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1 Page 1 of 5 HOME PRIN Best Schools Which school districts get the best bang for the taxpayer s buck? Which are underperformers? The results may surprise you. by Matthew Hrodey Friday 4/27/2007 TO A FRIEND PRINT THIS ARTICLE additional research by Bruce Murphy and Caroline Goyette Back in the 1930s, federal New Deal workers built Greendale as a model village for the working class. Planners surrounded the settlement with thousands of acres of farmland and parks to shield the village from Milwaukee. Seven decades later, the greenbelt is gone and Greendale feels similar to the average Milwaukee suburb. Yet something of the old planners ideals might remain, for Greendale scored as the top K-12 school system in our rating of metro area schools. About 92 percent of students in this middle-class suburb achieved proficiency or better in math and reading last year, nearly as many as in Whitefish Bay, an affluent district known for high-performing I think we do a good job with what we ve been given, says Kurt Susek, Greendale teacher s union president. Realtors and buyers have long used achievement test scores to pick out the best school districts as they buy and sell homes. But they may be overlooking districts that perform better than the top districts, schools where excellence is masked by the fact that they serve a lower percentage of well-to-do Research has consistently shown students from high-income families will score better, on average, than students from low-income or even middleincome families. Concentrated poverty creates huge challenges for teachers and administrators that can lower a school s test scores. Just because a school is scoring low, that doesn t mean it s a bad school, says professor Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at UW-Madison. The economic circumstances a student grows up in affects educational success. Most rankings remain narrowly focused on student achievement, without regard for student circumstances, says Paul Gazzerro, an analyst with the group SchoolMatters. Too often, this is like ranking by zip code, since districts with more affluent students can be expected to achieve higher proficiency rates. SchoolMatters, a division of Standard & Poor s, assembled the raw data for our study. With that data, we ranked 57 school districts in the five-county area. We used a statistical model that takes into account family income and attempts to answer this question: Without spending more than an average district, which district does best with the students it serves? ARCHIVES April 2007 New Kids in Town Big Money Best Schools March 2007 Hottest Places to Live Last Man Standing Suddenly Evil Complete Archives >> Subscribe Now

2 Page 2 of 5 Our research found a clear correlation between affluence and student learning. Even students from moderately disadvantaged communities tended to score lower. What can money buy? asks William Velez, a UWM sociology professor who specializes in education. It can buy a computer, an encyclopedia, a nice place to study and access to the Internet. If you re middle-class, you re so privileged. Wealthier parents tend to create more instructive verbal environments and have more time to read with their kids and help them with homework, experts say. And parents who succeeded in their own education can better guide their children. At Milwaukee Public Schools, most students failed to reach proficiency in reading and math. But three-quarters of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and almost half come from households with income of less than $30,000. MPS is fighting against things outside of their control, says Velez. Principals and administrators feel like society is dumping all these systemic problems on them, and they re right. We excluded MPS and Racine from the rankings because the huge percentage of poor children in both districts made it difficult to compare to other districts. And we ranked K-12 districts separately from K-8 districts. The result is a snapshot of performance that has limitations but is fairer than rankings that do not take into account household income. Among K-12 districts, we found underperformers like Waukesha, Menomonee Falls and Franklin, and overperformers like Greendale, Shorewood, Greenfield and Pewaukee districts that seemed to get the most bang for their buck. Greendale Superintendent William Hughes credits his system s success to Teacher Leaders, a team of a dozen teachers that helps develop curriculum and works with faculty to improve techniques and set assessment standards. We have strong leadership in our teachers, says Hughes. Parents in Greendale and in other districts that use Apple s PowerSchool software can look up online how their children are scoring on tests and assignments. Hughes says parent involvement is another key to Greendale s success. Pewaukee Superintendent JoAnn Sternke says, The biggest thing Pewaukee offers, it s the smallest school system in Waukesha County. Research shows the size of schools, more than the size of classes, can have a significant impact on achievement. Among K-8 districts, the underperformers included Dover No. 1, Raymond No. 14 and Maple-Dale Indian Hill systems. Overperformers included Richmond and Swallow (both in Waukesha County) and North Cape (Racine County). Richmond, economically, is only slightly above average, but 98 percent of students scored at proficiency or better last year. Why? According to Richmond Superintendent George Zimmer, The answer is in early intervention. Many area administrators say an hour of tutoring in early elementary grades can save a dozen hours in later years. At Richmond, a database fueled by frequent assessments tracks student performance so needs can be addressed immediately, Zimmer adds. In districts that perform well while maintaining low expenses, volunteers often make the difference. In North Cape, a rural K-8 district with 195 students, about 80 volunteers help kids with reading and other subjects. There are a lot of parents, grandparents and retired teachers in and out of the building all the time, says Superintendent Petra Walker. The lowest-spending K-8 district in Southeast Wisconsin, North Cape has helped foster children relocating from Racine or Milwaukee catch up to classmates, Walker says. We have foster kids come in with boxes of

3 Page 3 of 5 issues, and by the second year, 90 percent are successful. Some districts spend much less than average, and get poorer results. These include the Burlington, St. Francis and Northern Ozaukee districts, communities where taxpayers may not want to spend more. Anyone who thinks communities are willing to spend more on taxes right now, they re misunderstanding the public, says Burlington Superintendent Ronald Jandura. But other communities are willing to spend more. We found three districts where higher-than-average spending resulted in better overall performance: New Berlin, Port Washington-Saukville and Elmbrook. To get success, these districts have spent more than our top-rated districts, but their citizens seem willing to pay for it. We are fortunate to have good funding, says New Berlin Superintendent James Benfield. Despite the state spending caps, he says, I don t think our district is going to be in trouble. The district spends about $1,700 more per pupil than the average K-12 district in the metro area. Elmbrook Superintendent Matthew Gibson says the district s higher-thanaverage spending has enabled it to spend early on reading and math intervention, which leads to higher achievement. The district tracks students and performance data to measure the effectiveness of programs. We re increasingly data-based, Gibson says. The strategic development of resources is a key to success, experts say. What matters is not how much the dollars are, says Gamoran, but how the dollars are spent. Matt Hrodey is a frequent contributor to Milwaukee Magazine. Sidebars: How We Did The Study Using raw data on school districts in the five-county area provided by SchoolMatters, a division of Standard & Poor's, we analyzed a number of variables for data from Surprisingly, we found no reliable correlation between student scores and the relative percentage of special education students or children learning English as a second language. Nor did we find a strong relationship between student performance and the percentage of college-educated adults in a school district. But two variables were strong predictors of performance: the percentage of households in the community with income greater than $75,000 and the percentage of students in the district who receive lunch assistance, an indicator of poverty. Countless national studies have also shown similar correlations. We weighed these two factors based on the impact they tended to have and created an index for affluence. School districts that scored better than expected on achievement tests, given the relative affluence of students, were ranked higher, unless the districts ranked far above the median level of per-pupil spending. (The five union high schools in the metro area weren't ranked because we felt there wasn't a big enough field of schools.) "I think this is a reasonable first attempt at this problem," says professor Ronald Serlin, chair of the educational psychology program at UW- Madison, when asked to consider our approach. William Velez, a professor of sociology specializing in education, reviewed our findings and said, "Your model is imperfect but basically sound. The only thing I would have done differently is to disaggregate math and reading scores, that is, create two scores with two separate rankings." Velez and others noted a simple ranking of school districts by average student performance is inherently faulty because it results in rankings that simply reflect the relative affluence of a community. "The only methodologically accurate way to assess a school's performance is by making sure you are controlling for the quality of the students who attend the schools," Velez notes. -M.H.

4 Page 4 of 5 Critics Complain Some school administrators object to our method. Several school systems that scored poorly in our ratings cried foul. Officials at some districts noted they served a higher percentage of special education or English as a second language This might show up as a factor in a broader study of schools, but did not emerge as statistically significant in our study of metro-area districts. Others pointed to size of schools. Studies have shown that smaller schools often perform better on achievement tests. "I would have some concerns with being compared to districts that are much smaller than ours," says Janet Bashirian, president of the Waukesha teacher's union. Her district was ranked as an underperformer. Officials at Burlington Area schools noted they put more emphasis on technical programs in which teaching might not be fairly reflected in achievement scores. Burlington, through partnerships with the Wisconsin Association of General Contractors and Burlington Memorial Hospital, offers special classes such as Construction English. Maple Dale-Indian Hill Superintendent Mary Jordan Dean noted that her district is 33 percent minority. "We are far more multicultural," which can present unique challenges, she said. Several officials pointed to Chapter 220 as a factor affecting performance. Under the program, African-American students from Milwaukee attend suburban schools but are not included in the receiving district's percentage of students eligible for free and reduced-price hot lunch. "There is a higher percentage of black kids that come from low-income households," says Glendale-River Hills Superintendent Lawrence Smalley. That's true, but the difference is not as dramatic as you might think. Officials at Shorewood estimate that 25 percent of their Chapter 220 students are eligible for free or reduced-price hot lunch; Menomonee Falls Superintendent Keith Marty estimated his district's percentage at 25 to 30 percent. UW-Madison researchers Christopher Thorn and professor John Witte studied the decades-old transfer program in 1991 and found that Chapter 220 children, compared to their MPS peers, tended to come from more affluent homes that placed greater emphasis on education. News stories over the years have made the same point. About 6 percent of students at Glendale and 8 percent at Menomonee Falls are Chapter 220 students: If a quarter of them are low-income, that would not increase these districts' overall percentage of low-income students by very much. To check the impact, we took the schools with the highest percentage of Chapter 220 students and tracked the impact on achievement tests and found this had no discernible impact. Several administrators raised the concern that yearly fluctuations in scores may account for many of the variations we picked up, landing some schools unfairly below the mark. For schools ranked as low-performers, we examined math and reading proficiency levels going back four years to ensure that recent scores weren't aberrations. -M.H. Overperformers & Underperformers K-12 Overperformers 1) Greendale 2) Shorewood 3) Greenfield 4) Pewaukee 5) Cedarburg 6) West Allis

5 Page 5 of 5 These school districts got the best bang for the buck: Average or belowaverage spending per pupil resulted in higher achievement test scores than expected given income level of K-8 Overperformers 1) Richmond 2) Swallow 3) North Cape 4) Waterford Graded J1 5) Merton Community These school districts got the best bang for the buck: Average or belowaverage spending per pupil resulted in higher achievement test scores than expected given income level of K-12 Underperformers 1) Waukesha 2) Menomonee Falls 3) Franklin Public 4) Oconomowoc These school districts had median to above-average spending per pupil with lower achievement test scores than expected given income level of K-8 Underperformers 1) Dover #1 2) Raymond #14 3) Maple Dale-Indian Hill 4) Washington-Caldwell 5) Glendale-River Hills These school districts had median to above-average spending per pupil with lower achievement test scores than expected given income level of High Spending, High Performance 1) New Berlin 2) Port Washington-Saukville 3) Elmbrook These school districts spent more per pupil than the metro average, but gained higher than expected achievement test scores given income level of Low Spending, Low Performance 1) Burlington Area 2) St. Francis 3) Northern Ozaukee These school districts spent less per pupil than the metro average and had a lower performance on achievement tests than expected given income level of