Start over with a clean sheet.
Blaska said it in 2019 when we ran for Madison school board. The district’s Behavior Education Plan — then in its fifth year — wasn’t working. Would they listen? No-OOOO!
Surprise surprise, as Gomer Pyle would say. The Behavior Education Plan (BEP) STILL isn’t working! Its failure is so obvious that even the Madison school board can’t ignore it. When superintendent Joe Gothard, in his second year on the job, says he hears “a lot of staff feedback about the BEP” you can bet that the feed he’s hearing is pretty salty.
The purpose of the BEP was always flawed— fatally flawed. Former superintendent Jennifer Cheatham devised the BEP to do one thing: to eradicate that all-purpose boogey man of the terminally Woke: racial disparity. Guess what! After 12 years, those racial disparities have not budged an inch!
The district’s own figures reveal that where 30.5% of students suspended in the 2021-22 school year were black, that percentage remained steady at 30.0% in 2024-25.
Earlier this year, Blaska Policy Werkes looked at total disciplinary procedures (as reported by the WI Dept. of Public Instruction) — not just suspensions. We found they were MORE prevalent. Either Madison schools are cracking down (👍) or schools are more unruly (👎). Either way, black students were more disproportionately disciplined than ever!
A study conducted by concerned West high school parent Ray Mendez suggests that school, at least, is more unruly. (Ray Mendez for school board!)
Not ‘user friendly’ indeed!
The Capital Times is performing some real journalism on our local schools. Quotes Supt. Gothard to say that Behavior Education Policy is “not very user-friendly” but is instead “heavy handed.”
Same thing teachers were telling candidate Blaska in 2019 on the sly, lest they incur the wrath of the vengeful Cheatham, who left the district to create more Cheathams at Harvard University.
The blueprints to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona are more transparent than the welter of BEP flow charts and cascading checklists frog-marching the teacher through every disruption.
If discipline policies affect academics (as we believe) one must conclude that the BEP has done nothing for minority race students. English language proficiency (combining merely proficient with advanced) data from the WI Dept. Public Instruction shows no real improvement in black student scores after 10 years; Hispanic students regressed a little.
The definition of crazy
The school board is considering a study group (what else?) to address the failed policy. District bureaucrats propose an equal split between administrators and teachers. That has board member Ali Muldrow playing her over-extended race card. As quoted by the TCT:
“I’m going to be really frank with you all. It would be offensive for this to be a majority white group of people having this conversation.”
She is right to argue for including voices from the community. But we know what kind of community, don’t we? All the usual suspects, given that all seven members of the Board of Education are progressive.
Under-girding the BEP was the indictment of Madison teachers as closet racists. Central office bureaucrats wrested control of the classroom from teachers who had yet to “Do The Work.” Discipline itself came to be stigmatized as a white construct. While they were at it, school board progressives expelled school resource police officers! Never mind that all of them were minorities.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Ms. Muldrow succumbs to same fallacy that undergirds BEP itself — that race is the denominator, not behavior. If boys account for 58% discipline while accounting for only 49% of enrollment (which they do), does that mean Madison public schools are biased against boys?
12 responses to “Expel Madison schools’ Behavior Education Plan”
Situation is pretty hopeless – our only hope is some kind-of bomb that replaces school board members/progressives with common-sense people (note I didn’t say conservatives)
The sad fact is that Madison has been wasting enormous resources on this problem for 40 or 50 years, all to no avail — since the focus is almost always on hectoring teachers to correct supposed bias that supposedly causes the racial disparities. For example, (there are many examples I do not recall), the schools in the 1980s brought in researchers from UW–Madison School of Education (Dr. Carl Grant is one name) to analyze coursework and run summer seminars to train Madison educators on intergroup dynamics and classroom race relations. Google AI mode refers to (among many other details) a 1990 MMSD created “Classroom Action Research professional development initiative that brought outside academic consultants together with educators to analyze daily instructional interactions, student alienation, and implicit disparate treatment within classrooms.” And of course, hectoring teachers to reduce disproportionate disciplinary practices has always been a key objective of this useless approach. NONE of this works because the problem is NOT the teachers or the curriculum or the school culture. The problem is the profound dysfunction within the family life and communal culture in which all too many black kids in particular (and plenty of whites as well) are raised. MY TWO CENTS and MY MEMORY
Also, I wonder what the figure would be if you could add up all the many tens of thousands of dollars spent on these “professionals, consultants, experts,” — and charlatans — over these many years. Enough to raise every poor Madisonian out of poverty I bet.
I remember a study done years ago to look at the lack of minority achievement. One of the members was Nino Amato ( yes, that one). When the report came out and they had looked at the family life of minority students (or lack of) and he was called every racist name the minority community could come up with.
You just saved me a lot of typing..You are spot on. This problem didn’t exist in the 50/60s. IMO things started going south with LBJ’s Great Society.
Blaska writes: “If boys account for 58% discipline while accounting for only 49% of enrollment (which they do), does that mean Madison public schools are biased against boys?” Great point! There is something greatly wrong with the idea that disparate impact is due to racism!!
Real Cheathamism has never been tried.
🙂
Not like when I went to school. We had Bob “Boomer” Harris, Wally Schoessow, Bill Olson and others that you didn’t want to get on their wrong side. If you did you found out fast.
Same with Bones Brown at Sun Prairie Sr. High.
Sadly, I fear for the future of Madison Public Schools if things don’t change. A house cleaning of the board would be a great start. Lets get practical and get real, forget about the plattitudes of woke, back to basics, and toss social engineering. Discipline is needed in order for classroms to be productive. With the current school board the teachers are working with both hands tied behind their backs. My opinion.
The elephant in the room is that this is cultural then it is racial. When Cabrini Green, Chicago’s vertical ghetto became uninhabitable ca. 1989, black Chicagoans migrated to Madison and who can blame them? At the same time as MNI was demanding Diversity Uber Alles. The more refugees the more programs. What you subsidize you get more of. Never fails. (Anybody remember Somerset Circle?)
My one time boss in the Peace Corps in West Africa married an African woman with teen age kids. They were installed at West High school. I knew these kids. They were fluent in their tribal language, French and quickly learned English. The AA kids at West High told the new arrivals they had to choose between “acting white” ie. disciplined and high achieving, as these kids were in Africa, or becoming gangsta/ghetto kids.
All these kids were black but the Chicago culture won.
It is still winning.