Mailbag: School Beat: Melissa writes: "Death by 1000 cuts does not cut it."

(Ed. note: In preparation for the Monday night School board meeting, the following mailbag letter addresses the famous "Death by 1000 cuts" article. "


Death by a Thousand Cuts Does Not Cut It. 3/31/06

I recently received a copy of “Death by a Thousand Cuts” by the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future. It was included in my children’s copies of the April Newsletters and also available on the Internet. I have read it cover to cover, which is why I am so unimpressed. Initially, I was struck by the sentence, “Most of Wisconsin’s 426 districts have declining enrollment, which holds down revenue limits.” The word “most” connotes “almost all” (Cambridge Dictionary). I envisioned a secret mass exodus from Wisconsin. I questioned the author about his word usage and the actual values involved. “The word “most” means greater than 51%,” was his reply. No, the word “majority” means greater than 51%. It’s this type of verbal repartee that loses your supporters. The actual percentage of Wisconsin school districts experiencing a decline in enrollment is from 56% to 60%, depending on which of his sources you read. Under normal circumstances, I would expect 50% gaining and 50% losing enrollment. If 40% of the districts are gaining and 60% are losing, are the 40% that are gaining students absorbing all of the students from the 60% that are losing? Where, I asked the author, are all of these students going? Mass exodus from failing school districts account for some of it. Flattened birth rates were cited since other school options have experienced similar downward trends. Wouldn’t that imply that the percentage of school districts experiencing a decline in enrollment should be closer to 100%? Surely, the whole story is missing.

Next, I scrutinized the chart of gaps between revenue limits and cost-to-continue. Only 129 school districts (30%) responded to the survey from which the chart was constructed. That’s an abysmal response to a survey for a report that’s supposed to aid you in the battle against revenue caps. I noticed that Evansville was not on the list of respondents. By the author’s own admission, school districts were given options on what methodology to use. "The answers are estimates, using different time frames and different methods. But…they are a reliable measure of the impact of caps.” Can’t you see how spurious a use of data this is? My 6th grade daughter knows the value of controls in reporting data. Why should any deductive person just take them at their word? It’s exactly this misuse of data that infuriates people.

Let’s return to the chart. One can see from the chart that 6 schools have a positive gap and 3 or 4 have “0” gap. It’s hard to tell exact values from my miniature, blurry copy in the school newsletter. If, as the author contends, this is a representative sample of Wisconsin school districts, we should be able to extrapolate that 30-33 school districts in Wisconsin have “0” or positive gaps. Has anybody investigated them? What are they doing differently? Are the positive gaps indicative of a healthy system? If so, can their strategies be successfully implemented elsewhere? Does anybody care, or shall we all just whine about revenue caps?

I do not deny that the revenue caps create problems. However, the Department of Public Instruction is not furthering its cause by endorsing such a flawed report.

Sincerely,

Melissa M. Hammann