saying that Weakland was shredding “copies of reports,” not the originals. So he kept the originals around but just tore up the copies? That seems a little hard to believe.
The never-ending clergy abuse crisis – and the nagging sense that the archdiocese never quite comes clean about it – has taken a toll. One sign I’ve reported before is that attendance at weekly Mass has dropped from 270,000 to 165,000 in about a decade. More bad news comes from a just- released annual statistical supplement to the Milwaukee Catholic Herald, which shows the total Catholic population dropped from 681,781 to 643,775.
Why these declines? “I’d be at a loss to comment on any specific reason,” says archdiocesan spokeswoman Julie Wolf. “If you’re looking for me to say it’s due to the clergy abuse crisis, I don’t think I can say that. The Pew Research shows that all church attendance [at all denominations] is down.”
Even if the clergy abuse crisis hasn’t contributed to the decline in numbers, it certainly makes it harder for the archdiocese to recoup its losses.
The Buzz
-Governing magazine offered an analysis of the effort at joint savings by Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Minnesota’s Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Their talk of $10 million in savings began to seem overly optimistic, the magazine noted, “when, after several months of trying, the two states were lucky to have saved $100,000 between them.” And will those savings be institutionalized, Governing asked, or will it all get forgotten when the two men leave office after next year?
-The Sunday New York Times offered a front-page story on the growth of charities, which now number 1.1 million in the U.S., up by 60 percent in just a decade. Besides the growth in numbers, there’s a growth in size: Locally, big nonprofit health care systems just keep expanding. This puts more pressure on residential property taxpayers, as more and more property is exempt. Combining nonprofits and all government property, about 33 percent of all property is exempt from taxes in the city of Milwaukee.
-And why is the Sports Nut apologizing to the Green Bay Packers?
-And check out the magazine’s delicious new money-saver, Daily Dining Deals.
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